On Wikidedia:
“Couture is the creation of exclusive custom-fitted clothing. Haute couture is high-end fashion that is constructed by hand from start to finish, made from high-quality, expensive, often unusual fabric and sewn with extreme attention to detail and finished by the most experienced and capable sewers - often using time-consuming, hand-executed techniques...”
In other words, couture in its original idea was something super expensive and thus very few could afford.
In reality of nowadays, we may call couture anything created by artistic vision of an educated professional and executed in a very LIMITED number of exactly same items. There should be NOT more than one piece of the same item in the same size. Handmade details and great attention to quality have to accompany those creations. At the same time it is no longer a requirement for these items to be made from high-quality, expensive fabric. They could be made from anything... LITERALLY! However, there is one very important requirement:
these items MUST be wearable to say the least.
If we talk about couture, or high style fashion, as a work of applied art ready to be exhibited on the art shows – then it could only be one of a kind, absolutely unique, piece produced by an artist. In this case sizing is not an issue. The quality of execution becomes secondary to the idea of that creation. It may or may not be wearable.
And now comes the crazy stuff some ‘artistic’ minds would love to call High Fashion.
Most of the times these items are not wearable. It would require a huge stretch of imagination to call it art. The waste majority of these items’ creators would not be capable of even drawing a single sketch… Yet, this so called ‘couture’ is getting more and more popular every day. The only answer I could come up with is – when the gap between the rich and the poor is getting overwhelmingly huge and impossible to overcome people just start the riot. It might be interesting to look at the sleeve being attached to the buttocks or the collar sitting in the middle of the back… But please, do not call it High FASHION. Cheers everyone!