CATWALK CULPRITS
Hardy Amies says that John Galliano and
Alexander McQueen design clothes that no one wants to wear
THE CATWALK is now a familiar feature of the fashion trade, but it is a compara- tively new development. You will probably not find it in your dictionary unless it is a very recent one. Even then its use may be limited to 'a narrow pathway over the stage of a theatre, along a bridge etc.', that is to say, a high access way allowing techni- cians to get to lighting and scenery or for the maintenance of a structure. Yet in the last decade it has become an integral part of the publicity circus for clothes in Paris, London, Milan, New York and other cen- tres where fashion shows are staged.
The catwalk is used to display the gar- ments and their wearers, making them more easily visible to larger audiences and to photographers and television cameras. It comes complete with `supermodels', flashing cameras, loud music and strident lighting — often to display clothes which reflect the same attention-seeking in their design. It is a publicity device and has little to do with the clothes that it is designed to present. It would have been anathema to the world of haute couture when I first entered the business.
In those early days it was unheard-of to have music at a dress show for customers. The idea was to show clothes in the atmo- sphere of the places where they might be expected to be worn. The customer saw the clothes in the way in which she was to be seen in them. We did show collections but not on a catwalk, which changes the angle at which the clothes are seen, and without the razzmatazz that so often accompanies them today.
The proper couture house would have its own house girls who would model the clothes for individual customers. When a customer came in and said that she wanted a suit for Cheltenham races, the girls would put down their sewing and put on the tweed suits we had made to be suitable for race meetings. There were also saleswomen who were the right size and they would often step in and model clothes. It was all done very privately.
The other two fashion houses — the famous ones then — were Hartnell and Victor Stiebel. The house girl at Hartnell was quite well known, but it was not until after the second world war that the public became aware of models, and their role was a long way from the `supermodeP sta- tus some of them claim today.
The catwalk shows that have just taken place in London and Paris have very little to do with selling garments to the couture customers of a house. Few of the clothes that you see on the catwalk and pho- tographed in the popular press, by design- ers like Galliano and Alexander McQueen, are wearable by couture standards. They are not clothes to appeal to a customer prepared to pay the high price of a couture dress. Making couture is expensive: a price of £3,000 will probably give only a small profit, and customers are not going to pay that for something that looks as though it has just come out of the Folies Bergere. The couture customer is interested in being suitably and elegantly dressed. She is not out to startle, nor is she interested in change for its own sake. These people are horrified by the nakedness so often on dis- play today. Their worries are perfectly reasonable. A well-made couture dress can be worn for many seasons. These ladies carefully plan their wardrobes; they do not want a new dress which will put their whole wardrobe out of gear. Of course, there is subtle change and a new look — that is the cou- turier's skill, and we still have our tricks. The clothes we are showing and selling today are different from those we were making ten years ago. There is a fluidity about the dresses, for instance, particularly about the skirts, though we never make them very short. My rule is that for our customers the skirt should caress the knee. Hartnell, I remember, had an aversion to seeing the knee. 'I hate those short skirts,' he rather cruelly said, 'for women's knees are like badly risen rock cakes.' I aim to show clothes that will help cus- tomers in their way of life, and to do that we must understand it. As I always remind my staff, 'A dress is not a dress until it is sold. You have got to make clothes that are saleable.' They are saleable when they form part of the average woman's wardrobe. This is a long way from the clothes that have just been paraded on some of the Paris catwalks. Consider the much-hyped British designers John Gal- liano (at Dior) and Alexander McQueen (at Givenchy). Neither I nor my staff would know how to make such clothes, and we would not want to. The results are terrible and I gather that their employees are in despair. It is rumoured, not loudly, but everyone knows it, that the owners of these names don't really want couture business. They want to sell stockings and scent. They are prepared to spend a lot of money advertising their names and are glad of the publicity which their catwalk shows can generate. Givenchy, for instance, who is a very rich count in his own right, has sold out. He knows his past quality is going to be bastardised but he doesn't care; he has all the money he wants, and is laughing in his retirement. Givenchy have a new scent out as I write: it is called 'Organza'. Every newspaper and magazine you open has a photograph of an organza dress to advertise this scent. I think it is rather a silly name — who wants to have a scent that smells of cloth? But that is Givenchy's business. On the other hand the tough French entrepreneurs have looked at all the fig- ures and have seen that it is very difficult to turn a profit in making handmade clothes in the heart of the city; certainly not the kind of profit that they are inter- ested in. What they want are profitable big volume sales of stockings, lipstick, scent. The popular fashion press feeds on the catwalk, but the catwalk is largely a way of promoting a name that is used for selling things other than clothes.
A couture name can also be used to sell non-couture clothes. That is big business too, and partly what the French tycoons want. Manufacturers in Japan or wherev- er can say they are making Dior or Givenchy, though I suspect that the astute Japanese are aware that the reputations of houses can be damaged when no decent clothes come out of them. My Paris informants tell me that many of Dior and Givenchy's old couture cus- tomers have moved to Balmain or St Lau- rent. Balmain has a clever American at its head, the talented and tasteful designer Oscar de la Renta, who ran a very high- class off-the-peg business in New York, and Yves St Laurent is still at work in his own house. They are where many of the customers now go to have proper clothes made for them. If Givenchy and Dior continue with 'flash' designers, I fear this is where the customers will stay.
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