TV: Secret World of Haute Couture

I know zilch about fashion, and that's probably why I found "Secret World of Haute Couture," a BBC documentary, to be entertaining. There's something bizarrely fascinating about taking a peak into the lives of a small, secretive bunch of people, and it becomes even better when said group is ultra rich. Here, Margy Kinmouth looks at the exclusive "club" of women who sit in the front rows of the Parisian haute couture fashion shows. They snap up expensive dress after expensive dress - some with six figure price tags.

The documentary presents an interesting portrait of haute couture, past and present. Most of the women who make up the buyer's "club" are trophy wives, who married into their wealth. And the reverence they display for their favored designers borders on cultlike; Paris becomes the Vatican, with the catwalk as a cathedral. This is way more fancy than "ready-to-wear" fashion - sort of a Saville Row for the women.

Average construction time for a single piece is around 150 hours. No machines, just lots of lots of stitching and sewing by hand. Most of the time, haute couture actually loses money for the houses that design and produce it - they make much more money off the non-custom, mass-produced fashion lines (analogous to auto companies who produce high-end sports cars for the prestige value alone). All in all, a rarefied world for the phenomenally rich.