It's official. In December, French fashion's governing body, the Chambre Syndicale, granted Bouchra Jarrar an haute couture appellation. This was an upgrade from her guest-member status and a seriously big deal. She's secured a place in couture's history books, joining the ranks of pre-war women designers like Chanel, Vionnet, Grès, and Schiaparelli. It's been more than thirty years since a woman was named a grande couturière. Thirty!

And so there was good reason for the newfound swagger in her exuberantly embellished jackets and gilets. "J'ai des oiseaux," she said backstage. "I have birds." And she meant it. Jarrar used ivory feathers last season, but here they were packed closely together in natural shades of brown and black or were dyed a gorgeous sapphire blue. There were probably more colors in this show's plumes than in all her previous collections combined. More crystals, too. They encrusted the front, back, and sleeves of a Perfecto, or, more subtly, were tucked among the long "shard" sequins of a bolero jacket, only now and then catching the light. Jarrar was just as attentive to her tailleurs. A devastatingly precise blazer and redingotes (with sleeves and without) were made from custom-dyed handwoven threads. They gleamed.

On the couture runways, glory tends to come from gowns destined for the red carpet, or maybe a royal wedding. Jarrar, a little like Coco Chanel before her, is obsessive about clothes for everyday, unapologetically so. This season, there were military flares and tuxedo trousers that made a persuasive case for pleats. Glittering accolades? Meh. Ask any woman, there are few things more glorious than a great-fitting pair of pants.

BRAND: BOUCHRA JARRAR  |  BOUCHRA JARRAR OFFICIAL WEBSITE

In every couture collection, Ulyana Sergeenko tells a story. This time, it was a reimagining of a ride on the Orient Express. Sergeenko's new heroine not only crossed borders (the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), but also, in a manner of speaking, cross-dressed, borrowing clothes from the men she met on her travels and mixing them with her own more feminine attire. "She could be a movie star," Sergeenko said, "but she’s definitely a femme fatale."

It's the kind of trip that John Galliano would've once taken us on at Dior. He was a virtuoso, and Sergeenko is a couture arriviste, but damned if she isn't determined. The train car set and sound effects…the all-star hair and makeup team of Orlando Pita and Pat McGrath…the tubeteika-inspired hats made by milliner Stephen Jones…and especially the made-in-Russia workmanship of the clothes. At a preview a couple of days before the show, Sergeenko was keen to point out the hand-painted beaded fringe suspended from the back of a silk chemisier gown, or the way the stripes on a sheath weren't a print but rather intarsias of narrow bands of silk. It was impressive stuff in close-up, as were the hand-embroidered cotton buds (a nod to Kazakhstan’s major crop) that decorated many of the looks.

With Raf Simons ensconced at Dior and Karl Lagerfeld putting sneakers on the Chanel catwalk, couture has taken on a more modern tone, and Sergeenko's destination-oriented approach starts to look old-fashioned. That said, she's worked hard to lighten up her constructions since her debut four seasons ago. She's still at the beginning of her couture journey.

BRAND: ULYANA SERGEENKO  |  ULYANA SERGEENKO OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Chanel Miss 6-year-old when my mother passed away, his father even leave her and four other brothers and sisters. Since then, she had aunt dependent adult, a child admitted to convent school (Convent School), and there learned first-hand sewing skills.

In Chanel (CHANEL) Miss, 22-year-old that year (1905), she became a cafe singer and played a stage name "Coco", in different music clubs and cafes sing-song living. During this showgirl career, Coco Chanel (Coco Chanel) has to meet two old customers and become their lover, a British industrialist, the other a wealthy officer. To meet dignitaries, so that Coco Chanel (Coco Chanel) have the economic ability to open their own shop.

BRAND: CHANEL  |  CHANEL OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Picture Grace Jones in one of her iconic hoods. That's what Donatella Versace did as she was designing her new Atelier Versace collection. "She left a sign as a strong, powerful woman, a power goddess," Versace said of Jones before the show. "I wanted to embody that." Versace set about her glam salute by combining the body-con silhouettes that are essential to the house DNA with more fluid draping.

Fashion is trending toward easier, more relaxed silhouettes at the moment, and Donatella may be keying into that, but if her designs here were liberated, they were fierce in a way that will be familiar to the label's followers. Take the opening tailleur. The skirt was draped black silk jersey studded with a grid of Swarovski crystals, but the jacket was as structured as a suit of armor, its rhinestone-embroidered hood conjuring Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc as much as it did Jones.

