Givenchy (Q21)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
French luxury brand
- House of Givenchy
- Hubert de Givenchy
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Givenchy |
French luxury brand |
|
Statements
intern
joint lead designer
2005
designer
2020
creative director
2024
creative director
client
1983
assistant
1964
special collection designer
1950
model
studio assistant
jewellery designer
designer
attended fashion show
Following fall 2024 shows for men (in January) and women (in March) that were both presented inside Givenchy’s home on Avenue George V, this 2025 pre-co lookbook saw the design studios join forces to shoot their respective collections on the sidewalk outside it. Over a Zoom Susanna Venegas (who design-directs the womenswear) and Josh Bullen (ditto menswear-wise) explained their rationale.Said Venegas: “We work separately, but also have a pretty constant conversation. And while we both have our own inspirations, there is also that language that we share. So when it came to shooting this lookbook it was about exploring a narrative between the two collections.” Added Bullen: “We both work to very different timings, so it’s hard to do something that is fully linked… so here we wanted to introduce some looks as couples because it’s not something that we’ve been able to do before. And when it came to styling and looking at both collections, there were some particular combinations that looked really good together.”Venegas said her cipher for this collection was Stella Tennant (with a touch of Paula Yates). Bullen meanwhile leaned towards John Lydon via Julan Schnabel. These differing directions in part reflected their different design backgrounds, respectively in couture (at Dior, before a stint at Margiela), and in technically advanced utilitarian menswear (Stone Island). When the collections were shot together, the intersections thrown up by this adjacency were fun and convincing. A white womenswear double satin, buttoned funnel-neck shirt worn above a black marabou pompom lined skater skirt epitomized Venegas’s apparently (but not) thrown together racy insouciance. Alongside it Bullen’s cashmere catprint ringer sweater and slouchily worn tuxedo pants and open-heel loafers was more dressed-up grunge.Looked at in isolation, the Venegas-overseen womenswear leant into Givenchy’s late ’60s and ’70s archive while working to reconfigure its attitude in order to serve contemporary context. This was achieved through adjustments in proportion and materiality that refocused the house's genteel source code to signal something bolder and more self-determined. In menswear, meanwhile, Bullen channeled Hubert’s peerless midcentury patrician grandeur towards a 21st century masculine equivalent by applying twin tailoring silhouettes both designed to be worn irreverently, sometimes expressed in a blue patterned double-faced nylon inspired by Hubert’s own loungewear.
There was also a base of upgraded but vintage-inspired military dress and some of the more whimsical details, cat-pattern included, carried over from fall.Quite what the future will bring at Givenchy still remains murky: in the meantime Venegas and Bullen are leaning into that limbo to produce fun and attractive collections whose common denominators are clarity and panache.
3 June 2024
Paris has been chattering all week about the empty creative-director seat at Givenchy, tossing out names and wondering about timelines. The studio team was responsible for this collection. Givenchy has been through so many hands in the past decade—Riccardo Tisci, Clare Waight Keller, Matthew M. Williams—that the audience has lost its handle on what Hubert de Givenchy stands for, but that’s not a problem the in-house designers suffer from.This show started off promising with a cocktail dress swirling with densely embroidered silver beads, a narrow train trailing behind it: That was a reminder to those who may have forgotten that this house has a couture atelier. What followed was a decorous, if not daring, collection of elegant tailored suits and evening dresses. The former were distinguished by fabric-covered buttons and a pinkie ring looped through a buttonhole on the lapel, and the latter often embellished with a swoop of fabric at the neckline or across the back, a subtle but not uninteresting detail pulled from the house archives. On a few other dresses, a draped, doubled waistline evoked a basque silhouette, another hallmark of the founder’s era.Coats followed the same playbook, respectful of Givenchy’s polished, classic codes. (The men’s collection shown in January was significantly more irreverent.) Among the coats, a double-breasted beetle-backed trench looked the most contemporary; you could see heads swiveling with that one. Of course, a new creative director could come in, put aside the house’s history, and find success that way. That’s how Tisci did it, and he stayed 12 years. But for the moment this was a collection that will find a market.
