Suspend your disbelief, take a deep breath, and dive into the extraordinary world of Paris haute couture fashion week … Because there’s nothing else quite like it. By Jess Cartner-Morley

In pictures: Haute couture, the greatest show on earth

On Tuesday afternoon I waited for the best part of an hour for a 10-minute catwalk show comprising of 24 dresses, none of which in all probability will ever be available for sale. This was the Christian Lacroix show, and neither I nor the other 279 people in the audience would have dreamed of missing it. This, the new collection from a designer whose 22-year-old company has never made a profit and is now on the verge of bankruptcy, was the hot ticket of the week, despite the fact that if no buyer appears to rescue the company, the atelier where these clothes are produced will be shuttered and locked before these dresses get a chance to go into production.

What Paris haute couture week lacks in logic, however, it makes up for in poetry. The dresses at Lacroix were dark and elegant and grand, in the kind of fabrics you seldom come across in the real world: guipure lace, swiss muslin, silk taffeta. Midway through the show, the gathering clouds let rip and the slender glass windows of the Museum of Decorative Arts rattled in the driving rain: appropriately theatrical, battlefield weather for Lacroix’s last stance.

One of the details that distinguishes haute couture from other clothes is that these are clothes designed and perfected from every angle. The front view is only one element of the look: the side profile will have been tweaked to dramatic perfection, and the back view is often a work of art in its own right. At Lacroix, a midnight blue crepe dress was caught with a creamy silk bow at the base of the spine, while an evening gown was suspended by a single fragment of the lightest black lace stretched from one clavicle and over the shoulder bone. It was as if Lacroix was as focused on exits as entrances: which, seeing as how this could be his label’s last show, would be understandable.

The trouble with haute couture is that pictures don’t really tell the story at all. Trying to convey the full experience of haute couture via a photograph in a newspaper is like trying to capture the taste sensations of a meal by Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adrià in a flavour of potato crisps. Watching it live is a full-on sensory experience: the angles, the ideas, the references, the colours, the texture of each outfit, not to mention the choreographed body language and painstaking hair and makeup of the models, or the ambience of the setting, every detail of which will have been meticulously planned, from the celebrities who have been invited to ornament the front row to the colour of the napkins handed out with the after-show canapes.

Now more than ever, attending haute couture requires a certain suspension of disbelief. To appreciate couture you have to leave your head-screwed-on, oh-for-goodness-sake-surely-no-one-buys-this-stuff attitude at the door and dive right in. Some people like to take deep lungfuls of air when they are by the sea, or in the mountains, in order to draw deeply on the good stuff: I do the same in Paris couture ateliers. I calculate that every lungful contains at least a tenner’s worth of Diptyque room fragrance, so I try to make the most of it, in the hope I will still have figuier or tuberose in my nostrils when I get off the Eurostar and back on the tube.

There are still people who have pots of money and the desire to spend it in ridiculous ways. If you doubt me, ask Nicolas Ouchenir, a calligrapher who is employed by designers including Miuccia Prada and Karl Lagerfeld to write the work-of-art, handwritten invitations that are a calling card of couture. He told Womenswear Daily this week that as well as fashion designers, his clients include wealthy Russians who pay him to transcribe love letters to their sweethearts, sometimes in ink laced with real gold.

But haute couture is in very real trouble, caught in a tug-of-war, between Paris and the rest of the world. There is a very real need to build a relationship with clients in emerging markets. The Russian and Middle Eastern clients who were a front-row novelty just a few years ago are now the old-timers; China, Brazil, Turkey, even Ukraine and Kazakhstan are where orders are coming from now. To seduce these customers, they need to be made to feel comfortable with what they are watching. Yet the value of couture is in its very Frenchness: every other city in the world has a fashion week, but only Paris has a week devoted to haute couture. That hoity-toity Parisian attitude is precisely what gives added value to the labels on the couture roster, and they tinker with it at their peril.

The dilemma can be seen in the contrast between the Chanel and Dior shows this week. At Chanel, Lagerfeld’s new look centred around long, column-shaped skirts and dresses slit at either side. It was reminiscent of the Chinese cheongsam shape – and, as such, may well succeed in grabbing the attention of the Chinese clients whom Chanel and Dior are currently battling to seduce. But on the Paris catwalk, the clothes looked a little tricksy, although the evening was staged with aplomb – an evening show in the Grand Palais, which merged seamlessly into a glamorous after-show soiree.

Dior took the polar opposite route, moving its show from the hangar-like, out-of-town venues it has favoured in recent seasons back into the iconic dove-grey rooms of Dior’s Avenue Montaigne headquarters. The setting, the clothes and the styling conspired to turn back the clock half a century to when Dior clients gathered in these very rooms to view classics such as the Bar peplum jacket and wasp-waisted suits, pieces that were revived this week. The makeup at a Dior show is always a work of art in its own right, and this season it conjured up memories of 1950s beauties. Dotted black net veils over the face recalled Irving Penn’s famous 1951 Vogue cover, in which the model’s face is closely wrapped in a black fishnet veil; the strong eyebrows and pale complexions artfully powdered and sculpted suggested Richard Avedon and the regal, arch allure of his 1955 portrait Dovima with Elephants.

The giant perfume bottles that dominated the Chanel catwalk made another important point about haute couture, which is that despite the tiny scale on which the actual dresses are produced, the economics only make sense on a giant scale. Couture is “a powerful tool to educate the customer about our brand”, as Chanel’s president of fashion, Bruno Pavlovsky, put it recently. The concept of a brand having a “DNA” has taken over from a colour being “the new black” as the fashion cliche of our time, and there is a very real danger of the creativity of couture being strangled by the obsession with bludgeoning home brand values. Death by brand-building: what a very 21st century way for couture to go.

The spirit of couture lives on, if nowhere else, in the studio of designer Bruno Frisoni, who twice a year creates a range of couture bags and shoes for the venerable Roger Vivier label and presents them in his gorgeous, pink-walled studio above the Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Here, this week, he showed me his treasures for autumn: a clutch bag with one side in gold vermeil, modelled on a turtle shell, and the other in gold-painted crocodile, soft as the underside of a turtle; and a chainmail bag encrusted with jet dragonflies and the softest feathers, which he likened to “the magical remains of a mermaid”. Moments after I had laid my coffee cup on Frisoni’s table, Inès de la Fressange, his full-time muse – I told you, this place is very, very couture – discreetly picked up a stray teaspoon and replaced it on the saucer, apparently bothered by the asymmetry. Moments later, I spotted Frisoni absentmindedly rubbing at an entirely invisible mark on a white leather chair. After all, as Pavlovsky of Chanel said recently, “in couture, the objective is to be perfect”.

On my way home, as I got off the train at St Pancras, I fell into step behind a petite lady in harem pants and gladiator sandals. I wouldn’t have looked twice, except it was nearly dark and she was wearing sunglasses. It was Kylie, who had changed out of the curvy black lace skirt she had been wearing at Jean Paul Gaultier earlier that day. Families and businessmen jostled past her on the platform, and in the evening rush, no one noticed a pop princess. Haute couture was over, and it was back to reality, even for Kylie.