You always remember your first. For Fredrik Robertsson, it was a vivid-red Alexis Mabille jacket, with two oversize bows crowning either shoulder. For Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo, it was a gilded-brass Schiaparelli necklace sculpted into a pair of trompe l’oeil lungs (immortalized by Bella Hadid at Cannes). For Rebecca Vanyo, it was a black Giambattista Valli minidress wrapped in seafoam-green duchesse satin and embroidered with three-dimensional floral appliqués. And for a growing number of couture collectors, that introductory purchase is arriving earlier than ever.
Today’s clients aren’t just heiresses and socialites—such as the archetypal ladies who lunched Nan Kempner and Lynn Wyatt—they’re young tech founders, wealthy aesthetes, and archivists. Some treat couture as performance; others, as preservation. But what unites them is a desire to own something no algorithm can replicate.
Together, this new guard signals a shift in couture’s center of gravity. They aren’t buying couture to disappear into “society”—they’re using it to write themselves into it. No longer the uniform of discreet wealth, couture is becoming something closer to a self-mythology set in tulle, boning, and bias cuts.
“Previously, wearing couture signaled, ‘I belong.’ Today, at least for me, it makes the statement ‘I author,’” says Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo, a tech investor. “Clothing can be a kind of soft architecture—stories that you can step inside—and I came to see haute couture as a beautiful tool for authorship, both to yourself and to the world.”
Kuo won the award for Most Creative Mask at this year’s Save Venice ball for her couture Rahul Mishra masquerade look, featuring a bejeweled headpiece of two faces bookending her own, inspired by Lord Brahma, of Hindu mythology. “I’ve noticed a general trend of more women who can afford to care less what other people think, and as a result can take more risks in their outfit choices. I’ve also noticed women who, instead of aligning their identities to particular brands or jewelers … can be more fun and playful and experimental.”
In contrast, couture client Rebecca Vanyo—who, coincidentally, also won a prize at Save Venice, for her custom pink crystal headdress in 2023—takes a markedly different approach. “I don’t really like to change the design. I really, if I can, like to keep it exactly as it’s seen on the runway because I collect. And I’m archiving everything.... I’m kind of a stickler for that.”
Vanyo, who began collecting in 2014, the year she married securities litigator Bruce Vanyo, maintains her closet to museum-quality standards, with climate control, acid-free tissue, and garment lifts. It’s the same preservation protocols used by museums. “It’s not even kept in my home,” she says. “The main goal is to preserve this so other people can appreciate it.”
For Robertsson, the creative director of the Swedish hair-care company Björn Axén and one of a rare handful of male clients, haute couture is less a shrine than a stage. “To me, couture is all about fantasy, craftsmanship, creativity, and escapism,” he says. “But there are still clients and friends of mine who are very discreet about it and just buy beautiful clothes that just happen to be haute couture, because they can afford it and know what they want and enjoy collecting for themselves.”
Robertsson’s view is echoed (though with more guarded phrasing) by a couture client who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s very ‘We don’t talk about fight club.’ I will admit that,” she says. “Even if it’s a younger clientele, there’s always going to be an emphasis on privacy. It’s still considered gauche to be shouting about it.... That’s what makes it so fascinating: it’s so opaque within, it becomes even more impenetrable from the outside.”
That opacity extends to pricing, which remains one of couture’s most closely guarded secrets. “No one wants to talk about what they’re spending,” she adds. And even the maisons themselves can be cagey. “I’ll ask, ‘So is it this much?’ And they’ll say, ‘Well … kind of. It depends.’”
According to one industry insider, Dior usually tops the price scale, with Chanel and Valentino following close behind. Armani Privé is slightly gentler: a couture blouse tends to run in the $10,000 to $20,000 range, and trousers between $15,000 and $20,000. At the other end of the spectrum, beaded gowns can fetch “in the low 200s” and climb to a half-million. That level of investment is part of why couture remains so private.
“It’s a tough balance,” says Nolan Meader, an image consultant who works with up to four couture clients per season. “A lot of people don’t want others to know what they’re spending. Or, in some cases, that they even have the ability to spend that way.” And he’s observed the same generational shift others have.
“Couture has gotten younger in the sense that I think a lot of clients are in their 30s and 40s now. And I think that’s part of why couture in some ways has gotten less stiff. People are having more fun with it. They’re buying more whimsical pieces. Whereas they may have bought a beautiful Chanel couture jacket in a more traditional black or navy, now they’re doing it in a pink or a white.”
Whether clients treat it as playacting or preservation, performance or private club, haute couture isn’t aging out—it’s growing with a new generation.
Chloe Russell Kent is a journalist and documentarian. She can be found on Instagram and TikTok and is known for her original series, 80s Excess and Paper Trail