29 February 2024
Givenchy today turned to its teams and studios, its seamstresses and craftspeople, to fashion what will go down as the menswear part of a two-collection interregnum between Matthew M. Williams and whoever comes next as creative director.I’ve seen some so-called “studio collections” before that were dire, others that were wonderful, and several more that I can’t remember. However they come, they are often harshly criticized. This is because those who are too brainless or cautious to have an opinion beyond consensus (baa) suddenly feel empowered to have a pop, because everything will be different next season anyway. It’s like kids that act up when a substitute teacher takes class. Bill Gaytten’s pret-a-porter for Christian Dior, perhaps most egregiously of all, was pilloried when what it truly merited was praise.As did today’s collection. Overseen by Josh Bullen, a former Stone Islander who joined Givenchy two years ago and is employed as design director, men’s ready to wear, it was—as every collection is, creative director or no creative director—a group effort. That group was crowded into the pokey attic rooms of Givenchy’s building on Avenue George V, from which they sent down 34 models into the two-room salon below.The first look was classic blank-slating: a pair of slim charcoal wool pants and a version of the scrubs-like white work blouson that Hubert de Givenchy wore while attending to his house. Beyond that the team rightly focused on Hubert himself, successfully excavating some intriguing personal attributes beyond the public persona of impeccably suited couturier-patrician (while also adding some impeccable suiting).Like Clare Waight Keller in her earliest months at the house, they fixed in part upon Givenchy’s endearing fondness for cats: Bullen recounted that the founder would commission Giacometti to make him memorial sculptures of his most beloved pets when they meowed their last. A vintage long-hair cat print was revived on a print shirt and more tangingly reincarnated within the folds of a white goat fur jerkin and two bags: these were hilarious, cute, and didn’t need feeding. Vintage trompe l’oeil hair print scarves were revived with delicate transgressiveness on the severe looking young men who wore them wrapped around their heads. The hair theme continued with a series of shaggy artificially-maned outerwear pieces, one-worn inside out. These reminded me of a portrait of Givenchy with an equally refined looking Afghan hound.
Brimless raised cloche hats and a cocooning camel teddy coat with covered buttons hinted at a genderless approach with a couture frame of reference. Chandelier print jacquard pants and shirts and some delightfully louche action-shouldered safari jackets spoke of theseigneur à loisirin the 1970s. A hair-lined couture parka in silver jacquard and swoopingly shawl collared topcoat edged in a delicately wiry dark pelt of some material were both loving deployments of the couturier’s legacy in order to champion it. Bullen and his colleagues did an excellent job today: hats off.
17 January 2024
Luxury’s guillotine fell once more last Friday, leaving the pre-collection pictured here as the last gasp of the twenty-something run (including menswear and pre-) produced under Matthew M. Williams at Givenchy since June 2020. Speaking about the collections a few days before, Williams said: “It’s kind of the same story as always; in menswear making clothes for myself, clothes that I feel have a need to exist. Exploring the themes of silhouette and materials that I’ve been following since I arrived at Givenchy: garment dye, treating luxury and non-luxury material with sartorial technique.” Strong examples included windbreakers, half-zips, and work pants in garment-dyed washed silk. These were delivered within a signature mix of subtly defamiliarized tailoring archetypes and minimally-adorned but materially lush outerwear trophy pieces.Another specialism of the Williams period has been true technicality and functional collaboration. Here that was evident via a new partnership with American company Bogs that “allowed us to produce a vulcanized shoe I’ve been wanting to do for a decade,” as well as a new hybrid shoe named the Nfnty incorporating a sole in Pebax, a material currently unused elsewhere in luxury. Under Williams, he offered as a footwear footnote, the development of Givenchy’s TK 360 shoe involved securing the first shoe patent in LVMH history.Voyou bags aside, there was no overlap between men’s and womenswear, the latter of which edged onwards the spirit of contemporary flou Givenchy has been honing for the last few seasons. Lace, smokings, polka dots, Breton stripes, denim, bouclé, cocoon coats, and other Parisian pillars combined to create a cutely comprehensive French girl offer.Givenchy’s CEO Renaud de Lesquen characterizes the house mission as “redesigning elegance.” This sounds straightforward but isn’t. Because unless you base your idea of elegance on the historic—which defies the notion of meaningful redesign, dooming you instead to endless repetition—it’s a highly elusive and inherently subjective (although undeniably French) bourgeois quality. That’s the challenge that awaits Givenchy’s next marquee name—palace intrigue places many in the frame—while Williams is left free to spend more time with his own baby, Alyx.
