The Secret World of Haute Couture. - BBC Documentary

and now the passionate eye presents the fairytale world of oat couture for me is like a virus once you started there was absolutely no way you could wear anything else find out what handmade in paris really means they feel like nothing else they're very very light it's like wearing a second skin when you enter the world of oak couture you find that this dress becomes a part of you you put it on and you don't think about it again because it has been molded on your skin if you will meet the eccentric characters in a story of decadent decline all this mississippi's dr and i saw his collection i really thought i died and gone to heaven that's the secret world of old culture i want to tell you about a club i've heard of it's secret highly exclusive there are no written rules to decide who can and can't join there's no official committee to vote you in this club's got only about 200 members in the entire world all women what they have in common is the desire and the means to acquire the most expensive clothes that money can buy so where do they congregate not surprisingly it's paris if clothes aren't handmade in paris they can't be called oat couture and twice a year the city becomes the club's unofficial headquarters as members fly in from all over the world to see the oak couture shows but the fashion houses are famously discreet about two things prices and clients i'd written to over 30 women i thought might be coming to paris but it was like hitting a brick wall almost all of them refused to meet me i began to wonder if i'd ever get my foot in the door finally i struck lucky with a newer member she was staying where they all stay at the ritz becca kassen thrash is a philanthropist and the wife of a seriously rich texan oil and gas tycoon she agreed to let me in on some of the secrets of the club let me tell you something about what i've learned after being here for five years now the couture is like a private club and many of the members don't want to let you in they put you on the sixth row and the very back of the the tent and you know you just have to you have to be patient and get to know people and let them get to know you it all changed when becca raised 450 000 for the american friends of the louvre discreetly she was fast tracked to the front row of the paris shows she's now a star name and a fully paid up member of the oak couture club becca's obsession with fashion and oak couture in particular started when she was very young you know i i do not come from a family of means i come from a loving family the working class but when i was growing up in a little small town in south texas i would see the vogues on the stands at the grocery store but we couldn't afford to buy them back then so while my mommy was buying the groceries i would be flipping through and it was it became an obsession with me fashion so how much would one of those cost well it's all over the place i mean you can find a piece for you know for twenty thousand euro and then they can exceed six figures it's often that i'm sharing a very important charity event becca stressed the importance of philanthropy in all this well it's the only way i could ever even remotely justify it i mean i spend i don't have children and i spend most of my day raising money and and so i come over you know looking for one specific item for something for the prince of wales foundation you know when i went to balmoral last year uh i wore a um a dior jacket with a ralph rucci oat couture skirt so for becca the vast sums she raises at her charity gigs squares a huge amount she spends on the oak couture she wears on those occasions but what about the rest of the members of the club i needed someone on the inside someone who'd talk i'd been told by a source about a russian baroness now retired who'd worked at the highest level within the business for over 30 years she agreed to be filmed she loves mascara and makeup ugly i asked what had driven her clients to spend such fortunes it's a lady that if she buys uh a car she'll get the best car if she goes she'll buy furniture she'll buy the real thing and if she wants a wonderful suit she'll go to the best that can provide for it i think it's a question most of all of quality that is the the good reason to bike with you i think i wouldn't call it a bad reason but there may be more superficial reason is wanting to be part of a certain world world part of glamorous people who who do that and ladies who dress like that being part of that group how much does an oak your piece cost and has this cost changed you know uh if san all closed in 2002 i think things have gone up but a suit but then a blouse would cost anything between 20 and 30 thousand dollars but an embroidered risk could cost a hundred thousand dollars i'd read about a club member with homes both in new york and here in paris who had a massive collection but would she even meet me when i eventually made contact she first asked her husband permission he agreed doors were opening once an air hostess susan goodfriend is the wife of legendary wall street banker john goodfriend susan had built up her large wardrobe during the heady bond boom of the 80s i was about to get my very first sighting of oat couture in the flesh this is um what started me on my voyage with the okra