Until very recently, people have been sniffy about ascribing trends to the couture shows.

Once upon a time, these flights of fancy represented the designer’s vision in its purest form, unswayed by commercial pressures or the exigencies of modern life. The shows became displays of pomp and ceremony, of luxury credentials rather than clothing.

That was the latterday spin, anyway. In reality, during the discipline’s Fifties heyday, haute couture was de rigueur, and it set the sartorial precedent of the day.

But with the rise of ready-to-wear and consumer culture, couture became an archaism, a beautiful relic whose importance and artisanal merit was undisputed but whose values seemed increasingly at odds with the pace and the practicalities of real life. A world of plush carpets and hushed ateliers gone with the wind, scorned by the first generation able to buy clothes straight off the peg, then romanticised by subsequent generations who couldn’t afford not to.

We hadn’t banked on the developing world, of course, or on boom and bust to create a sector of people with the wealth to buy up, and live in, couture pieces. Or on the fortitude of designers determined to return its practices and its skills to profit.

The renaissance we’re seeing now is, in some ways, no less than a return to form, as those with the means realise that, in the squeezed race for individuality and exclusivity, couture is now their best bet. If we wanted to get political, it speaks volumes about wealth distribution between the world’s richest and its poorest that we’ve come full circle.

There is a commercial market for couture, now more than ever. With the passing of that generation of doyennes and debutantes, of Texan oil wives and European royalty, comes a newly savvy consumer - Russian perhaps, Chinese, Mexican, even a popstar - who wants clothes for her life now, not for museum cabinets in years to come.

So while couture remains – and vigorously so - the ideas lab it always was in terms of technique, taste and venturing into new territory, it has recently come into its own in terms of trends too.

Rather than a piece of fashion theatre, couture shows have become – and this season especially - a setting for designers to explore lifestyle dressing at its most immaculate. Witness the practical, almost-too-perfect daywear from Raf Simons at Dior; the youthful, sporty separates at Chanel; and of course, the trainers at each. Consider the Rousseau-esque blanket coats at Valentino or the use of ‘found objects’ at Maison Martin Margiela that combine collectability with commerce just as the art world does.

This isn’t to say that couture has become more pedestrian or less imaginative – one look at the pieces up-close is enough to put paid to that suggestion – but it does mean that the influence of these collections is far more visible on our own mere mortal wardrobes than it once was. Lucky us.

Click the gallery to see the trends that emerged at the spring 2014 couture shows