Couture beautifully uncool

Couture fashion is many things. Extortionately expensive, to start with. An opportunity for some of the world's best designers to give free rein to their imagination.

Or an awesome display of the talents of the Parisian workshops that specialise in fine embroidery, beadwork, and crafts such as stitching feathers on to the collars of mousseline capes, for instance.

It's also an excuse for enough thickly hairsprayed "up-dos" on the catwalk to make Ivana Trump, a couture regular, feel at home.

The thing haute couture isn't, however, is remotely cool, as one was reminded every time a model slipped her coat from her shoulders and dragged it along the catwalk in the time-honoured - well, high- 80s - fashion. (For the record, there was plenty of coat-dragging at every show of the autumn/winter 2006 season.)

The handful of houses still participating in this hallowed craft did not this season seem to use couture as a "laboratory for ideas" (the favoured justification among the French for its continuance) that would then influence every strata of fashion. Rather, it was a chance to express, with the talents of the workshops at their service, the romanticism that has already filtered through the season's ready-to-wear collections.

For some of the world's wealthiest women, who fly to the Paris shows to blow hundreds of thousands of euros on handmade clothing tailored to fit their every curve, it was a good season to be in the market for, say, a really big ball gown.

For the most fashion-savvy among them, John Galliano's show for Dior was a standout, dedicated as it was to the centenary of the birth of Monsieur Dior himself.

Divided into 10 sections, each dedicated to a distinct aspect of Dior's career and those who depicted it (the 1947 New Look; Princess Margaret sitting for Cecil Beaton; 50s movie stars; the loyal seamstresses who realised Dior's designs), this was, however, more fashion spectacular than fusty history lesson. When a show opens with two black stallions pulling a carriage bearing the Dior "CD" logo, and out steps Erin O'Connor dressed in a grey tulle Edwardian costume, you know Galliano hasn't lost his sense of theatre.

There was the drama of his sweeping, 2m-diameter ball gowns. But the most intriguing moments were when Galliano's creative method became apparent.

Partly inspired by a trip to Peru, his fusion of traditional Peruvian dress (brightly coloured braid, tall hats) with the New Look silhouette was fascinating, as were his flesh-hued tulle gowns, on which the immaculate work - trompe l'oeil houndstooth, antique-style florals - of the Lesage embroidery workshop was left half-finished, making for a glorious work-in-progress.

At Valentino, where the Italian designer took his bow with an enigmatic tear in his eye, there is never any confusion about who might wear his refined clothes.

Extremely rich, extremely thin socialites can do no better than Valentino's bow-bedecked column dresses, in pale grey, liquid satin or golden taffeta with jaunty polka dots.

Valentino, whose parent company went public the week before this show, is the subject of some speculation as to who might take over when the maestro decides to retire. It is hard to imagine a replacement who would have such a precise understanding of the social circles in which his clients move.

Italian Giorgio Armani is steadily building up a new couture business.

In his second season, the master of the softly tailored suit continued his exploration into an entirely different territory: spiky skirt suits with pagoda shoulders, for instance. And for evening (or the red carpet, more likely), a seemingly never-ending selection of black, backless mermaid dresses blooming with floral motifs in crystal, satin or velvet. Nothing to push fashion forward, then, but their fluidity was a great improvement on the stiffer gowns of Armani's couture debut in January.

- INDEPENDENT