tour and as you can see the hand work is extraordinary with all the ribbons and the crystal aurora borealis in the center and um as i say i've just never gotten over the beauty of this dress and to this day it enchants me i've always been passionate about textiles for as long as i can remember and this for me was the ultimate i bought this dress i felt like i had been transformed it's very much the way a young girl feels about when you see your first cinderella movie and i i was enchanted i was convinced i was the prettiest girl in the street you see the whole thing you snap yes open i think that o couture does change you from the point of view that you enter into another world and it is that a refined world and rarefied world that has become increasingly smaller and this one i love this is a chanel from my vintage collection and this i love because i think the textile is so amazing i love the colors i love the textile and of course this is one of those dresses where you can't eat because the boost j is so tight and this is done in cashmere and here you see all the work and the bones and the underpinnings i learnt from susan that as a club member is not enough to wear the clothes you've got to really appreciate how they've been made it's part of the club subculture for susan oat couture is a wearable art form and she's a patron it's worth every penny how many pieces of oat couture would you say you you had yourself oh i have a few pieces i don't go to bed thinking about dresses i read books unrelated to all that not that i don't like that but suddenly in the early morning i see especially for couture not only i see the silhouette the spirit but i even see the set i'd asked if i could follow the making of an oat couture piece maybe then i'd understand what all the fuss was about carl agreed to my request for the coming paris show his magic pen is creating a dress made almost entirely of feathers at this point it's an industrial secret a secret only me and my cameraman are being allowed to share a few miles away another hidden world of oat couture an atelier the job of incorporating some of the world's rarest and costliest feathers into carl's design feathers specially farmed in south africa the dress is in two bits the bottom bit is being pinned back at hq while the top is around the corner being embroidered the decadence of it all it was breathtaking how long does it take to make an oak couture piece from start to finish about 150 hours it's an average of that the material is prepared with irons special iron special way of ironing it you work the material you don't cut in a raw material and once you've done that the advantage is if you have a even a silk dress done by utgeo worked that way you take it and you pack it in your suitcase you arrive god knows where you take it off and it's impeccable it was once a booming industry just after the war 46 000 people were employed in it now it's down to some four and a half thousand and the reason mass production factory made clothes ready to wear become the norm both for rich and poor alike skilled artisans are now hanging on by a thread there are only a handful of ateliers left chanel's been buying most of them up to try and ensure oat couture stays alive and all of these things are what makes an okutor dress so special and there are fewer and fewer of these ateliers that exist and if they're not supported you lose an art form i may have been let into the secret of the feathered dress but carl wouldn't let me into another secret the identity of the dresses future owner club members can breathe a sigh of relief they don't want to be mentioned you know there are many many rich people today the public have no idea who they are how they look and they don't want people to know how they look and who they are and where the money comes from you see so don't ask me too many questions in that area because it's like a doctor it's a miracle secret the club members who'd agreed to speak so far were all americans with new money but i knew there were old families involved in oat couture i tracked down one of them a british club member daphne guinness she was reticent at first it took me three months to persuade her to talk what are you wearing done i'm wearing a combination which is normal for me i tend to throw things together but um this is a couture jacket ancient this is a sort of woolly recording thing and then these chinese are sort of jeans from somewhere and put some crosses on them um but nothing really special just normal daphne's descended from the mitford sisters her grandmother was diana mosely wife of the famous fascist she showed me how her pieces were made slightly different construction of shivanshi they all got a different way of working in different sort of people that work there but again you've got the shoulders you know if you see the difference between a shoulder that looks like this with a seam across here and then this this one here this whole arm is it's of a piece well my grandmother was very um close to mr givenchy uber and her sisters too were very keen on fashion and clothes and then when i got married i had my you know wedding dress made and that was where the bug began you know just i still wear that i still wear the suit it still fits perfectly it still looks wonderful and you can't really say that about