While we were busying arguing about the merits of Raf Simons‘ work at Dior, the French fashion house was busy rolling its eyes and moving vast quantities of couture into the presumably palatial closets of young Russian girls.
Wondering whether the three-piece suit which appeared at Dior’s Spring 2013 couture show (pictured) was commerically viable, New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn approached the label’s director of haute couture, Catherine Rivière, to be like, “Cute, but come on now.” (Horyn was worried that the “newness” of the look might detract from its appeal.) Madame Rivière was like, “No, what’s cute is that you think we have to do much of anything to court clients.”
As Dior president Sidney Toledano put it, “Frankly, for us, the problem will be to have enough petites mains. We have more orders than our capacity.”
Can you imagine how annoyed you’d be if you were an heiress with a practically unlimited couture budget, and the Dior atelier didn’t have enough seamstresses to fulfill your order? I bet the heiresses spend all their time calling each other to complain/gossip about Madame Rivière and compare fittings.
Dior isn’t the only house that has its hands full with heiresses — it appears that Chanel also has to beat them off with a stick. Designer Karl Lagerfeld told Horyn that one Russian client ordered about twenty outfits in just two hours.
Lagerfeld essentially presides over an untelevised version of Say Da to the Dress: the designer employs a huge staff of over 200 workers at the Chanel atelier and sends the high fashion equivalent of emissaries all around the world to do special fittings in places like Asia, Russia and the Middle East. Yep, that’s where you find couture-buying heiresses these days. Sorry, France.
