Haute couture: A very gallic occasion

Mira Sorvino, dressed by Armani, at the Golden Globe Awards. Picture / Reuters

Stitched by hand, costing tens of thousands of pounds and destined to be worn by a customer base of just 300 of the world's most wealthy women, haute couture is a peculiarly French tradition.

It was apposite that Christian Dior's couture show should conclude with a wedding dress, three metres wide and tumbling with folds of taffeta, embroidered with the words "Liberte, Egalite Fraternite".

Haute couture week might not be inscribed in the French constitution, but the event, now just three days, upholds the Gallic tradition of hand-made, highly ornamented clothing tailored to fit a client's every curve and whim.

Designer John Galliano is its greatest showman and his spectacular presentations also serve as a marketing tool for Dior. The blood-red satin cape glistening with jet embroidery that opened his spring/summer 2006 show signalled that the British-bred designer was in combative mood. Inspired by the bullfighters of Arles and the new movie The Libertine, he reinterpreted historical garments such as the corset and the crinoline for his dramatic ballgowns in brick red, ecru, black and white, many splattered with fake gore, or elegantly rumpled. Meanwhile, Armani, who dressed Mira Sorvino at last month's Golden Globes, gave the starlets plenty to choose from. Crystals, jet and pearls smothered every surface of many of his narrow halterneck dresses and pyjama-style trouser suits, while those after a less eye-popping effect could take their pick from pale lilac silk charmeuse gowns cut in fluttering layers or peplum jackets with broad, Forties-style shoulders.

For its financial might alone, Chanel is a fashion house that often seems to tower over others in Paris. Hence the spectacular finale to the show where a bright white 15m column slid upwards to reveal beneath it five tiers of models standing on a spiral staircase.

Thanks to the late Coco Chanel, chief designer Karl Lagerfeld has a rich seam of house signatures to plunder: the little black dress, the tweed suit, the camellia and the double-C logo.

There was a Sixties feel to Lagerfeld's curvy black dresses, which were worn with flat white go-go boots, and an even more youthful interpretation of the ultimate bourgeois uniform, the Chanel suit, which for spring is in high-maintenance shades of white or powder pink. The Hollywood A-list will be weighing up the virtues of Chanel's fairy-princess evening dresses ahead of the Academy Awards. In white, they had short, full skirts - some even resembling ballet tutus - with sugar-sweet embroideries, beaded silver camellias or trimmed at the hem with peach-coloured silk flowers.

It is 16 years since the cone-shaped bra worn by Madonna on her Blond Ambition tour catapulted its designer Jean Paul Gaultier to stardom. So when the singer arrived in a black, fur-trimmed coat and sunglasses to sit front row at his haute couture show it seemed another mutually beneficial collaboration might be in the offing. The former "enfant terrible" still has the ability to shock - health-conscious guests might have flinched at the sight of models who wafted lit cigarettes as they walked down the runway - but he is now part of the French fashion establishment and seen as the natural successor to Yves Saint Laurent, who retired from fashion four years ago.

The Grecian and Moroccan-themed show closed haute couture week, a privilege formerly held by Saint Laurent. The aggressively-styled corsets and bras that he created for Madonna are still a signature design for Gaultier and for spring he offered his couture clients a pale yellow pleated dress with conical bosoms encrusted with crystals.

However, for the most part this collection channelled a delicious mish-mash of eastern Mediterranean influences, from giant organza harem pants and a long amethyst-coloured chiffon dress ruched into Grecian pleats to Ali Baba stilettos and a belly-dancer's outfit, stitched with blue glass beads in a mosaic pattern.

He transformed the former theatre that houses his headquarters into an exotic den, with some guests seated in swing chairs suspended from ceiling and candle-lit Moroccan lamps. Even the wedding dress, traditionally the closing outfit of an haute couture show, was given a Middle Eastern makeover with ballooning white harem pants and a giant stiff white pleated collar that dwarfed the model's head.

- INDEPENDENT