most things that you buy this is over 20 years ago now look at those sleeves so daphne is a living embodiment of oak couture from times past when the key membership requirement was to have bona fide family connections i wanted to meet a club elder i found one living in new york i'd located her through her charitable foundations after discreetly checking references she agreed to talk to me the doors to the secret world really were opening up multi-millionaires mrs carol petry was a famous beauty and a model in her youth a southerner she was part of a land-owning family and by marrying a baron she became the baroness of petago looks can take you anywhere and her first trip to paris was by ocean liner she's been married several times and is now heiress to the colossal toys r us fortune mrs petrie's fifth avenue apartment block is like a stately home upstairs club member susan goodfriend also has an apartment around the corner there's a whole wing of the metropolitan museum named the petrie court mrs petrie didn't want me to film in her wardrobes she has a maid who takes care of all her oat couture so she wheeled in a small sample to show me at about two dozen pieces this was a pretty impressive haul chanel or is that the lovely buttons on it during the war no one made any new clothes to speak up because that would not have been patriotic well when i got to paris immediately after the war that was when dior appeared on the scene this is a dior dior yes this is a dior yes all this mississippi's dior and i saw his collection i really thought i died and gone to heaven what about this one here is this what sort of date would that be which one this one is yes the red one you want to know the date yes i'd be interested i couldn't believe what he had done with fabric it was so extraordinary did you make your wedding dress yes yes yes he did he did and there was somebody else there at the time who i know that you used to go to shows with mrs simpson can you tell me a little bit about her and her appreciation of oak couture i'm smiling because you referred to her as mrs simpson when i knew her she was the duchess already and because she liked oat couture didn't she oh yes very much very much she was always in the okra what was her taste like exquisite i've never seen her in anything it overpowered her in any way she was always in control over the years mrs petrie's wardrobe standards haven't slipped one iota i'd learned another key club rule maintain sartorial elegance all your life i couldn't imagine this is petrie donning a sweatshirt she's an example of the old school where oath could your 24 hours a day every day it's the mega busy week of the shows paris is like a big party i got back to my hotel to find flowers i've been making films for over 20 years and i've never received so much the dandelion i hope the feather dress might come in the next delivery but could treatment like this be why the fashion press is so famously uncritical it's show time first out of the gate is christian duel 2 30 monday in the word of the loin and here come the club members now i've got the chance to find out what these shows really mean to them and whether they're going to buy anything there's becca i've managed to get backstage there's an army preparing for battle no club members ever get in here before the show they'll be kept waiting for over an hour while designer john gagliano prepares an outrageous spectacle for them the theme is top secret even looking at the model's wacky hair and makeup i had no idea what the subject is club members held their breath were treated to a sort of homage to the french revolution carnage couture with fake blood embroideries it was high melodrama but i couldn't imagine any club members wearing this lot in a million years so what a dior and everybody getting out of this i asked becker to explain this oat couture mystery to me well i thought it was a dream very wearable once you extract pieces and cut them down and rework them because what you see on the runway it's never ultimately what goes on the customer's body it's it's done for you so once you get in the fitting room and you get in the atelier and you say maybe less leave and drop the hip and whatever really becomes a very wearable piece of art it is a piece of art can i talk to you a little bit did you enjoy the show very much very much i love it as usual with john is always even for me it's a big surprise it's like a painter and you get all these very strong images obviously this is not the volume business we talk to very specific customers we're going to take ideas from you know part of it a jacket an embroidery for that john would develop a customized criteria for some customers and then we developed the business this is my duty so what's becoming clear is that it doesn't matter if anyone's going to buy a dress from the catwalk or not it's just a huge marketing push for all the other products from dior these fashion houses are so clever just by opening a bottle of perfume we can all join the club it had taken me over six months to get access to galliano he rarely gives interviews like chanel dior is very protective of its chief designer but he agreed to tell me the secrets of his collection if you look closely it's a take on a classic um 12 di jouer which has been embroidered on what's known as clang