Earlier, in 1945, Diana Vreeland had implored an assistant to bring back a fabric rose from Paris, as post-diluvian proof that couture had survived World War II. And again in 1973, when Vreeland mounted her elegiac Balenciaga retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time’s diagnosticians determined that haute couture, a moribund institution, was “breathing very hard.” Now, with the revered maison of Lacroix having filed for bankruptcy protection, the death knell is being sounded once again. “Personally,” says Hubert de Givenchy, “I do not see a future for haute couture as I knew it. Haute couture means for me perfection.”

But perhaps the reports of haute couture’s demise are once again greatly exaggerated. At the end of January, reversing the direction of the plummeting stock market, the two grandest fashion houses in Paris, Chanel and Dior, were posting sales increases of 20 and 35 percent, respectively. Even as a mass was held to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Yves Saint Laurent’s passing (the official end of fashion, according to his partner, Pierre Bergé), a new name, Alexandre Matthieu, burst onto the lineup for the fall-winter haute couture shows. “Haute couture is still the best way for a designer to get noticed,” argues a Paris insider. “If you show during ready-to-wear, you’re one among a hundred, crowded into a nine-day week. During the couture shows, you are one among only 20, spread over just three days.”

What is this Persephone-like phenomenon called haute couture, which cyclically dies only to be reborn? “According to the bylaws of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, a division of the French Ministry of Industry, an haute couturier is a designer who presides over the creation of hand-finished made-to-order clothing, in a “laboratory” that employs at least 20 workers in Paris. The haute couturier must present a minimum of 25 ensembles twice a year, in January and July, and construct a garment over the course of several fittings, directly on a client’s body or on a dress form replicating her physique”. (Hubert de Givenchy, for example, had a dummy built for Audrey Hepburn, whose 31½-22-31½ shape never varied.) From a peak of 200 before World War II, only 11 authentic haute couturiers remain; additionally, there are four correspondent members. (Giorgio Armani joined as one in 2004.) Just two Americans have ever been classified as haute couturiers—Mainbocher (retired 1971) and Ralph Rucci, who was accepted as a guest member in 2002. (After five years and 10 collections, a guest may advance to full membership.) “If someone is simply a couturier,” explains a Parisian expert, “all that means is that you are sewing.” And, the Parisian adds, if a dressmaker uses the term “haute couturier” without the Chambre Syndicale’s sanction, “he can be arrested.”

The origins of haute couture—an appellation contrôlée, or trademarked name, like “champagne,” and “equally a part of our DNA,” says one French fashion professional—date back to Louis XIV, whose finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert established France in the 1660s as the leading manufacturer of silk and other luxury items.

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