5 December 2023
Luxury’s guillotine fell once more last Friday, leaving the pre-collection pictured here as the last gasp of the twenty-something run (including menswear and pre-) produced under Matthew M. Williams at Givenchy since June 2020. Speaking about the collections a few days before, Williams said: “It’s kind of the same story as always; in menswear making clothes for myself, clothes that I feel have a need to exist. Exploring the themes of silhouette and materials that I’ve been following since I arrived at Givenchy: garment dye, treating luxury and non-luxury material with sartorial technique.” Strong examples included windbreakers, half-zips, and work pants in garment-dyed washed silk. These were delivered within a signature mix of subtly defamiliarized tailoring archetypes and minimally-adorned but materially lush outerwear trophy pieces.Another specialism of the Williams period has been true technicality and functional collaboration. Here that was evident via a new partnership with American company Bogs that “allowed us to produce a vulcanized shoe I’ve been wanting to do for a decade,” as well as a new hybrid shoe named the Nfnty incorporating a sole in Pebax, a material currently unused elsewhere in luxury. Under Williams, he offered as a footwear footnote, the development of Givenchy’s TK 360 shoe involved securing the first shoe patent in LVMH history.Voyou bags aside, there was no overlap between men’s and womenswear, the latter of which edged onwards the spirit of contemporary flou Givenchy has been honing for the last few seasons. Lace, smokings, polka dots, Breton stripes, denim, bouclé, cocoon coats, and other Parisian pillars combined to create a cutely comprehensive French girl offer.Givenchy’s CEO Renaud de Lesquen characterizes the house mission as “redesigning elegance.” This sounds straightforward but isn’t. Because unless you base your idea of elegance on the historic—which defies the notion of meaningful redesign, dooming you instead to endless repetition—it’s a highly elusive and inherently subjective (although undeniably French) bourgeois quality. That’s the challenge that awaits Givenchy’s next marquee name—palace intrigue places many in the frame—while Williams is left free to spend more time with his own baby, Alyx.
5 December 2023
So large were the crowds anticipated outside this show at L’École Militaire that the house designated a Givenchy-signposted, sports-event-style fan zone for them to gather in—an invitation most of the excited and friendly horde screamingly ignored. Once through the imposing iron gates, we were shown to an airy, open-wall, all-white 22nd-century Big Top. This was designed by Gabriel Calatrava: Backstage, Givenchy designer Matthew M. Williams waxed lyrical about his friend’s disruptive architectural philosophy.By contrast, this collection was classically inclined, although liberally seasoned with a contemporary outlook. Williams’s dialogue with Carine Roitfeld is continuing (she was in bravura, twinkly form backstage), and there was plenty of Parisienne oomph in the high-denier nylons, ruche-detail shoes, garter-fastened leather skirts, and cross-draped sheer chiffon dresses.Williams’s trademark high revere, notch/peak collar, and wide-shoulder tailoring often framed or overlaid the looks, sometimes in house-staple black wool or leather or via long, jewel-colored topcoats. It was also softened and sculpted around the body in wrapped shirting and dresses in deconstructed tailoring pieces that Williams said he was especially pleased with: These were in part inspired by research into the sculptural radicalism of Ossip Zadkine and Constantin Brâncuși. Elsewhere a gray menswear jacket shorn of its collar and unfinished at its edges was placed over a sheer evening dress, a look that combined a stripped-back, essentialized précis of these twin poles of the collection.Yet the collection also leaned heavily toward eveningwear, as did the outfits of many guests (even if it was barely 4 p.m.). Following Givenchy’s recent Tiffany & Co. collaboration, there was a smattering of Fabergé-precious heritage Easter eggs as reference to the founder’s defining muse, Audrey Hepburn. Amongst those were the bows that enveloped arms and bosoms on jackets and dresses and served as a reconfigured nod to the piece worn by Hepburn for a 1963Vogueshoot. Another was a split-front variant of Givenchy’s most famous little black dress partnered with one opera glove (but no chignon or cigarette holder). Opera coats in satin blended the volume of Hepburn’sFunny Facestaircase sweeper with Williams’s tailoring architecture.
This runway featured some models who, despite their height, seemed as slight and angular as Hepburn herself, a questionable casting trend that is seemingly perennial—and which has returned yet again at several shows this Paris Fashion Week.Floral-shaped twists of chiffon and hand-painted flowers were displayed alongside botanical prints and lace trimmings. These conventionally heritage details were contrasted with more forward-facing facets, including the long-front, arch-back hemlines on dresses that left the calves framed and the shins curtained. One of them, a curved-neckline black dress, unfolded down its back in two open sheets of material to expose the shoulders like a double-page spread. If Williams’s menswear is motivated—as he regularly observes—by what he wants to wear, then his womenswear reflects the women around him. This collection also bore a down-the-decades echo of the founder’s immensely sophisticated Old World codes, which in turn played against Willams’s up-to-the-minute California polish.