which is horsehair which is normally what you use for the undiscovered the more magnificent ball dresses um but it has this amazing structure and here you can see um a whole work that's done with darting but on the outside and these blown away pockets that gives this amazing structure and it's super light if we try and think of it almost like a pyramid everything takes its inspiration from the orth couture which is a showcase um for everything that i can do um which eventually has a trickle-down effect on everything that we create at the house of duo today like carl when it comes to the clients galliano is just as tight-lipped i have a kind of doctor-like relationship with my clients i don't like to talk too much about them because that's part of the mystery book duel 2. club members barely have time to throw up their stilettos before it's the next show valentino's at lecol de musee bozar at 8 30 monday night susan's here and there's daphne this show is late so plenty of time for club members to meet each other yet again i tried to work it out what's the appeal of these outfits to club members so different from the eccentric mr gagliano's i'd heard that mr valentino's collection is very reliable for those stocking up on evening wear for corporate functions in the far and middle east in particular there are few husbands in the audience at these shows but i could still feel their wallets opening i thought it was sheer genius it was just beautiful all the dresses were so light and airy and young looking and made one want to forget dinner and lose 10 pounds but they were just glorious and it was such a pleasure to be here and see all the wonderful people how are you hi how are you just glamorous people like this you see so how does it feel to wear it too it's like the difference between wearing a real piece of jewelry and a fake although the other is fun too but it's there's a different feeling to it that same afternoon i'd gone back to carl's his show's tomorrow i watched the feather dress come down chanel's famous staircase with the rest of the collection on a production line the whole lot is photographed and videoed for hours these images will go into the stores into magazines and be sent around the world videos dvds and a website are a club bonus for members who cannot make it to paris members like betsy bloomingdale who lives 5 000 miles away in los angeles yes bloomingdale as in the world famous store her husband owned along with diners club credit cards which he set up she and mrs petry are in the same social circles and that's how i got an entree to her back in the 50s fashion houses would send betsy things called crocky in the post hand-painted sketches of the collections with samples of material attached when i first started this is what they would send they would send all the croquis and i would spread them all out on the floor and i would think this one and this one and i'd hold you could hold the color up to see if you like this color or this nice red color do i like the color and later you've got a tape but it wasn't as much fun as getting all these wonderful sap fabrics samples you know that uh it was just different betsy showed me her collection carefully stored in a series of wardrobes over 80 pieces that must be over half a million dollars worth of today's prices yeah all of this and these this is a wonderful dress this is a party dress and this is something you would wear a dinner dress maybe every single piece is labeled to show where she wore it new year's eve at the annenberg's in palm springs and he was once ambassador in london moma that museum metropolitan arab art new york city in the spring dinner for jean franco ferreira the davis christmas party the assembly ball in los angeles the kluge party to the reagan inauguration looking at betsy's wardrobe it's clear the history per oat couture is a history of her social life made for earl spencer's birthday party at all trip and i wore it at the dallas country club and i wore dinner at home here so it's been out three times i was astonished to see how few times she'd worn some of these dresses when i buy something really special i hope i'll wear it a lot to justify the expense but here it's exactly the opposite so i'd learned another club rule don't wear the clothes too often and for certain club members there's a bonus if the frogs are in good nick after a few years you can donate them to a museum and write them off as a tax loss betsy tell me about your first oat couture experience well my first oat couture experience was a lady called madame jeannette spanier who was with balma and she met my husband at some place and she said oh she said you must send your wife here we want to dress her at balmat and i thought well i don't really why would i live in los angeles and what am i going to paris but i did and uh i found it absolutely amazing so i had one or two things made there then at that time my husband started a business called diners club and no one in paris understood credit cards except jack rouette who was the head of christian dior and because he signed up with dinos club my husband said betsy you're going to buy everything at dior so that's why i started at dior besides i loved paris paris was always beautiful and it was my first really falling in love with paris everything about it was beautiful