McFashion Design; The End Of The Lines: Rather than fight, some of the biggest names in couture are either closing up luxury shops or going to work for the former knockoff artists of fast fashion. It's a seismic shift in power.

Byline: Dana Thomas (With Jenny Barchfield in Paris and Marie Valla in London)

On a frisky Friday night in September, Paris's chic and hip flocked to the rooftop restaurant of the Centre Pompidou to celebrate fashion's coolest new collaboration: Karl Lagerfeld and H&M. There Lagerfeld unveiled his new clothes for the Swedish retail chain. Like his work for Chanel, the designs were slick and savvy: skinny black pant-suits, crisp white shirts, mod shifts and chiffonlike cocktail dresses. Unlike Chanel, however, they are all priced under $150--and most under $100. Lagerfeld wants to prove that fabulousness isn't about price. "It's all about taste," he says.

Are couturiers who design throwaway clothes the future of fashion? Looks that way. While some are fighting the trend--led by French fashion's chief lobbyist, Didier Grumbach--many of the big names are joining the movement. Along with Lagerfeld, there is Isaac Mizrahi at Target and guest designers such as Hussein Chalayan and Sophia Kokosalaki at TopShop and Eley Kishimoto for New Look, to name a few. Because these "fast fashion" companies can deliver new lines of clothes to their stores every four to six weeks, they are displacing traditional high-end ready-to-wear designers as the leading trendsetters. It's the end of an era.

For almost half a century, the fashion business followed a simple pyramid mod-el: made-to-measure couture on the top, ready-to-wear (often a distillation of couture) in the middle and knockoffs by mass retailers on the bottom. Since the late 1980s, however, as luxury evolved from privately owned family-run houses to publicly traded global conglomerates, couture has become a crass exercise in branding to sell logo-embossed lipsticks, perfumes and handbags to the masses. With skyrocket-ing prices, the number of women who will shop for made-to-measure suits (starting at $20,000) has dwindled from several thousand in the 1960s to a mere 200 today.