Haute couture gowns can take over 800 hours to produce so it goes without saying that buying haute couture doesn’t come cheap. Daywear can start at $10,000, while a heavily embroidered and intricate gown can cost several hundred thousand dollars. The Scott Henshall diamond-encrusted dress worn by Samantha Mumba to the 2004 premiere of Spiderman II was priced at approximately $9 million, so the sky is really the limit.
Despite these mind blowing prices, most fashion houses don’t actually make money off of haute couture and use it as a marketing vehicle to sell everything from perfume to lipstick to the average consumer.