the museums the food the beds the clothes everything so paris was always my favorite city it was so different than it is today you sat on little chairs and it was very quiet and the ladies came through and they would announce the number or whatever it was this was always very straight and very perfect and the clothes were beautiful the models came out quietly it was it was a whole different world really so i don't know how it's changed i mean they don't do that anymore that's more it's a different way i realize they've added a new membership category famous thin people some of the real members are none too happy about it to get your clothes onto a movie star is going to be advertising in one form or another and if i see something in advertising i don't want it anymore that's for sure if i see it on a movie star i don't want it anymore it's done still it is the chanel show and attendance is compulsory i've been told there's becca susan's good friend introduces me to another senior club member i'd seen at dior yesterday called dida blair she was wearing full club uniform from top to toe sunglasses and an immaculately tailored suit apparently she used to go shopping with club member jackie kennedy she even knew club saint coco chanel herself we were all enjoying ourselves so much just sitting around looking at each other that i hardly noticed the show starting ah the little black dress chanel's trademark the club members are being treated to 62 of carl's dreams chanel is the only fashion house which claims to make decent money out of its oat couture i'm not surprised i've seen inside enough club members wardrobes by now to know they're addicted to the chanel look suddenly i spotted the feather dress it's a club rule concentrate on the outfits not the celebrities sitting near you they walk past terribly quickly some of these things are so sort of complicated that you have to be able to break them down very very quickly in your head and figure out what is going to work for you how do you know if it's going to suit you or not gut i know absolutely what will work and what won't work and i know precisely what i like and what i don't like absolutely no question in my mind ever i suppose you can't afford to go wrong at a hundred thousand dollars a throw there's carl i'd heard he had to shed six stone a few years back to comply with club rules on fatties he's mobbed at the end of course everything came together in such a light young feminine way and i think we were all just you know in next stars over it because it to see that kind of beauty and we all felt the same way it was finally i guess in a word it would be ethereal susan qualifies to kiss him because she's a club member but i was kept outside the inner circle even though he'd sent me flowers i followed the club members over to ecole de bozar to the christian lacrosse show after the war there were over a hundred couture shows in a season now it's down to barely a dozen there's a buzz here today even though not long ago christian lacroix hit a rocky patch with his oat couture there's daphne guinness taking her place in the front row lucy ferry becca's here too with one of her very famous friends the club members go mad about these dresses i could only imagine the bun fight between them to be the only woman in the world to be seen wearing one of them watching this lot i wondered how many more years decadent oak couture shows like this could continue the day after the show it's time for club members to go shopping it's not like any clothes shop i've been in before you can't just walk in you have to make an appointment and there are no price tags that seems to be a club rule daphne is going through the chanel stuff for the honorable amanda harlick she's employed by carl as part of his team i mean the most incredible fabric they spend most of the time extolling the virtues of the spectacular workmanship i wonder if she'll go for it doesn't it concern people how much something's gonna cost oh yes it does they ask but they know that it's they know that the the form that a blouse is about ten thousand dollars they know it so the minute they come to order they have a budget maybe some high budgets and they know they can afford such an amount of money or they can afford to buy three or four pieces that season becca is getting her individual look at the collection right but it has a jacket no i'm sure being a club member means being on a non-stop diet because if you are thin enough to get into the dress the model wall you can have it at a 30 discount if you're a normal shape a dress has to be made for you from scratch and you have to pay the full oat couture work i like to accentuate my hips and my legs because that's where i'm thin and this right here is where i'm the biggest so i love the blue foam with the you know the tight underneath but this is fantastic for someone really thin lacrosse chief saleswoman marie martinez the directories is helping becker pick something for one of her philanthropic fundraising events oh that it's the gold from the show oh look at that then i was thinking to upgrade my pants that i got from the first time you and i met with i saw a little jacket that might work in the end she didn't buy anything it's a special club service for overseas members the oak couture garments are flown to the clients to