Wedding gowns are future of haute couture, says designer

Lebanese designer Zuhair Murad seems confident that wedding dresses could save haute couture in the long run.

"Prêt-à-porter covers everything else," Murad told Relaxnews in his Paris showroom during haute couture fashion week. "You have oufits for your dinner, your cocktail, daytime. [...] But a haute couture dress that you'll hopefully only use once in a lifetime, that's our niche in the market."

The designer, who creates both ready-to-wear and haute couture collections and designed 300 individual dresses for his clients in one year, counts Hollywood's biggest stars and the Middle Eastern royal families among his clients. According to him, his brand also has a strong customer base in Middle Europe, Russia, and China.

But he says the haute couture trade has changed, and designers should change with it. While the "relation between the designer and the client is very important," according to Murad, "[well-funded] women don't have time for fittings anymore."

Karl Lagerfeld addressed this issue too when he was interviewed by the Telegraph, claiming that "haute couture has become a private jet business," which has designers travel to their clients instead of the other way around.

As for ready-to-wear, Murad told Relaxnews that designers needed to be far more sensitive for trends than in haute couture. However, he doesn't approve of the current celebrity-turned-designer phenomenon: "It's a hundred percent commercial," he told Relaxnews. "People should stick to what they know. If she's a singer, let her sing. [...] It's a wave that will die down soon." And he added that in order to increase their reach, collaborations with fast fashion retailers such as H&M or Uniqlo were far less damaging to their image.

Zuhair Murad showed his haute couture collection on January 26. His dresses were poised between masculinity and femininity, between trendy rock'n'roll chic (he incorporated spikes and studs into flowing gowns) and classic elegance, between military - inspired by Napoleonian uniforms - and soft baroque. Female shapes were celebrated with paddings on hips and corset dresses, and the micro skirts paired with dramatic trains at the back look as if another successful red carpet season lurks on the horizon.