Haute Couture

France is the birthplace and contemporary heartland of Haute Couture. It has been described as the ultimate fashion laboratory because of its unique history of developing the highly-skilled artisans that produce the majority of custom made elements that outfit almost all of the fashion pieces found at the highest end of couture spectrum.

Haute Couture is the most rarefied of all fashion categories. Literally, Haute means elevated or high and Couture means dressmaker. Thus we get High Dressmaker or High Fashion. Haute Couture got it’s start in France at the very beginning of the 20th century and has remained a predominantly French phenomenon to this day.The houses generate more than 1 billion dollars in annual sales and employ close to 5,000 people. After World War II, during fashion's golden age more than 14,000 women wore couture. Today only 2,000 women in the world buy clothes in haute couture houses. Haute couture means designing for rich women, who can afford to pay the very high prices.

Couture is the only 100% unique fashion category. Each couture piece is unique, and constructed by only the finest artisans in each production category. In classic couture based in France designers utilize a dwindling but highly skilled set of old-school artisans who use only the finest, most costly, and most time consuming materials and methods for construction.

Haute couture refers to one of a kind, ornate "high" fashions, that are often conceptual and experimental in nature. Haute couture fashion represents a chance to create the best of the best - using the highest-quality textiles, and unique materials like aged leather, chain mail, or 24 karat gold. Haute couture projects give designers the opportunity to experiment with innovative sewing techniques, hand-sewing and beading, and to create fanciful, exquisite designs that are much more prestigious than ready-to-wear (mass market) collections.

Haute Couture is so specialized that it can mean many different things. It is the “most expensive” fashion around, in which this level of expense is only for the top fashion designers and houses, not many in the fashion world can charge such high amounts.

Haute couture is a multi-million dollar per-year industry - though most haute couture creations are extremely costly to produce. However, the notoriety and prestige of haute couture fashions (especially when worn by celebrities) have the unique ability to generate tremendous publicity for a design house - and that almost always leads to higher sales in the designer's ready-to-wear collections, which can often include simplified, more affordable versions of couture pieces.

Paris has long been known as the ‘City of fashion'. This is the place where it all began. There are haute couture houses like Chanel, Christian Lacroix, Nina Ricci, Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior. To be called an haute couture house, a business must belong to the Syndical Chamber for Haute Couture in Paris, which is regulated by the French Department of Industry.

Today, Paris must compete with Milan, Japan, and New York for the title of "epicenter" of the fashion world, but the history of high fashion has its roots firmly in France.