Chanel Haute Couture spring/summer 2014: Dynamic modernism and exquisite examples of handcraft However, the couture shows are great advertising tools, fuelling mass-market desire for "entry level" goods, like make-up, perfume, and indeed sunglasses, hence, they still make economic sense. However, the label "haute couture" means something. It means a rarefied form of fashion, entirely made by hand, which allows designers to utilise techniques unimaginable elsewhere. Nowhere else in fashion can hundreds - even thousands - of hours be spent creating a single garment. It's important because it keeps specialist crafts alive. It's a direct link to the 18th and 19th centuries. It's like owning a piece of history - hence the price-point, which can approaches that of a Chippendale chair or a minor work by a major artist. The clothes at Chanel's spring/summer 2014 couture show were exquisite examples of haute couture handcraft, encrusted with microscopic sequins, hand-embroidered flowers, degrading into ostrich feathers, glimmering with iridescence. Chanel champions those artisan-forms: the house has bought a number of specialist workshops, including the embroidery house Lesage and feather specialists Lemarié, to ensure their survival into the twenty-first century. Their work is essential to the magical impossibility of haute couture, the sort of clothes you have to bury your head into to fully comprehend. There was also a touch of the dynamic modernism - the sporty spice - that's been infecting this season's couture shows. Karl Lagerfeld is a master at that kind of gesture. He chose to send every one of his models bounding down a staircase in haute couture trainers, their pastel hues perfectly matching their gowns. A few came paired with legging-slender trousers, or even haute couture kneepads, like chic rollerblade enthusiasts. And everywhere, in everything, there was a sense of ethereal lightness. Nothing looked heavy, stiff, or difficult to wear. That was energising. Yet as the models took their turns in the vast auditorium for the cameras - and incidentally, for the audience, ranked along the perimeter so they didn't spoilt the shot - you couldn't help but feel frustrated by the distance between your human eye and these clothes so intimately born of the human hand.