As it happens, Azzedine Alaïa, the man who first put Jones in a hooded dress, was watching in the audience tonight. But this collection was all Donatella, with the anatomical seaming on cocktail dresses picked out in stone and outlined in tiny metal chains, and geometric back cutouts flanking a lacing detail that ran up the spine. Graphic tattoo motifs were stitched in crystals onto the sheer tulle of a top worn with a very un-Versace voluminous ball skirt. "Tattoos are a new form of art, a less elitist one that everybody knows," said Donatella of the impulse. Other embellishments were more understated, or if not understated, at least more personal. Donatella certainly relished pointing out the cropped black Perfecto that closed the show. Made from tiny pieces of leather sewn onto georgette, the jacket weighed next to nothing, a feat only a couture atelier could pull off. It was the signal achievement of the collection, and there were certain elements in the crowd that would've liked to see more along those lines.

In the end, though, it will be the flash and bang of slinky red-carpet numbers in acid green, orange, and purple, their corset waists embroidered in glass beads, with bare legs flashing, that will provide the collection's most-tweeted images.

BRAND: ATELIER VERSACE  |  ATELIER VERSACE OFFICIAL WEBSITE

In Paris, Schiaparelli - known as "Schiap" to her friends - began making her own clothes. With some encouragement from Paul Poiret, she started her own business but it closed in 1926 despite favourable reviews. She launched a new collection of knitwear in early 1927 using a special double layered stitch created by Armenian refugees and featuring sweaters with surrealist trompe l'oeil images. Although her first designs appeared in Vogue, the business really took off with a pattern that gave the impression of a scarf wrapped around the wearer's neck. The "pour le Sport" collection expanded the following year to include bathing suits, ski-wear, and linen dresses. The divided skirt, a forerunner of shorts, shocked the tennis world when worn by Lili de Alvarez at Wimbledon in 1931. She added evening wear to the collection in 1931, using the luxury silks of Robert Perrier, and the business went from strength to strength, culminating in a move from Rue de la Paix to acquiring the renowned salon of Madeleine Chéruit at 21 Place Vendôme, nicknamed the Schiap Shop.

BRAND: SCHIAPARELLI  |  SCHIAPARELLI OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Raf Simons has always been mesmerized by closed, secret worlds. At his own label, it was the youth tribes who coalesce around certain types of music. Since he started designing womens wear, other doors have opened for him. The beauty parlor/spa scenario of his Spring 2012 collection for Jil Sander was the most obvious expression of his wonderment at the world of women and the closed societies they create for themselves. Then came the job at Dior, and, with it, the opportunity to truly decipher the codes of haute couture and its sorority of female artisans: These are clothes that women make, by hand, for other women.

Simons is like a kid in a candy store with couture. Its combination of technique and psychology could have been tailor-made to satisfy his obsessions. So the first thing that struck one about today's show was the lightness, not only in the openness and airiness of the clothes themselves, but also in an attitude that reflected the designer's oft-stated desire to modernize couture. And if that boiled down to something as straightforward as pairing a couture dress with flower-strewn trainers (Simons painted a picture of a woman leaving the red carpet, plucking her shoes out of her bag, and spending the rest of the night in a club), then so be it. "Dior loved movement in his clothes," said Simons, "and I was wondering what would have happened if he'd been in business twenty or thirty years longer, when the sixties happened, when there was a literal movement in society." Wonder no more…the collection that Simons showed today had the free spirit that you imagined he imagined Dior would have brought to couture.

The key to the code was the cutwork. Outfit after outfit was slashed or winkled open to form a lattice that veiled the female form below. Then there were actual overlays, and veils of sheer silk covering polka-dot sheaths. Everything shook or shimmied: "It's not about stillness, not about the couture pose," said Simons. It was also quite sexual, as concealment infused with the peekaboo promise of revelation often is. The sole jewelry was a tiny chain that wrapped the neck and the fingers in a tiny bow. It was another way for Simons to communicate the charged intimacy of couture.

The show was a celebration of the hand—with the clothes, obviously, but also with a set that had been laboriously hand-plastered in swooping curves and columns, a bit like Bedrock carved out of lard. The result was an all-white, womblike space, inspired by the work of Valentine Schlegel, a little-known ceramist from the fifties who graduated to making "architectural suggestions" with biomorphic plaster jobs. To Simons, the interior represented "a radical, female gesture." That choice of words alone in the context of couture underscores how this man is the standard-bearer of a transformative sensibility.

And the fact that he is able to imbue his mission with the sweetness and light we saw in today’s presentation makes it that more remarkable. For all the lip service that designers pay women, Simons is one who is truly dedicated to respect and celebration. A jacquard top (intended to convey the ease of a T-shirt) featured a graphic that wasn't quite clear from the audience. "It's a woman, on top of the world," the designer explained.

BRAND: CHRISTIAN DIOR  |  CHRISTIAN DIOR OFFICIAL WEBSITE