Couture is perhaps best described as ready-to-wear fashion’s glamorous, wealthy and slightly difficult aunt — the one who only ever travels in cabs, eats out six nights a week and doesn’t do stairs. It’s clothing for people who look at luxury department stores the way most of us look at upmarket supermarkets. The industry’s most important dates are the biannual couture weeks in Paris. Taking place over five days (compared to Paris Fashion Week’s eight), they occupy a very different space from the cut and thrust world of ready-to-wear. It is slower, more considered, and quite often more expensive. It’s well known that the landscape of fashion is rapidly being reconstructed by social media, growing calls for inclusivity, high-profile changes at influential magazines and iconoclastic brands like Vetements opting to show outside of