"Behind the scenes at every great couture house -- from Chanel, Valentino, Dior, and Givenchy to Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, and Jean Paul Gaultier -- is a skilled team of artisans who turn fashion dreams into reality. This exquisitely illustrated book provides a privileged tour of couture's backstage, inhabited, to be sure, by exceptional designers but also by lace makers, weavers, textile designers, pleaters, jewelers, fan makers, leather makers, embroiderers, passementerie makers, feather workers, and many other specialized craftspeople. With painstaking attention to detail and exceptional workmanship, they can create everything a designer can imagine. Remarkably, this is an unchanged world of small, family-owned workshops, and the trades these artisans practice are ancient; not only do they keep alive the techniques and expertise that might otherwise have disappeared forever but they also have evolved with the times. Weavers still use looms, but the ones found in contemporary ateliers are high-speed precision machines, guided by proprietary software. Hélène Farnault, France's leading authority on haute couture crafts, elucidates the rarefied hierarchies and mysteries of these extraordinary artisans. Close-up photographs of the ateliers and fashion shows, specially commissioned for this volume, allow readers to follow the progress of work from sketchbook designs to the finished creations on the runway." -- Publisher's description.