28 September 2023
His back was turned to us, but the figure was unmistakable. Walking into the vaulted loggia surrounding the courtyard of the Musée de l’Armée in the Hotel National des Invalides this afternoon, we passed behind a titanic statue of Napoleon Bonaparte, who is entombed here. His bicorn hat and oversized redingote (into which his left arm was tucked) created a silhouette as memorable as his many marvelous maxims. These include; “Victory belongs to the most persevering,” “Ability is nothing without opportunity,” and “Imagination rules the world.”Matthew M. Williams was about to deliver his next gambit in a Givenchy tenure which, despite being an enormous opportunity, did not at its offset see him fulfill the potential of his ability. Creditably, the house persevered. Pre-show I overheard talk which I possibly shouldn’t have that sales of its Voyou bags have recently doubled. The collections have certainly improved. Would Williams’s imagination lead to another step upwards today?It unfolded as a pincer movement: two expressions of tailoring that surrounded an apparently oppositional force. The opening expression was more relaxed: wide but soft-shouldered double-breasted jackets, loose but boxy, over wide silky pants. The closer was shock and awe: another atelier achieved a barrage of precision-cut sleeveless jumpsuits and evening suits with no side seams. The look which preceded them was also atelier made, an Eisenhower suit. This is of course named after the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces who was also a fan of Napoleon’s pithy aphorisms, especially: “the great leader, the genius in leadership, is the man who can do the average thing when everybody else is going crazy.”That’s not to say that the crucial middle section of this Givenchy collection was “average”—it was anything but. However on a day when downpours left the menswear press corps dressed like a bunch of nylon-happy hypebeast golf dads, it was notable how Williams concocted a plethora of luxuriously technical trophy garments that you could easily wear in the real world without looking like a luxury victim. An olive and bark brown storm jacket, backed with gleaming labrets, was my own personal defeat: I just wanted it, urgently. The jacket before it worked a lace effect into its paneling, while an earlier version in yellow swapped out the technical fabric for treated leather.
22 June 2023
When it comes to menswear, Matthew M. Williams deploys his specifically evolved aesthetic to conjure fresh answers to a fundamental fashion question: What is unavailable to purchase that men want to wear today? Or as he puts it: “For me, menswear is so much about wardrobing—about finding that perfect thing that you can’t always buy.”What renders something perfect yet elusive is determined by the way in which its owner wishes to wear it. As Williams points out, archetypical garments are often cut to be worn in a certain manner that is not necessarily current. Many button-up shirts, for instance, are cut to fit close to the body and neck in order to be worn under a jacket in the confines of a tie. “But if you want to find a shirt with a sleeve drop and neck opening that allows it to be won in a casual way—and I like to wear mine over a t-shirt—then that’s more challenging.” Thus this bridge collection contained just such a button-up.Menswear reshapes itself under pressure from two competing forces: tradition and revolt. Williams’s most-used recipe for adapting his designs to those meandering forces is to re-order the layers and proportions of his looks, while mixing traditionally cloistered menswear genres into each other. He then often adds hardware to taste. Examples here included placing a carefully oversized tailored jacket over a ’90s-wide skate pant bedecked with punkish, cinching metal fixtures, or fixing a ’50s-origin biker with a ’90s-origin technical zippering array and then placing it over a breaky straight-legged workwear-silhouette pant. These looks and more came strapped with crossbody versions of the house Voyou bag.Said Williams: “I like to develop things that might seem simple. But in actuality I don’t know where you can buy these pieces. That’s why in this collection I was working to create a balance between a strong fashion proposal that’s directional and a series of timeless and elevated wardrobing pieces that I want to wear, and which I would have trouble finding anywhere.” Anywhere, that is, apart from Givenchy.
