la vie en rose.

What motivated me, after having already taken up squash, to pick up a Prince tennis racket? Being in Paris for the couture shows and the idea of new tennis gear! I left the Ritz at 6:30 a.m., grabbed my LV monogram gym bag, towels, and water, and took my first-ever lesson (a two-hour drill of hitting the ball) with brilliant coach Bruno Lambert at the Tennis Club de la Ch,taigneraie in Rueil Malmaison, 20 minutes outside the city. The tennis thing is invigorating, and while I saw red at the club-with its terre battue (clay court)-spring haute couture 2007 was about to serve up a pretty-in-pink revival. It's been a long time since the couture season sprouted such brilliance. In 40 fast-driven hours, I caught Dior, Chanel, Valentino, and Christian Lacroix, the last of the high-fashion designers who, like poets, create beauty that elicits emotional responses. The audiences were full of world-class fashion journalists, American couture clients like Marie-Josee Kravis and Danielle Steel, and one great En-glish client, Daphne Guinness. The first beautiful suit at Dior was a cyclamen-pink pencil-slim knee-length suit with a fitted Bar jacket right out of the late Christian Dior's archives. This was the look that helped John Galliano land his job in Bernard Arnault's corporate realm, first at Givenchy, then at Dior. Now, ten years later, Galliano, who is the Gabriele d'Annunzio of Paris fashion, achieved the pinnacle of his entire career with his Madame Butterfly-meets-the-Fifties-New Look show. It was a romantic narrative about the stupendous ability to manipulate (that would be the most reasonable word) crocodile into a black jacket with a wonderful Dior basque peplum hem over a pencil skirt with a panel of the same reptile skin flaring from the waist. It was about the ability to create on Shalom Harlow a white satin dress with flying origami panels over tulle, with a Japanese-inspired diamante headdress askew in her black wig (by Orlando Pita) and the smallest cherry-blossom lips (by Pat McGrath). With clothes so extreme, his mastery of brio couture workmanship becomes part of the annals of an Englishman who conquered Paris. Like Lieutenant Pinkerton, surrounded by his postmodern geishas at the end of the show, Galliano took his bow, and butterfly-shaped confetti showered the finale with a sense of operatic climax that left everyone in awe of his approach to beauty. The day after Dior, Karl Lagerfeld came up with the most extraordinary collection of 59 looks for Chanel, balancing restraint and refinement with extravagance and opulence. Lagerfeld held two main tenets. "I wanted the proportions to be modern, so the belted waists had to be slightly higher but not Empire, to give the silhouette a new look," he said. "And I loved the idea of long, vertical lines. I called the braided tweeds 'vertical flexibility.' " These remarkable braided tweeds-think about the way the tails of dressage ...