CONTEMPORARY HAUTE COUTURE is often considered extravagant, sometimes superfluous and even irrelevant. It is one-of-a-kind, made-to-measure fashion pushed to its very limit; ball gowns so hefty they barely fit through doorways; unwritten price tags soaring into the six figures. Susan Sontag once defined the word “camp” as “a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.” That’s bound to be haute couture.

Yet in its heyday, haute couture wasn’t an exorbitant luxury — it was simply the way clothes were made. The 1950s were the last decade before the arrival of designer ready-to-wear fashion, when wealthy women had their clothes custom-crafted as a matter of course. The dominant couturiers were, of course, in Paris, but every major city had its own couture industry, each with its own distinct style. Notables could rise even from the provinces: In 1917, Cristóbal Balenciaga established his first haute couture house in the resort town of San Sebastián in Spain, close to his birthplace of Getaria (the house was named Eisa, after his mother); in the 1950s, a teenage Azzedine Alaïa began his career working for couture houses in his native Tunis. And New York and London’s houses evolved to (almost) rival the primacy of the French — the very idea of couture as a business was, in fact, arguably invented by the Englishmen Charles Frederick Worth in 1858.

The postwar world of haute couture in London had its advantages and disadvantages. The royal court’s social calendar demanded clothes possessing 19th-century levels of grandeur: Vast crinoline gowns were prerequisites for debutante and ambassadorial balls. Yet wartime restrictions on textile yardage, buttons and embroidery, along with clothing rationing — the last of which only ceased in the United Kingdom in the spring of 1949 — often stymied creative efforts. The differences between the British and French couture scenes reflected their respective origins’ disparate philosophies: If Parisian couture, led by Christian Dior and his revolutionary 1947 “New Look” silhouette, was on the cutting edge, London’s society and its clothing was more conservative, respectable rather than radical.