Haute Couture is Probably Divorced from Reality

An awful lot of my ideas about what works well boils down to "My mother had great ideas and I want to recreate her ideas, though I don't sew like she did." 

I don't really know what drives haute couture fashion houses. I know they typically have resort wear as one of their categories 

Sometimes referred to as cruise wear, resort wear consists of casual looking apparel appropriate for a cruise or tropical vacation. 

In fashion, the more outdated it is, the more formal it is. So the US Army has Dress Blues rooted in the Civil War era and the Vatican has uniforms for its people that are hundreds of years old and look essentially silly to people today.

Dress Blues have a dark blue jacket and lightwr blue pants because in the American Civil War, you typically took your dark blue wool jacket off and stick it in your saddle bags so you wouldn't die of hear prostration in the hot weather of the Deep South. The pants were bleached out by the sun and ended up a lighter color and now we make them that way as a reference to those historical events.

Cruise wear or resort wear was almost certainly born of the era when people traveled by ship and business was conducted in person rather than by phone or Internet. 

If it took six weeks to get to the US by ship, you needed clothes appropriate to hobknobbing with your fellow elites. This clothes needed to be adequately casual or vacation appropriate and adequately snooty and social signaling for getting to know the other wealthy passengers and impressing them etc.

That's no longer how we live and the resort wear category is likely an anachronism and people in fashion probably have no idea there was ever a real practical purpose to that style of clothing.

I tend to prefer professors who work full-time in X field and teach part-time. Fashion has become a thing where practical reasons for clothing are largely irrelevant and in GIS lingo it's kind of like a map shop.

A proper GIS is integrated into an urban planning department or similar and the people calling the shots have the power to pull up the information they want to see in a visually rich format called a map. And then his print if they wish.

But in some cases you have a map shop where their only job is making the maps other people request and they tend to make bad maps. 

A well-designed map that works well as a map for communicating the information in question typically is described as beautiful. But simply making a map pretty doesn't make it a good map and can actively harm its function as a map to add flourishes or color to make it pretty.

Map shops tend to do that because it's the only creative outlet for the working stiffs making the maps in question.

And I suspect these days haute couture mostly out of touch with any practical reasons for designing clothes and just focus on "make it pretty and expensive." 

I will probably never get anywhere, but I have very practical reasons for what I want to do. This isn't like abstract art you can wear.