The Haute Couture market is worth €5 billion

After the show by John Galliano for Maison Margiela Artisanal, magazines and industry insiders are proclaiming the golden age of Haute Couture. Never before have social media been so ablaze with notifications during January's Paris Haute Couture Week, an event that brought, along with Margiela's extraordinary show, the debut of Simone Rocha and the return of cyborg aesthetics. Defying expectations, Haute Couture is poised for growth in 2024, by approximately 10% according to Bernstein's estimates. This year, the market is set to approach a value of 5 billion euros, with high fashion experiencing unparalleled economic expansion compared to the Ready-to-Wear sector. Haute Couture's value figure is relatively small compared to the enormous sales of brands such as Dior and Chanel, but these collections are not only dedicated to a small circle of customers that increasingly include men (Dior introduced men's couture during its last show, for example) but also create media resonance and a rise in brand reputation that then drive sales in numerous other merchandise categories.

In an interview with MF Fashion, experts demonstrate the exponential growth of high fashion in the international market. This is also evidenced by the annual results of LVMH, which closed 2023 with a record turnover of 86.2 billion euros, as declared by conglomerate president Bernard Arnault. The demand for high-end fashion continues to rise despite the crisis. «At Dior, we can't meet the demand of all our customers because it takes a lot of work to train seamstresses and create haute couture garments. Our workshop capacity is limited, so we have to contain orders,» the CEO continued. Despite the fact that the looks we see presented on the runway during Haute Couture Week are made-to-measure, crafted entirely by hand in Paris (one of the basic rules for admission to the Chambre Syndacale) and over the course of several weeks driving up costs to hundreds of thousands of euros, the amount of people who take an interest in the creations of the maisons' skilled experts is steadily rising, a sign of the times we are living in, marked by a division of spending among luxury customers who from season to season spend more as much as they are wealthy, despite the serious economic worries that instead rattle other markets.