Why Couture Is Our Working Metaphor
At The HuPerson Project, Haute Couture gives us a living language for how transformation feels and functions.
Couture begins with presence. A client arrives, and the designer listens: Who is this person? What is the moment? How do they move through their world? The garment takes shape through fittings—co-sensing and co-presencing—until the line that wants to emerge becomes clear. That is our stance with leaders and teams.
Couture honors made to measure. No preset pattern. Many answers could be right. The work is to discover what fits this mission, this season, this context. Organizations experience the same relief people feel in a true fitting—seen, understood, and supported at a high standard.
Couture keeps house codes and signature alive. Identity remains coherent while expression evolves. We hold an enterprise’s blueprint and DNA alongside the life mission of its people—personal and collective—so solutions read as recognizably yours and precisely of this moment.
Couture is craft. Feather work, bead work, leather work, techniques most never see. Years of mastery live as unconscious competence, ready to meet surprises in real time. We cultivate the same readiness in leaders: rituals that steady attention, range that enables clear choices, courage to let epiphany become a working practice.
Couture also models care at scale. Great houses invest in local artisans and cultural lineages. Enterprise can do this too—financing resilience in communities while elevating quality and meaning in the work. Profit remains vital, and so does contribution. The “and” matters.
Why this metaphor now? We are living through an interwoven, fast-moving world. Patterns that fit last quarter may feel off today. A couture stance invites steadiness with aliveness—identity held, context heard, decisions cut on the body of the moment.
This is why fashion inspires us: it unites art, science, and spirit in service of work that expresses the couture DNA of your enterprise – and that is the work we love.
Published WorkMore Relevant Reading
Seeing Patterns We’ve Never Seen Before
When faced with challenge, most of us instinctively search for patterns. How did this happen? Where have I seen this before? Our brains are wired to connect new experiences to old ones. For thousands of years, that worked—because life didn’t change much. Today, it’s different. The patterns emerging now are often unprecedented. The pandemic and […]
The Meeting Before the Meeting
A CEO once told me the most important part of leadership wasn’t what happened in the boardroom. It was the meeting before the meeting—the one you have with yourself. Before stepping into the room, she had already prepared. She had reflected on why she was there, what her role was calling from her, and the […]
Business as Usual Has Rewired Our Brains
The 21st-century workplace didn’t emerge in isolation — it’s the latest step in a long redesign of how humans live and think. From forager to farmer, farmer to factory worker, factory to information worker, each leap reshaped our brain’s wiring. Neuroplasticity allowed us to adapt, though often in ways that left us further from our […]