For all its glamour and mystery, haute couture relies on something quite simple - a highly skilled woman with a needle

Of all the eras in fashion, none better captures the imagination than the "golden age of couture". Yet when exactly this golden age occurred is open to debate. I think of it as the 1930s, when fashion and film merged to become one glorious marriage of slinky evening dresses, raised eyebrows, cocktails and impossibly large apartments with a housekeeper and butler, kept behind a swinging kitchen door. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, however, has decided that the golden age was the 11 years betwixt 1947 and 1957. "It was one of the most extreme times we've ever seen in fashion," explains the curator Claire Wilcox, who came up with the idea for the exhibition. "At one end you have the end of the war, and at the other, the 1960s."

In between, there were some very nice pieces of couture from Paris and London, representing designers such as Christian Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies. Perhaps it also helped that this period of time is very well represented in the V&A's cedar-lined wardrobes, deep in the belly of the museum: 95 per cent of the show's contents come from the museum's own collection, thanks in no small part to Cecil Beaton's prodigious collecting in the early 1970s for his own "Fashion: An Anthology". "The Golden Age of Couture" has also been timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Christian Dior's Corolle collection - later renamed the New Look by the American press - which heralded a welcome return to excess after the frugal war years. Look out among the exhibits for the famous Bar suit, which in 1947 cost 59,000 francs, the equivalent of three times a factory worker's annual wage.

Haute couture is, quite rightly, regarded as other-worldly; it maintains a glamour and mystery no celebrity has yet managed to ruin. This is largely because only lack of interest can ever kill couture: no technological advance can dilute it, as it can with ready-to-wear fashion. Couture is actually something quite simple: a unique outfit, expensively hand-made. The moment a set of clothes becomes anything else, it is no longer couture. Paradoxically, when you get down to it, all that money buys is a highly skilled woman (it usually is a woman) and her needle. So it is nice that the show recognises this by devoting much of its first room to how a couture dress is made.

The exhibition spreads across three rooms. In the first, you walk through pretend ateliers showing fabric swatches scrawled over in pencil. You get to see the inside of dresses, handwritten bills and notes, and undergarments, which remind you that even back then women needed a bit of help in that department. There are evocative old perfume bottles and there are shoes perched on magazines of the day, but what really gets the hairs standing up on the back of the neck is the old newsreels showing seamstresses seated, heads bent, sewing.

If ever you need to see, in the space of a few short steps, the difference between the haves and the have-nots, you should visit a couture house. You can still do this if you hurry: there are barely a dozen left, and only one - Hardy Amies - in London. The first room in a couture house is the salon. Here the clients are seen to and shown designs. Then they are measured, pandered to, brought tea in china cups from which they take tiny sips, before allowing the salon's "madame" to slip a yard of silk chiffon over their heads so that no make-up transfers from perfect face to the perfect dress they are trying on for fitting.

Once you leave the salon, with its mirrors and thick carpets (no stripped wood floors for couture house salons, as secrets are absorbed by carpets and thick drapes), you walk up steps leading to the workroom. This is where the seamstresses sit and sew magic. When I worked at Norman Hartnell in the 1980s, the carpet would get thinner the higher up you climbed in the house, until it became almost threadbare as you entered the workroom. Inside, the floorboards - permissible up there - were so gappy and aged that 50 years of history had slipped between them. I once found a sliver of fabric which someone said matched that of a dress made in 1953.

Every dress had a name and an inventory. You had to go and ask for the thread with which to sew it together, and the hooks, eyes and buttons that would fasten it. Everything was marked on the card as it was handed over; thieving was almost impossible. Behind me stood the headless mannequins, each an exact replica of a particular customer's torso. Every client had her own mannequin and each would be padded out to match the owner's expanding waistline. Some would show as many as 60 years of expansion - a depressing sight, but of course the women themselves never got to see them. If ever you get the chance to see a couture dress, turn it inside out and look at the exquisite hand stitching. Only the seams will have been sewn by machine; everything else is done by hand. A couture hem is never pressed.

In the second room of the exhibition is a catwalk of models (not live ones) showing a timeline of 18 skirt suits (very in this season) from the decade that the exhibition covers. These neatly show how fashions changed from boxy to more feminine, looser shapes in just 11 years. Next to this is a display of cocktail dresses - note the elaborate, quasi-bustly bottoms, because you were meant to mingle rather than sit down during cocktail parties. These party dresses are interesting because, being relatively cheap, they could be much edgier and more fashionable. The ballgowns shown behind them - in the largest glass case ever built for a V&A exhibition - are beautiful, but less "risky". The evening dresses are shown against a moving projection of the ballroom at Osterley Park, to try to convey a little of the sort of grand setting they would have been worn in.

The third room shows three outfits by John Galliano for Christian Dior Couture from 2004, illustrating the legacy of couture. On the wall, strangely technicoloured by comparison, is a timeline showing which designer worked where and for whom. This last provides interesting context, but it jars slightly. Perhaps it serves as a useful decompression zone between the exhibition, with its elegant, gentle, fantastical history, and the real world outside.

"The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-1957" is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London SW7, until 6 January 2008. For more information log on to: www.vam.ac.uk

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