Paris is a grand place for the style-conscious any time of year.

During the triannual fashion weeks, it is simply the most invigorating fashion place on the planet, where the top designers reveal - for the first time - what the world will be wearing four months hence.

Sandwiched in between the spring and autumn shows, is the midsummer haute couture extravaganza, where the designers really let their imaginations rip.

Everyone is familiar with images from this orgy of fashion excess.

Newspapers love to run photos of models wearing the most outlandish of outfits with the rhetorical question: Who on earth would wear this daft stuff? Not many do, of course, in the real world.

But the point of the shows is to demonstrate just how far the designer's mind can run when freed of High Street considerations - in other words, without the need to wonder if wearer's butt will look big, or not, in this.

The most elaborate of all came during the golden days of now-disgraced Dior creative head, John Galliano. He brought a touch of British irony to the all-so-serious French approach.

At least it is assumed that dry humor and whimsy were at play when the designer dressed models in mediaeval armor draped with garden hedges and personally bounded down the catwalk at the end of the show dressed (variously) as a spaceman, a cowboy and the hard hat-wearing construction worker from the Village People.

Haute couture shows such as those cost amounts that would seem insane to people outside the industry: The entire budget for a half-hour show is measured in hundreds and thousands of US dollars.

From a marketing perspective, though, the outlay is vindicated by the volume of words generated. People may well chuckle at the outrageous clothes, but they remember the fashion-house names, albeit subliminally.

Such shows are only open to the very elite of the fashion world and even tickets to the lesser-known designers' shows during regular fashion weeks are difficult to come by.

Those who use contacts to snag a seat are rarely disappointed: Even if the clothes are ordinary, the entire theatrical spectacle of ravishingly pretty girls, loud rock music and dazzling spotlights is an experience to savor.

The bigger fashion names regularly snag plum venues that are usually off limits to commercial events, gaining permission to erect their catwalks and accompanying caboodle in museums, art galleries and mansions.

(China Daily 06/29/2014 page10)