Russians, Arabs Too Filthy, Ethnic For Dying Couture Industry

You all know the story: A multileveraged American industry goes into a slump. Traditional stateside sources of capital dry up, and distribution networks get lubricated with foreign investments that don’t bear close scrutiny. Balance sheets become wooze-inducing, and at the end of the day, a globe-bestriding empire shrivels into a mere vanity project, as international markets turn away in abashment and horror. We speak, of course, of the ultra-high end fashion world, where the fetishized handmade franchise of “couture” appears to be in its death throes, according to an absurdly solemn cover story by Nancy Hass in the Wall Street Journal magazine.

The once-exclusive preserves of custom foppery-known as ateliers, in the fashion industry’s preferred Old World argot-are shuddering to a virtual standstill in the global recession. And what’s worse, Hass notes, is that as couture’s traditional American and European client base plummets, an army of New Money arrivistes are moving into the resulting vacuum. Behold the brutal social revolution: “The blue-blood ladies who lunched and hosted benefits” are no longer the principal engines of couture demand, Hass writes; that privilege now falls to “new-world billionaires-from the Middle East and Russia.”

And “for this very monied class, it’s less about the luxuriousness of wearing exquisite handmade-to-order creations,” she proceeds to sniff, “and more about conspicuous consumption and making museums out of their closets.” Meanwhile, the once-stalwart US doyennes of dosh who might have continued stoking couture demand in the West just opt for high-end ready-to-wear fare. “Couture isn’t necessary, even to promote a brand,” comes the chilling testimony of onetime couture prince Oscar De La Renta. “Customers are smart. They know a $10,000 wedding dress will look the same as a $1 million wedding dress. Maybe it will not be finished the same way inside, but who will know?”

Here in consensual reality, most readers will instantly recognize Hass’ heavy-breathing alarmism as the very definition of a distinction without a difference-as though the Western “blue-blood ladies” of yore possessed fortunes that were magically quarantined from the resource plunder and crony capitalist intrigue that make up contemporary cash empires in Russia and the Middle East. Nevertheless, Hass labors heroically to puff up this shift in market demand as a Meaningful Sea Change of the first order-indeed, as the death of an art form. And certainly her sources are puffing along in chorus; the handful of design houses that keep a couture line going expend nearly as much collective effort on rhetorical pretense as they do on hand-stitched frills. Here, for instance, is onetime Bergdorf Goodman director-turned “luxury consultant” Robert Burke, marveling at the purity of the couture-purchasing heart, even as the new generation of swarthy philistines throngs to the ateliers: “You can’t underestimate the undying dedication of a small group of people to an underlying art. Couture is more than a transaction for the people who make it and buy it; it’s a piece of history.”

Amazingly enough, the undyingly dedicated members of the global disaccumulation set share this same Homeric self-regard. “If I didn’t put it up there with painting or sculpture, I don’t know if I’d be able to do it,” confides the Monaco-based couture gadabout Leona Kornej. (One wonders, by the way, how this sort of credulous quote-stringing might have played out if some hapless editor dispatched Hass to get to the bottom of “this whole Scientology craze.”)

There are of course countless other problems with this kind of doe-eyed trend spotting. Just for starters, it makes no sense to bewail the new Russian and Middle Eastern couture hordes as an alien vanguard of “conspicuous consumption,” when the man who coined that term, Thorstein Veblen, devoted an entire chapter in his Theory of the Leisure Class to explaining how couture-style fashion is intrinsically an exercise in conspicuous consumption, regardless of the ethnicity of its partisans. “Elegant dress serves its purpose of elegance not only in that it is expensive, but also because it is the insignia of leisure,” the irascible, jargon-happy economist wrote. “It not only shows that the wearer is able to consume a relatively large value, but it also argues at the same time that he consumes without producing.”

This goes double, he continued, for the frantic effort to produce elegance in female attire, since the frenzied tides of changing fashion stoke a perverse demand for ever more pointless and unappealing forms of novelty. By Veblen’s account, the fashion system is a uniquely tortured effort to mimic the appearance of useful innovation beneath a broader mandate of “conspicuous waste” and “futile expenditure” that is “inherently ugly.”

As Veblen theorizes it, the end result is less a scheme of improvement than, well, a pyramid scheme:

We find that in all innovations in dress, at the same time that the requirement of conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming anything more than a somewhat transparent pretence…. The ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details of dress, however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and their substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our attention as to become unbearable, and then we must take refuge in a new style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of reputable wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently becomes as odious as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy which the law of waste allows is to seek relief in some new construction, equally futile and equally untenable. Hence the essential ugliness and the unceasing change of fashionable attire.

Jargon aside, it’s hard to imagine a better summing-up of the recursive race to the aesthetic bottom that is so fastidiously swathed beneath the elaborate draperies of the atelier world. (Though do not get us started on Thomas Carlyle.) Once you’ve digested the real Veblen stuff, Hass’s admiring descriptions of the actual content of the couture world takes on a strikingly different cast-as in her opening vignette, which asks its reader to savor the alleged disjunction between a vulgar scenemaking Russian actress and the refined display of “John Galliano’s floor-sweeping dresses inspired by 19th-century riding costumes” that she’s checking out in Paris’s couture-week Dior show. In lieu of the piece’s organizing fable of conspicuous-consumption declension, Hass might well have opted for Oscar Wilde’s terser description of the horsey fox hunt: “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”

It’s hard, in any event, to see how we’re supposed to be mortified that the high-fashion world might forsake such aristophilic excess in favor of the Hollywood-themed repurposing of Versace’s lapsed couture brand that Hass describes with faintly concealed horror: “Black-clad members of the [Versace] staff led visitors, including Kanye West’s companion, Amber Rose, around the dozen or so dramatically lit mannequins as waiters served cappuccino and petit fours. At a low table at the end of one room, representatives of a French cellphone company demonstrated a joint venture with Versace, $5,000-plus phones adorned with marble inlays in some of the fashion line’s signature shades, including aqua and pink.” Cellphones at least meet some minimal standards of utility, which is a good deal more than one can say for the high-waisted plum-shaded gunnysack we’re urged to admire on a model apparently sporting spike-heeled Timberland work boots in an accompanying photo of “Valentino’s Garden of Eden-inspired” spring-summer couture extravaganza. (Presumably because Adam and Eve would have preferred their unashamed nakedness to this sort of by-the-numbers mock fashion severity.)

In another of the piece’s CEO testimonials, Fabrizio Malverdi, who heads up Givenchy Couture, pulls a long face for Hass over the precious dying breed of gullible Western couture patrons. “These kinds of people you can’t reach except for the couture,” he observes with a rueful shake of the head. “And once you lose the ateliers, you lose this. You can’t get it back, you can’t recapture it.” We can only hope.

Chris Lehmann is probably wearing some horrid common dungarees right now.