Couture Shock and The Crisis in French Cooking Summary and Analysis

In "Couture Shock," Gopnik described a number of fashion shows he attended, the first of which was the Valentino show, at which the ladies in the front row suddenly folded over their programs and began fanning themselves in unison. It was the coldest July in Paris that anyone could remember, but the ladies were fanning, because that was what they always do. This season there were sixteen haute couture shows in Paris, with about one thousand outfits that nobody would buy, even the extremely rich ladies. The two explanations Gopnik discovered for this were that the shows were like research and development processes, which affect future buying patterns, and that the shows represented the living memory of vanishing standards of workmanship and imagination. Nobody seemed to mind...