WHY COUTURE CLIENTS KEEP BUYING SIX-FIGURE GOWNS

“Nobody really needs couture, to be honest,” said Demna after his Balenciaga haute couture show this week in Paris. No, most people do not need a bespoke gown that costs six figures and takes highly trained petites mains thousands of hours to make by hand. And yet.

Partaking in the official haute couture fashion week in Paris—which is rife with arcane rules about how the clothes are made—can pay off handsomely for the few designers left in the club. For the 15 or so brands that invest in the game, including Dior and Chanel, couture can multiply press and red-carpet opportunities, and have a trickle-down effect on sales of ready-to-wear and beauty and fragrance.

Then there are the orders, which can total in the millions for a single client. Wealthy couture diehards fly in for the shows and then quickly convene in cosseted showrooms to make their selections while munching macarons. Competition can be fierce, especially when a stylist nabs a gown early on for, say, Cardi B. When you’re paying this much to look unique, no one wants a duplicate.

Couture is famously over-the-top, and this season was no exception, with rampant feathered capes, obscuring hoods and trailing trains. But philanthropist, creative director and avid couture client Fredrik Robertsson told me he found the looks very wearable this season: “less PR showstoppers and more things people actually want.” He pointed to the calmer suits and cocktail dresses at Schiaparelli, which has in the past paraded out looks such as one bearing a faux lion’s head .

Couture can sag somewhat under the weight of its history. Craftsmanship, fashion’s favourite buzzword, can be a burden too, with designers feeling the need to embellish every gown with hand-embroidered butterflies and panoplies of pearls. But the following five looks show how a range of designers are making couture relevant today.

Balenciaga’s Sculptural Chaos

Demna, who goes by a mononym, is perhaps the contemporary designer most intent on bringing couture into the future. While he’s never far from Cristóbal Balenciaga’s archive—with its dramatic shapes and volumes—he’s also a student of streetwear. So the subcultures he reveres, from goth to skate kids, were present in his deceptively casual designs. Would the founder of the house turn in his grave at metal-band T-shirts masquerading as couture? Maybe not once he realised they were in fact hand-painted over a period of several days.

This top and skirt ensemble is made from unstitched cotton-jersey elements, which are then assembled and sewn together, and knotted on the model. It is a wearable sculpture, with the casual look of a pile of T-shirts.

Chanel’s Sublime Sweatsuit

Chanel, which is between creative directors after the departure of Virginie Viard, showed its haute couture collection at the Opéra Garnier. While many of the looks echoed the vibe of the classic theatre—including a sumptuous pink silk opera coat—some of the most successful moments were surprisingly dressed down. Robertsson, the Swedish couture client, exclaimed, “Chanel even had sweatpants!”

Shown on model-du-jour Amelia Gray Hamlin, the black Chanel sweatsuit was not technically a sweatsuit. It was a wool crepe jersey set trimmed in duchesse satin ruffles and organza. It was also shown in cream, and it will sell.

Dior’s Deceptively Simple Column

Maria Grazia Chiuri, one of the only female designers making couture, showed an elegantly restrained collection in a room filled with shimmering artwork by Faith Ringgold, who died earlier this year. Nodding to an Olympic year without being too heavy-handed, Chiuri presented Grecian-inspired draped dresses, flat lace-up sandals, and sporty tanks and bodysuits.

This long asymmetrical dress in cream-coloured silk jersey over a tank top is almost sporty, and a refreshing break from some of the more hobbling ensembles on display this past week. But that’s no ordinary tank top: It’s embroidered with silver-coloured micro-tube beads that have hematite-clawed jewels on them.

Schiaparelli’s Faux Feathers

Daniel Roseberry, the charming Texan who’s revamped a dusty Parisian couture house, is a true believer in the art of couture. But he’s also savvy about its press potential, so this season, the show didn’t start until paparazzi magnets Kylie Jenner and Doja Cat had arrived.

The house’s founder, Elsa Schiaparelli, was a surrealist innovator who collaborated with her friend Salvador Dalí on one of the first trompe l’oeil garments . Roseberry continues his predecessor’s taste for trickery in his work. This jacket is embroidered all over with what appear to be small white feathers, but are in fact 10,500 silk-organza snippets. Because each “feather” is handmade, the jacket takes over 7,000 hours of work to create. Worn over a pair of smart black cropped pants, it’s almost work appropriate.

Jean Paul Gaultier’s Undressed Dress

Jean Paul Gaultier, which maintains a healthy and bustling couture business, has adopted the clever strategy of inviting buzzy non-couture designers to collaborate on its collections. Simone Rocha, Glenn Martens, Olivier Rousteing and Chitose Abe of Sacai have all worked it out on the remix with Gaultier. Nicolas Di Felice, the artistic director behind Courrèges’s Pinault-backed renaissance, was up this season.