5 June 2023
Although it was relatively unsung, Hubert de Givenchy’s house did produce menswear under its founder. As with Givenchy’s current creative director, that menswear was strongly informed by the personal identity of Hubert himself.When it comes to womenswear, Givenchy’s heritage is up there in the pantheon. And wisely, Matthew M. Williams has of late become much more engaged with the specific archival codes of his original predecessor. This resort duly included a series of prettily and precisely draped evening dresses in confectionary colors. Added to these riffs on Hubert’s classical and sometimes almost minimal mid-20th century womenswear silhouettes, realized in new-century materials, were contemporary accessories including Voyou bags and footwear including Cowboy Shark boots. The combination created a sort of fashion time-travel impression: Audrey Hepburn in a Tik Tok by Hitchcock.In other scenes, Williams developed his own elevated Cali work/skate/grunge womenswear aesthetic, placing riveted construction denim under archival snow leopard relief outerwear and shaggy Afghan-esque jackets over stirruped post-Skims fitted pants. Unstructured yet cinched tailoring in silk twill, plus harder, collarless satin-darted jackets added a recognizably menswear/formal element that was referential without being reverential.Underlying the lookbook pieces was a large swathe of carefully developed offerings in jersey and cashmere, there to feed Williams’s urge to offer Givenchy customers an unusually thoughtful (at least in luxury) array of wardrobing options. Hubert’s are big shoes to fill—most especially when it comes to womenswear—but Williams continues to find his feet.
5 June 2023
Givenchy is a given—one of the big five—in the canon of French fashion. But unlike Chanel’s societally trailblazing menswear appropriation, Dior’s epoch shifting New Look, Yves Saint Laurent’s counterculturally adjacent runway revolt, or Balenciaga’s abstract invention, the founder’s patrician aspect and perceived conservatism (despite his close association with Balenciaga) means the house’s DNA is harder to glibly categorize.Until January’s menswear show, Matthew M. Williams’s efforts to mesh his design identity with that opaque house profile were mostly thwarted, first by the Covid-caused impossibility of connecting the audience with the collections, then by over-elaborate collections that were too bombastically presented, and then by a rainstorm. Now, however, he seems to have struck upon an effective recipe through which to appetizingly blend himself with the house that Hubert built.Today’s show again took place in the École Militaire’s pleasingly clothes-focused Givenchy white box. It repeated elements of January’s menswear formula, while adding fresh womenswear-specific elements. Again we opened with a baseline of waisted black tailoring, of which some (looks 1 and 5) was crafted in the couture atelier. The defining elements were generous box pleats at the back and two inward facing buttoned-down pleats running down each side of the jackets or coats. These sartorially creative details faded in favor of soft-shouldered double breasted mini-dress-jackets edged with organza trains. Then came two leather bouncer Jackets, one black one purple, that are the paradigm pieces of this Williams 2.0 phase at Givenchy. Big shouldered outerwear, a jean pocketed split black leather skirt under a split black mousseline blouse, and a strong shirred black leather dress followed before, at look 18, we hit the first of the adapted Givenchy archive pieces that would punctuate the rest of the collection.The next few looks in double faced cashmere, variations of what had come before, arguably stretched this opening act out a little too long. Then we suddenly pivoted from deconstructed oversized monochromatic tailoring and separates—sophisticatedly conservative contemporary dressing for sure—into a second act that was all of Williams’s own invention. These were much more radical, layer cake looks in which distressed leathers were placed over knits, zippered leather skirts or kilts, and then houndstooth bonded frayed Japanese denim or kicky pants from menswear fabrics.
Although the ingredients were various, these looks were built in similarly aggregate layers and finely reflected a similar instinct expressed back in January.
