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duchesse gown with a knot in the front and a little black velvet dress trimmed in grosgrain, Caron, like so many others, became a devoted couture client.
    More than two hundred thousand women worldwide wore couture in the 1950 s. It was an expected part of a bourgeois woman’s everyday life. Today, in comparison, a mere two hundred women worldwide buy haute couture. Suits start at $ 25 , 000 , gowns $ 100 , 000 , and are worn sparingly. I remember Ivana Trump telling me in 1988 that she wore her couture gowns a couple of times in New York and Palm Beach and then, rather than be accused of the social faux pas of being seen too many times in the same outfit, sent them to her mother in Czechoslovakia. And this was before the fall of the Berlin wall.
    Buying couture in the postwar years was an exercise in high protocol. Twice a year, Dior sent out three hundred gold-embossed invitations to good clients, magazine editors, reporters, retailers, and celebrities to attend the showing of Monsieur Dior’s latest creations, which were presented each January and July in the couture salons of the early-nineteenth-century gray granite headquarters—or “house”—at 30 , avenue Montaigne. Guests were seated in rows of delicate chairs; behind them in alcoves sat giant urns of roses, gardenias, and carnations whose scent perfumed the air. The shows started precisely on time, and no special accommodations were made for latecomers. Once the duchess of Windsor arrived after the show began and was relegated to the staircase.
    The swanlike models glided regally through the gold and olive rooms as an announcer called the name and number of the dress or suit, paused under the enormous crystal chandeliers, posed arms akimbo, twirled with great purpose, effortlessly slid off the jacket or wrap, twirled again, and continued. The American and European department store and boutique retailers seated in the front row scribbled potential orders in their notepads, and the chic Parisian and celebrity clients—many dressed in last season’s Diors with pearl chokers, hats, and gloves—occasionally nodded approvingly. Shows lasted three hours; today they’re twenty minutes—half an hour is considered long. The show concluded with a elaborate bridal gown, and the models would receive a thunderous applause punctuated with “Bravo!” and “Magnifique!” Dior himself was rarely there. “After all the horrors of preparing a collection,” he explained, “I wouldn’t think of attending a show.”
    After the show, Caron remembers, “if you decided to buy, you stayed. The ladies would be strewn out in the big salon, and there were several salons. The vendeuse called and asked the mannequin to put on the dress you liked. You looked at it, at all its sides, and you’d say, ‘I like it, but I’d like it longer, shorter, whatever.’ Then you had a rendezvous and you went into the cabines ”—or dressing rooms—“and there were three fittings for each dress.”
    The Parisian clients were, as Dior himself put it, “singularly difficult.” “At a fitting she behaves like a contortionist,” he told Time magazine in 1957 . “She stands up, sits down, bends and wriggles around; actually she is testing a dress because, she knows, an unhinged strap or a clasp could mean disaster at a fancy soirée. Often she brings along her husband or her lover, and they fidget as well over stitches, seams and buttonholes. They exasperate us, but we cannot afford to ignore their fussing, however petty it may seem. Unless they leave chez Dior in complete self-confidence, we have blundered and our image will be tarnished as a consequence.”
    The couturiers were often personally involved in fittings, and the clothes were constructed solidly so that they could be worn often and for years. “A dress or a suit was built on you, taking into consideration your own shape and above all, made to make you feel comfortable and at your best. You could relax and think of