Paris haute couture: the triumph of elegance and style
A few days ago, Paris dimmed its spotlights on the “Paris haute couture collections”, one of the most important fashion events of the year with top fashion designers presenting their women’s haute couture collections for the coming winter season.
This year, only a few designers took part in this prestigious event and almost all them were French, a sign that French couture is gaining a new dimension, its importance and its prestige dominating the entire fashion world.
The main elements distinguishing the “Paris haute couture collections Fall-Winter 2009/2010”, which took place from July the 6th to July the 9th, are the triumph of elegance and of a gorgeous refined style. The quest for beauty no longer depends on extravagance and attention grabbing originality, but, next fall-winter 2010, women will take great care always to look sensual, elegant, gorgeous and extremely attractive. They will use specific accessories such as a refined clutch, a corselet or visible suspender belts like the ones proposed by Christian Dior.
Lace and decorated fabrics of excellent quality are present everywhere, in almost all the proposed collections, in both matt and shiny versions. Leather is used by many top designers for dresses and coats and fur is very fashionable used to edge tops and skirts as well as coat collars. Black is the basic color of these haute couture collections, set off by shiny fabrics such as satin or silk, or embellished by shimmering bling of sequins, beading and crystals.
Hats and long gloves will be incredibly fashionable next fall-winter 2009/2010, matching the dress in color. The handbag is rarely used by designers in these latest collections but, when used, it absolutely must be a rigid, structured clutch, made of leather or of satin decorated with pearls and possibly clasped in the hand. Sometimes these clutches are black, silver or gold, with very gorgeous small chain straps, also decorated with pearls and shining rhinestones. Everything must be luxury and the height of elegance. However, Dior, departs from this general trend of the clutch as the must-have bag to wear with a couture dress. His models walk the runway wearing very colorful jackets, belted to enhance the waist-line, and holding a small structured ivory-beige handbag by the handles. Jean Paul Gaultier, on the other hand, alternates the classic clutch with very refined “small geometrical bags” made of exotic leather, which enhance the woman’s look giving her brightness and charm.
As for the shoes, to look gorgeous next fall-winter 2009/2010, woman has to wear high-heeled shoes or wedges to make the position of her feet more comfortable. The style can be classic or revisit the 30’s, as proposed by Chanel, when women wore high heeled lace-up shoes. Jean Paul Gaultier proposes sandals made of genuine python leather under a completely winter look! Many designers, like Chanel, match the shoes to the dress, not only in color but also in manufacture and fabric, as if the shoes were a continuation of the dress. However, if you don’t like wearing classic open shoes in the winter, because of having your feet constantly frozen, don’t worry: next to the stylish high heeled shoes, designers at the Paris Haute Couture event, propose classic high-heeled boots, made of shiny fabric, and perfectly matching the dress. They should be over the knee and skin tight, but note that they should only be worn with a short dress or skirt, covering the legs, but still revealing your sensuality and the perfect shape of your body. Both shoes and boots must be extremely elegant and capture the attention: so why not enrich them with pearls and glitter to make them even more gorgeous and prestigious? Chanel does!!!!
As we wrote in the very first lines of our article, woman next fall-winter 2009/2010 is a very sexy woman who likes to be daring and express her sensuality with very small and exciting details, but who never loses sight of elegance and prestige. Besides lace corsets and suspender belts or plunging necklines and slit skirts, the other element of charm that distinguishes next winter’s woman is the use of dresses of layered sheer fabric, which reveal tantalizing glimpses and enhance her figure. Almost all the designers use sheer sections in their creations, such as the sleeves of the jacket or some parts of the waist line or of the legs, giving the woman wearing them an undisputed touch of mystery and refined sex-appeal. The woman’s body is no longer left totally uncovered but much is left to the imagination with this play of transparencies.
And the colors? What are the main shades of the women’s look for next fall-winter 2009/2010?
Besides black, which is the main color adopted by all the fashion houses in their haute couture collections (especially for the evening style), the other tonalities used are gold and silver, both for very gorgeous evening dresses in lamé and for accessories such as bags and shoes to add brightness and luxury to the woman’s look. Beige is very often combined with black, mainly used to further enhance the sheer fabrics, creating a layered, veiled look. Grey is mainly used by the Italian king of fashion Giorgio Armani in its Armani Privé collection, above all for the extraordinary luxury women’s suits where the classic tie is substituted by a refined bow in the same shiny fabric as the dress. White too, like beige, is used but only combined with other colors such as brown or black, while midnight blue is used both for daywear in warm wool and for elegant evening dresses.
Even though winter is usually a time of dark color, this year many designers propose very vivid colors to make next winter brighter and more cheerful, such as red, electric blue, pistachio green and purple both for the day and, especially for the evening, perhaps enriched by shining accessories such as a gold or silver clutch or some jewelry. Christian Dior focuses his entire collection on vivid tonalities such as fuchsia, yellow, orange, red, electric blue, violet, light beige, pink and leopard brown, as if to banish the winter gloom with a fanfare of color.
Do you want to look at the styles proposed at the Paris Haute Couture in more detail? To be continued …