2 March 2023
The soundtrack by Bakar started slowly, elegantly, languidly—almost classically. This intro was accompanied by a group of weepingly fine black suits that Matthew M. Williams said had been crafted in conjunction with Givenchy’s couture atelier. Then, under surging breakbeats, dropped a bassline sowhoathat my Hélas beanie started moving of its own accord, like some overloaded subwoofer. Just as this happened a look passed whose cropped hoodie-topped silhouette contained five separate elements (work boots apart), and included references across punk and workwear.By beginning with couture tailoring, the most classical form built in the most elevated manner, before then ricocheting across all the sub-genres of contemporary masculine dress while maintaining a disciplined silhouette, Matthew M. Williams today produced arguably the most cohesive and compelling collection of his Givenchy tenure so far. Just as the couturiers reduced then rebuilt tailoring’s standard protocols into new experimental versions—pants with no side seams, floating hips—Williams unpicked then rebuilt disparate elements of menswear into a silhouette-defined systemic wardrobe. This process was illustrated and emphasized by the deconstructed/reconstructed treatment of the fabrics, from tartan wool to marled jersey, which Williams said echoed a traditional Japanese technique.The punctuation marks in this re-writing were the treated work boots and long-toed derby shoes and enlarged and refabricated versions of the Riccardo Tisci-era Pandora bag. These accessories framed looks that typically, but not always, were centered in a low-hemmed top or skirt that fell mid-thigh. Around this fulcrum were added cascading layers of reimagined staples; these included riveted skirts of workwear cotton duck, a waistcoat and sweater shaped by the atelier from goose feathers, heavily-reconstructed camo pants, a faux python jumpsuit (one of many) worn bottom half only in order for the top to act as skirt at the back, a cropped leopard hoodie zip-up, and a brace of garment dyed nylon technical looks. These echoed two more suits whose construction was more traditional than the openers but whose seams were bristling with loosened threads, as if plucked at by nagging hands keen to pull them apart into something new.Often, but not always, the looks were complemented by oversized classical pieces of outerwear which were Pitti-level highlights in themselves.
In the middle of all this action, look 32 represented the eye of the storm: a long leather chore jacket that Williams called a “Bouncer,” above double-knee work pants in leather and an unfussily minimal waistcoat—arguably a template for workwear inspired “formal wear.” The all-marl gray look was its sport-sourced streetwear equivalent. “It’s one of my favorite collections that I’ve done,” said Williams, and you could see why.
18 January 2023
“It’s continuing that dialogue between the Parisian codes of the house and my version of Americana, which is heavily influenced by California and New York.” So said Matthew M. Williams (middle name Michael) of this continent- and culture-spanning womenswear and menswear pre-fall collection for Givenchy.Unlike many other heritage Paris houses, Givenchy’s source codes have been largely overlooked since 2005 or so, when one of Williams’s predecessors first began his tour of duty. So last season’s pivot to consider the proper, hyper-defined and ultra-feminine cuts of his house’s patrician founder—full name Count Hubert James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy—felt surprisingly new and looked refreshingly unexpected.Williams, until now a dedicated seer of that contemporary, has since continued his conversation with that which came before. He said: “I spent some time with his family and they were showing me some of his old sketches, actually from when he was at Schiaparelli before he started his own brand. He was so creative.And it's just so interesting to see how early a lot of the design codes that formed his design language were created. It’s very cool.”The founder’s DNA was predominantly defined, of course, through womensear: via muses including Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Givenchy shaped the mid-century definition of soigné. Here, feathers, crystals, and paillettes added texture to carefully cut evening pieces garlanded with ruching and bows. More broadly the interplay between Givenchy’s couture codes and Williams’s more democratic sensibilities was played out in contrasts of material and form—trucker jackets and MA1s in wool/silk—and contrasting adjacencies mostly delineated by the dichotomy between tailoring’s ‘formality’ and more casual pieces. This Rive Droite v West Coast approach was epitomized by the placing of a tuxedo jacket against denim shorts.Menswear was less informed by this Vendome v Venice Beach dialogue, although there was plenty of oversized tailoring contrasted with highly technical sneakers and elevated examples of more contemporary masculine uniforms. Especially impressive were the richly garment dyed nylons in military-originating casual outerwear and cargos. New hardware came in the form of a fastening christened the ‘G-clip,’ which was a salute to Williams’s own early-formed design codes.
Through his conversation with the origins of the house he now stewards, Williams is both enriching his interpretation of it and expanding his own design vocabulary.