Di Felice, whose friends span Paris’s creative industries, brought his cool-kid approach to Gaultier. Many pieces featured couture details like rows of hook-and-eye closures, and partially hidden tulle corsets. But there were Di Felice signatures, too: koala-pouch front pockets, narrow trousers, tiny party dresses. This cheeky gown is carefully constructed to look like the top slip is falling away to reveal a bustier.

Wall Street’s hottest trade has gone ice cold.

For years, it paid off to buy stocks that were rising in price—and bet against struggling shares. The momentum trade was especially profitable this year, as investors piled into hot stocks including Micron Technology, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and other artificial-intelligence darlings while wagering against those likely to be hurt by the embrace of AI.

The S&P 500 Momentum Index soared 44% in the second quarter, its best quarterly performance on record, and it surged 133% over the past five years, nearly double the broad market’s performance.

Mega funds and rookie investors alike piled into the trade, some using leverage and options contracts in an effort to amplify their returns, propelling the underlying shares higher.

“It is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Matthew Tym, managing director at Cantor Fitzgerald, of the trade.

Suddenly, the trade is a loser. The momentum index has tumbled more than 9% since July 1, lagging behind the S&P 500’s 2.8% gain. The index—which tracks stocks in the S&P 500 based on a “momentum score”—is on track for the biggest quarterly underperformance in 25 years. July was the second-worst month for the momentum trade in around 40 years, according to Bank of America estimates; the only month worse was April 2009, in the teeth of the global financial crisis.

Hedge funds that bought momentum shares while shorting low-momentum stocks suffered even more. At the same time, a basket of the most popular stocks held by hedge funds tracked by Goldman Sachs recorded its biggest one-month underperformance in July relative to the S&P 500 in more than 20 years, according to the bank’s analysts.

Momentum trading is based on a rather simple observation: Investments that go up tend to keep outperforming; those that underperform often remain laggards. This kind of trading might seem too simple a stock-picking strategy to work. Yet it often has.

“For decades, it didn’t take a lot of sophistication to run a momentum strategy and make a decent living at it,” says Agustin Lebron, senior researcher at EquiLibre, a trading firm.

Part of the reason: It takes a while for corporate and other information to spread to various investors, so they slowly build positions, producing buying momentum.

“A huge pension fund can’t flip around its positions in a day,” says Lebron. “Behavioral biases also account for some of the effect, as well—people tend to sell their winners too early and hold losers too long.”

Fans of the strategy point to the human tendency to extrapolate from past results—and chase investment returns—noting that momentum patterns have been evident in markets for decades, even centuries. They also say that some of the worst months for momentum strategies are during longer periods of outperformance.

Some have been doing the trade by buying the strongest investments in a sector while shorting the weakest; others lean in to rising markets or asset classes. Still others use a quantitative approach or turn to banks or others who sell ways to make distinct wagers on momentum as a “tradable factor” or a “thematic basket.”

The fans remain believers. “Any strategy has disappointing periods,” says Antti Ilmanen, global co-head of the portfolio solutions group at AQR Capital Management.

The surge in Moderna and other biotech stocks helped crush the momentum trade. These shares were among the most heavily shorted in recent years, but positive news on a cancer vaccine from Moderna and Merck sent those stocks flying, crushing some quant and other hedge funds. Moderna is up around 150% so far this month.

These traders had an especially rough day on Aug. 19, which Goldman Sachs told its clients was the worst day for “systematic long-short managers” in more than two years. About half of the losses were because of momentum trades, the bank said.

Some traders have begun to short, or bet against, the very stocks that propelled the momentum trade earlier this year. Net short positions in futures tied to the Nasdaq-100 index among speculators recently climbed to some of the highest levels of the past two decades, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The about-face is a sign of how markets have become more treacherous for investors, even as indexes keep climbing. Part of the issue: the recent meltdown of Situational Awareness, a hedge fund that had piled into some of the most popular momentum shares, including chip stocks. After a period of market tumult, Nvidia shares rocketed almost 9% after its earnings, showing how quickly sentiment can shift.

Some investors say the run-up in share prices driving tech stocks higher reminds them at times of the dot-com frenzy decades ago.

Mike Ogborne, the founder of San Francisco-based Ogborne Capital Management, said he has grown more cautious on technology stocks and is keeping more of his portfolio in cash than he typically does.

And he is nervous about the surge in spending by technology giants and quarterly capital expenditures that keep rising.

“It is a little bit like Cinderella and the clock striking midnight. You don’t know when midnight is going to come around,” Ogborne said. “They don’t send a memo around telling you when the capex cycle is over.”