You journalists?" asked the private customer next to me at Elie Saab's couture show in Paris last month. I confessed, then asked her what she did, as I eyed her full-length chinchilla duffel coat. "I am princess," she replied. "I do nothing." And that sort of sums up what couture is about. Born Lebanese, living in Greece, she told me that she normally bought at least three items from Saab, two or three from Chanel and several from Dior. Every season, probably at the cost per designer of a spacious house in Cornwall. And this season, she was also on the lookout for a wedding dress for her daughter. It had to be couture and "very exceptional".
Couture is booming, with private customers doubling or even, in some houses (Dior, it is rumoured), trebling sales. Nobody in this self-indulgent world has any qualms about ordering clothes with prices starting at £20,000 - indeed, it would seem that many are paying much more.
And what are they getting for their money? Well, rather a mixed bag, taste-wise. Most couture customers favour the splash-and-flash school of dressing, choosing clothes with a heavy decorative overload, rather than the svelte purity of line that used to characterise this elegant French art.
But on the catwalks, at least, the dream remains, in exquisitely crafted clothes in fabulous fabrics, many of which have had literally hundreds of painstaking hours of hand-sewing, embroidery and beading lavished on them - and nowhere more lavishly than at Dior. The inspiration for John Galliano's collection was Sargent's notorious portrait of Madame X (considered the first overtly sexual society painting). Using rich purple, lime and yellow silks and satins, Galliano took his shapes from Christian Dior's work of the 1950s, when he was in his prime, and reworked them for today. With shapes kinder to the older figure, this was a real selling collection, which had back-to-back private customer appointments booked for at least the next 10 days.
There was the same frenzy at Chanel. The show was refined, elegant and understated, with clothes brilliantly judged to make the average older customer - Chanel's tactful shapes have always attracted many - feel young, slim and elegant. Soft, dreamy colours and traditional cut were shown with flat pumps - a great visual escape from the hideously heavy shoes that were the one false move at Dior.
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It was back to decorative excess at Christian Lacroix, a label where many of the big-statement dresses look like the results of a fight in a haberdashery. But not this time. It takes great skill to use up to six different patterns and even more colours in one dress and make it work. But in this collection, Lacroix triumphed. It brought together all the creative links that have made his career so exciting. This is a couture label that is finally putting serious money in the bank for its American backers.
Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy is trying hard to do in couture what many would call the unthinkable - to make it not just modern, but cool. And, to a degree, he succeeded, with a collection that played with layers and levels. Exaggerated scale was part of some complex engineering, such as a bolero jacket made of Elizabethan ruffles (a collector's piece). Add double collars and wavy-hemmed skater skirts and, yes, it is possible to see these clothes on shoulders not yet bowed with age.
This is the problem with couture. It is too expensive for most women, as brilliantly articulated by Joan Rivers when she asked a designer if he ever wished that, just occasionally, he could create a fabulous dress that might be affordable by a woman still "enjoying a menstrual cycle".
I thought of this as Valentino's final couture collection rolled down the catwalk at the Musée Rodin, bringing couture week and his fabulous career to a close. In more than 70 outfits, ending with 40 models all wearing an identical red evening dress, the maestro showed us a cultural history of how the rich and fashionable have dressed in the past 45 years.
Finally, with Jean Paul Gaultier combining the romance of the mermaid with the saltiness of the "Hello, sailor" tattoo, to offer women an opportunity to bring out their fantasy tart, I thought of André Breton's definition of surrealism as the "visual interpretation of dreams and similar irrational experiences". Surely, there has never been a better description of the undimmed attraction that couture currently has for women of all ages: an attraction stronger now than it has been since the 1950s.