9 December 2022
“It’s continuing that dialogue between the Parisian codes of the house and my version of Americana, which is heavily influenced by California and New York.” So said Matthew M. Williams (middle name Michael) of this continent- and culture-spanning womenswear and menswear pre-fall collection for Givenchy.Unlike many other heritage Paris houses, Givenchy’s source codes have been largely overlooked since 2005 or so, when one of Williams’s predecessors first began his tour of duty. So last season’s pivot to consider the proper, hyper-defined and ultra-feminine cuts of his house’s patrician founder—full name Count Hubert James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy—felt surprisingly new and looked refreshingly unexpected.Williams, until now a dedicated seer of that contemporary, has since continued his conversation with that which came before. He said: “I spent some time with his family and they were showing me some of his old sketches, actually from when he was at Schiaparelli before he started his own brand. He was so creative.And it's just so interesting to see how early a lot of the design codes that formed his design language were created. It’s very cool.”The founder’s DNA was predominantly defined, of course, through womensear: via muses including Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Givenchy shaped the mid-century definition of soigné. Here, feathers, crystals, and paillettes added texture to carefully cut evening pieces garlanded with ruching and bows. More broadly the interplay between Givenchy’s couture codes and Williams’s more democratic sensibilities was played out in contrasts of material and form—trucker jackets and MA1s in wool/silk—and contrasting adjacencies mostly delineated by the dichotomy between tailoring’s ‘formality’ and more casual pieces. This Rive Droite v West Coast approach was epitomized by the placing of a tuxedo jacket against denim shorts.Menswear was less informed by this Vendome v Venice Beach dialogue, although there was plenty of oversized tailoring contrasted with highly technical sneakers and elevated examples of more contemporary masculine uniforms. Especially impressive were the richly garment dyed nylons in military-originating casual outerwear and cargos. New hardware came in the form of a fastening christened the ‘G-clip,’ which was a salute to Williams’s own early-formed design codes.
Through his conversation with the origins of the house he now stewards, Williams is both enriching his interpretation of it and expanding his own design vocabulary.
9 December 2022
At the moment this Givenchy show was due to start in the Jardin des Plantes—outdoors—it was raining in a concerted and highly depressing manner. Luckily Valentino had started so late, and, thanks to footwear dramas, gone on so long, that the fashion traffic jam was around 30 minutes late squeezing its way to this show. The rain calmed as we crawled onwards. What had seemed an imminent catastrophe was scaled down by the time we arrived to mere potentially preventable disaster. The set-up was a runway and benches made of cork. We wiped them down and sat on our umbrellas to avoid getting soaked unmentionables. You were better off wearing dark pants—that cork stained.By the time the first models emerged there was blue above. A fascinating piece in theNew York Timeshad already created an anticipatory contextualization for what was a radical shift under Matthew Williams. He’d brought in Carine Roitfeld—no longer working with MaxMara—as a stylist and shifted the emphasis of what that newspaper’s writer Jessica Testa inferred was a house with no distinct codes.But was that so? What we got was a sandwich fashioned from couture flavored bread—delicate, feminine, sometimes derivative and a little processed—that was filled with a highly-flavored LA mayonnaise. The ruching on the opening, excellent dresses, was an Hubert staple. The boucle jackets, conversely, did not belong here: this was a brazen sample to drop. During one weird moment the show transitioned to Williams’s home territory of streetwear infused contemporaneousness—great denim, slouchy combats, all of that—just as the soundtrack segued into Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere; the most vanilla track one could ever imagine this highly progressive music-lover choosing. I looked across the runway and noticed that Ye was tapping the toes of his Balenciaga gumboots in time. Things were getting weird.The closing phase was rather magnificent, although the party was often at the back. A red dress featured a gorgeous swooping rear hemline that curved from the shoulder to sacrum. Another dress was tied up at the back in a series of bows: simple but lovely. These, Williams said afterwards, were part of a series of archival looks that he and Roitfeld had dug up from the archives and reworked. So this is a house with codes, after all.Was Willams losing his mind when that storm came in? He feigned calm, saying: “I was thinking that their skin would look beautiful with the water on it.
And the liquid in the hair… it would look incredible. And that it would be more dramatic in the rain.” He added of Roitfeld’s involvement: “She understands the house and the Parisian woman. So we built the collection together—it’s a dialogue between us. The beautiful thing about the brand is that it speaks to different women. It’s good to speak to everybody.” Even if the risk in trying to speak to everyone is that you end up connecting with no-one. However Williams, I suspect, could still untie the knotty problem that is Givenchy. As the Times of New York pitched it, he just needs time. But will he get it?
