Inside the Psyche of a Couture Customer

Can you imagine if you were this woman's daughter? "I want that one, Mom!"

We've always been fascinated by couture customers. Just who are they anyway? Do they, like, go to Paris with a budget? How many servants does it take to carry their designer luggage to their designer suites? Do they bring hair dressers to Paris with them? What do they eat for breakfast? When their friends ask them what they're doing on Monday, do they say, "Oh, just couture shopping in Paris"? Well, Reuters tracked down some of these fur-clad babes at the Dior show:

"Sometimes I get surprised, you hear there is a crisis but you still see people shopping," said a Jordanian Dior client, queuing in front of the sun-streaked facade of the museum.

"When you want something exclusive, you have to go to haute couture. My daughter is getting married and I want a dress specially made for her — and for myself, and sisters and family," said the client, who did not want to be named.


Scintillating. Assuming she has two sisters, and "family" encompasses one person (we're balling low here), that means she needs five haute couture dresses. If each dress costs $40,000 (and they can easily cost more), she'll need to spend at least $200,000 on clothes for the bridal party.

We don't expect her to understand these "layoffs" and "mortgage-backed securities" (if we were rich enough to buy dresses that cost as much as cars we wouldn't think about those things, either) but how does she ever actually see people shopping? She probably never walks anywhere except for small distances from buildings to her chauffeured vehicle(s). And when she's not freaking shopping the Dior couture show in Paris Dior salesmen probably bring things to her home, which is constructed from solid 14k gold, where she serves him whole truffles, caviar, and hundred year old champagne. And when she breaths the air molecules probably turn into money. Okay. Now we feel like we understand these people better.

Crisis? What crisis? Paris haute couture thinks big [Reuters]

Previously on NYmag.com's The Cut...

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