be actually fitted to their bodies the clothes are accompanied by key staff including rosslyn della plus the chief seamstress or premier as she is known the dresses clock up quite a few air miles this time the lacroix collection is heading for new york initially no one would let me in on this bit of the oak couture process but finally i found a willing club member judith karenti is an art collector and the wife of a dutch banker her daughter's with her judith has bought a dress to wear at the oxford cambridge boat race ball along with her daughter she's bought her stylist a lengthy discussion ensues you want us to add some a little more layers under like because it's well it could be isn't this enough i mean no i don't i don't think she really needs it you mean just just a touch here yeah i asked judith to explain the allure of oat couture it's a bit of an extension of my painting collection i view it as as that as that way and it's um something that i feel very um privileged to be able to participate in and it just um adds another dimension and she likes the exclusivity one of the reasons she does it is to be the only one i don't like to think that i'm wearing something that you know half of america has two i love the way it keeps its shape it has its own shape so you can you can try it on if you like i've waited weeks for this but i'm finally gonna get to try on some couture fabulous it oat it does feel quite unique and you look quite i sounded like all the women i've met so far isn't it beautiful i wonder if i could pass for a club member if i could would i want to suddenly i could understand what they'd all been going on about you always feel comfortable in it and once you you put it on the first time on your back you have the impression you've had there all your lives if i've discovered one thing it's the club members are united in their belief that oak couture is a collectible form of art from their point of view and with their money it's a sensible purchase an investment if you look at it as an investment like you would a piece of contemporary art something that you buy and you have forever towards the end of your life you give it to a museum very much like you would a jackson pollock or a de kooning or a magritte or you know whatever and that's how i look at it people don't think anything of spending masses of money on decoration or pictures or and there's just as much work that goes into a handmade piece of clothing as the as the does and into into many many works of art i definitely think it's an art form absolutely i never thought it but years ago but i think it definitely is an art form absolutely and putting the money to one side it's as important or unimportant as drinking the best wine or driving the best car as important or unimportant as being the most beautifully retired woman at the party so what of my club members i'd read about my new friends a few weeks later in the magazines several had gone to the ball i came across daphne appearing at a national gallery fundraising event in london she settled for an old oath couture favorite by chanel but not from this latest collection the minute she walked in she was photographed for a society magazine judith karenti watched her son's team lose in the oxford reserve team at the boat race still she was able to console herself at the after race party she and her daughter top to toe in that oat couture from lacroix becca went to the anglo-mania ball in new york and scored major club points by wearing ralph rucci both on her body and on her arm too betsy bloomingdale went to the vanity fair oscar party disappointingly she chose not to wear one of her 80 pieces of oat couture susan's still out and about in paris i never did find out how many pieces of oat couture she had mrs petrie dines at her favorite french restaurant most days it's always chanel for lunch as for the feather dress well here it is a full-page feature in vogue still no mention of an owner so would i buy it if i won the lottery you bet i would sunday night on the passionate eye dr jack kessler has his own reasons for taking up the challenge of stem cell research as a father i am both outraged and heartbroken the politics and irrational fears of new technologies are depriving my daughter allison of the possibility of walking again but there are those with equally intense reasons that oppose it mr president human embryo is a human life mapping stem cell research follows a father determined to help his daughter walk again i mean it's incredible it's incredible as soon as we have our first real treatment that works the pressure will become overwhelming we have been praying i think prayer is fine but i think research is really what's going to get us the answers i think most parents would tell you that if i could somehow put myself in that chair and have her walking i would do it a documentary that gives the stem cell debate a human face sunday night on the passionate eye you

Channel: ESPINOLA STUDIO

Views: 1,707,292

Keywords: Fashion, World, haute, couture, bbc, the, secret, world, of, daphne, guinness, becca, chanel, dior, Vogue, John, galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, Karl, Lagerfeld, John Galliano, Documentary, vogue

Id: Wqkgo6fV8q8

Length: 45min 34sec (2734 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 25 2013