Five thousand individual wood shavings, painstakingly cut, each one hand-coloured in dusty shades of lilac and blue to replicate the collective sharpenings of a mountain of coloured pencils. Not the typical embellishment for a dress. But this is haute couture – Chanel haute couture – where there are both strict ways of doing things and a total disregard for the usual constraints that rule fashion like budgets, man (or woman) hours as well as any form of industrial scalability.

For a collection that hinted at the issues around sustainability and preserving the planet - the materials included recycled paper, wood (Forest Stewardship Council approved, no doubt) and cork – Karl Lagerfeld made a strong case for Chanel’s position at the vanguard of the slow-fashion movement. You figure if the only thing the Chanel ateliers had at their disposal was a landfill mountain of rubbish, they would still make something truly precious and luxurious out of it.

Since 1985, Chanel has been acquiring and investing in the traditional art and craft ateliers that are essential if haute couture is to continue to exist. They own eleven specialist workshops including: the Lesage embroidery house with its archive of embroideries that go back to 1880 when the house was founded; Lemarié, which specialises in making exquisite flowers and fine feather work; the button maker and costume jewellery maker Desrues (responsible for the swarm of bejewelled bees buzzing around Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2016 Haute Couture collection).

This all about achieving the impossible, stretching the bounds of creativity and craftsmanship to their very limits. Hence the lowly “pencil sharpenings” used like armadillo scales to decorate the oval shaped sleeves of a dress of peach coloured organza. To put this dress on (the sleeves are delicately lined in the softest satin in case you were worried it might scratch) you will require the services of a dresser to fasten the 21 jewelled buttons up the back. The wood shavings were individually stitched to the fragile organza – that alone took a total of 800 hours work by the embroiderers of Lesage.

Haute couture makes no commercial sense. There is no price that can really justify the time and care – 700 hours – spent by the embroiderers to stitch iridescent sequins to a pleated black organza dress and then the additional 340 hours spent embroidering bees in featherstones and black rhinestones. And that’s without taking into account the time spent just cutting, stitching and fitting this elegant gown.

Likewise, the tiny wooden shards, beads and sequins – 6,000 of them – stitched to the bodice of a sand-coloured dress pleated over a mere 465 hours by another of Chanel’s ateliers, the pleating specialist Gerard Lognon. The embroidery used on the trim was done by Montex – another 7,000 tiny sight-splitting, putty-coloured sequins and tubes – and took a total of 85 hours.

But of course, it’s not just the time. It’s the precision of the work, the care that’s put into every millimetre of fabric. And the artistic vision that ties everything together to make pure, unadulterated perfection. Now excuse me while I go and sharpen my pencils...

Text by Tamsin Blanchard