Paris haute couture represents fashion at its most extravagantly romantic; and nothing seems to have dampened its spirits - neither grey skies nor dark economic forecasts. Indeed, even as I dodged rain-showers and puddles between shows in the latter days of January, I was reminded of Kay Thompson singing 'Think pink!' in Funny Face , a 1957 musical as effervescent as this year's spring collections.
At Chanel Karl Lagerfeld showed rose-petal chiffon dresses and bouclé tweed suits so exquisite that they might have been spun out of sugar, on models wearing flat black satin slippers that let them move with the ease of a young Audrey Hepburn. John Galliano also produced flurries of pink at Christian Dior - rippling from dark to light in layers of tulle and clouds of marabou feathers (a homage both to the founder of the couture house, and to René Gruau, an illustrator whose work in the late 1940s and 1950s was an intrinsic element of Dior's iconography). Christian Dior himself described pink 'as the sweetest of all colours', advising that 'every woman should have something pink in her wardrobe. It is the colour of happiness…'
The alternative, perhaps, is to think of pink as shocking, rather than sweet; like Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian couturier whose surrealist designs in 1930s Paris served as an antidote to the Depression. Bettina Ballard, a Vogue fashion editor who worked in France until the outbreak of the Second World War (when she gave up shocking pink to don a Red Cross uniform), described Schiaparelli's 'hard elegance' as 'a highly individual chic [that] stands out like a beacon… making the rest of the couture look pretty and characterless'.
Schiaparelli's business struggled in the postwar period, outshone by the advent of Dior and the return of Chanel, then finally closing in 1954. But her granddaughter, the actress and model Marisa Berenson, was resplendent in the front row of the Dior couture show last month… in black, like almost everyone else.