Les petites mains can finally rest

It is late Tuesday afternoon, and I am at the Palais de Tokyo, waiting for the Christian Lacroix spring 2007 couture show to begin.

I've been to the European ready-to-wear shows often, but it's my first time at the couture – ground zero of chic – where the most expensive clothes in the world, and some of the women who wear them, come together for three days of exquisite excess.

Even though I am a couture virgin, I know that the suddenly slumped-over woman beside me means something is amiss.

"Madame," I gently tap her arm, clad in a simple ribbed cotton cardigan. "Are you all right?"

"Oh," she pulls herself off me dreamily. "Je suis désolée. I did not sleep at all last night as I was working on the collection."

"You are one of les petites mains?" I marvel, realizing I am seated beside one of the legendary "little hands" who handcraft the couture.

She nods weakly.

Moments later the first outfit emerges and I gasp at a brocade mini-dress worn by Vancouver native Coco Rocha. The dress looks dipped in 24-kt gold. I turn stunned to the exhausted woman beside me, and she smiles in gratitude.

Later, after Lacroix has taken his bow, in a shower of the pink carnations left on each chair for admirers to throw, I thank her.

"Now I will sleep for two days," she sighs, collecting her nondescript parka and a plastic shopping bag that I am guessing contains a toothbrush, perhaps a change of clothes.

The mirrored bolero, gazar poufs and mille feuille collars that took her and her colleagues hundreds of hours to create are now for others to enjoy.

One admirer, a Muscovite in chinchilla hat and cape, sat in front of me under the imposing dome of the Grand Palais at the Chanel show earlier in the day.

Although it was not yet noon, she was swigging from a silver flask. "Vodka?" a colleague inquired playfully. "Cognac," the couture client responded, miming a shiver. Even though she is indoors, swathed in chinchilla and from Moscow, she is apparently chilled.

Elsewhere Victoria Beckham, Rachel McAdams, Sofia Coppola, Kate Bosworth and Rinko Kikuchi are heating up the front row.

The Chanel collection itself is perfect for modern-day Czarinas and Oscar hopefuls with feathered fingerless gloves, a Lagerfeld signature, and a nod to two of his greatest ready-to-wear hits of the '90s – tweed jackets over shiny black tights and fringed "car wash" skirts in metal sequins.

"It's the top of the top," Vogue's André Leon Talley declares in a post-show scrum. "You feel so uplifted when you come to a Chanel show ... exhilarated by the beauty."

And yes, darling, the jackets shown only with black tights can be ordered with skirts.

Talley is holding court on a ballroom-sized white carpet rolled out for the models to wander, white being a trend for the season both in the clothes and the environments they are shown in.

The Valentino show felt like it was held inside a hollowed out eggshell. An intimate room at l'ecole des Beaux Arts was made even more so with a snowy white carpet and sheer white curtain dividers, so that you felt like the parade was just for you and the 40 others in your little enclave. There were starbursts of pleats, pleats pleated into even more pleats, and a satin suit cutout like a paper snowflake.

At Givenchy the youngest couturier in Paris, Riccardo Tisci, bucked the white trend by creating a bleak underwater cavern with water dripping onto a cement floor. As the show progressed, puddles formed, and were smeared by the trains of the models' evening gowns.

Tisci hails from Taranto, a seaport in Italy's Puglia region, and the clothes were a seafaring fantasy Walt Disney himself couldn't fathom.

Silicone coral forms and broken shells were imbedded in pleated tulle. Sailor caps and admiral jackets had cartoon proportions.

And the murky sepia and black palette gave you the feeling you had drifted to the bottom of the sea.
Yesterday afternoon, Jean Paul Gaultier thrilled with a collection that melded motifs from saints and sinners.

Acrylic halos, stained glass patterns, icon prints and stigmata tears mixed with bustiers, siren dresses and backless jackets, some even modelled by burlesque star Dita Von Teese.

The sexy sacred heart dress will be sure to get temperatures rising both inside and outside the Vatican walls.