2 October 2022
As a creative director, Matthew Williams puts his faith in absorbing what the men around him are wearing, affirming it and reflecting it back—slicked up and minimalized and heavy with metal hardware. “You know, I think everything about the brand is grounded in reality. I could see this guy, how he looks, existing on the street. And for me, that's a really modern approach to fashion.”Presumably, there’s a fanbase that sees Williams walking on water because of the way he resists being drawn into fashion-y narrative-speak and just gets down with upgrading and glamorizing generic dress codes: easy to wear cargo-derivatives; tight, sexy motorcycle pants; tracksuits. All inspired, as he put it, by “different people that are around me, musicians, friends. Elements of, like, Melrose and California, where I spent time as a kid and I now take my son to shop. It’s what I observe of those communities, where it’s just going through my own personal filter.”Williams is doubtless idolized, too, for his loyal continuation of the declarative Givenchy branded logo men’s business that Riccardo Tisci established so successfully for the house in the years before he left in 2017. Before we get too snobby about this, let’s not overlook the fact that the snobbiest of houses are also up to exactly the same thing now. In the year 2022 the giant logo is stamped on practically every garment and accessory being sold by high fashion companies from Prada to Balenciaga on through. In these peak-logo times, the state of play in this inter-brand contest seems to to be finding novel anatomical niches upon which to place the things.Matthew Williams started out with writing GIVENCHY in black and white across headbands attached to torso-hugging turtlenecks which had grown up to form demi-face masks. First of all, they’d appeared slung around necks like bandanas or perhaps blindfolds. In any case, they were the at first unnoticed (but presumably very saleable) garnish in the necklines of a pair of lavishly-tooled leather jackets, emblazoned with the brand name and geometric double G logo.Mid-show, when it got to tracksuits, he translated the familiar shape of the Everlast boxing type into the Givenchy logo. Even on a black, Goth-y, oversized black sweatshirt, the apparently hacked-off hem was seen to be looped up and intricately inset with appliqued Gs. “Why so many logos?“ queried a journalist after the show. “Because it’s been the same for 70 years,” smiled Williams. “And I love wearing it.
”What can “Givenchy” mean beyond the lettering, though? As a designer with a strong reputation for inventing metal accessories, it made complete sense to launch men’s jewelry with this collection: necklaces, padlock pendants, earrings. He also slung bling on unmissable low-riding Western-style belts: absolutely bound to fly with his fans.Perhaps this really was a more personal and autobiographical collection than Williams usually admits to. Five or six of the models who were walking in the show—well, striding through a conceptual pool of white water—had doppelganger Matthew Williams buzz-cuts. When he paddled out to give a finale wave, wearing black cargo pants and a tight black t-shirt, he was almost physically indistinguishable from the rest of his crew. Which had to be his final point about being just one of the guys he thinks about designing for.
22 June 2022
If Matthew M. Williams’ runway shows feel like stadium concerts, his pre-collections are the total opposite. Fuss-free in every way, they strip his Givenchy aesthetic down to its core: stark, streamlined, and distinctly contemporary clothes with industrial accents. “It’s very direct in how people would wear the looks. It’s not over-styled,” he concurred, during an appointment for his spring 2023 proposal in the house’s Avenue Montaigne showroom. The women’s opening look was a literal case in point: a finely knitted black stretch suit with flared trousers that created a languid silhouette, worn with just a bra. It had a kind of Gen Z exec realness—austere but sexy—likewise reflected in clean-cut blazers and leather jackets, polished workwear skirts, perfected baggy jeans, and cultivated cargo trousers.Williams doesn’t talk about the inspirations or meaning behind the clothes he designs. “I really just design from instinct: what I think is cool; how I see women dressing,” he said, reiterating a point he has stuck to since his arrival at Givenchy. But ask him what musical artists he’s into at the moment and you might get an inkling: “Oh,” he said and lit up. “I’m always listening to Cardi, I like this new guy named Yeat, I like this kind of house group called Overmono, I like this singer-songwriter called Ethel Cain, who’s incredible. I don’t even know how to explain it. She has a unique, beautiful voice.” A quick Google Image search and you can see the fashion influence, although it goes both ways. When Williams discovers an artist, he said, they get showered with Givenchy.It probably won’t be long until we’ll see Yeat and Overmono—all very on-brand already—in the dystopian spider web hoodie, the eight-pocket denim cargo trouser, and the voluminous tailoring of the men’s side of this collection. Like the womenswear, there’s something approachable about Williams’s menswear when seen through a pre-collection lens, even if those intricate leather motorcycle pieces are anything but easy to create (or attain). Even the more glamorous parts of his women’s offering had a pronounced straightforwardness about them, exemplified in an archival ocelot print featured on a coat, blouse, and bag, and the minimal column evening dresses inspired by a gown from Hubert de Givenchy’s spring 1967 haute couture collection.The haute couture show that was meant to take place this July—and would have been Williams’s made-to-measure debut—has been put on hold indefinitely.
Asked if the looks he had been working on for that collection will filter into his next ready-to-wear show, Williams laughed: “I don’t wanna talk about that! It will be worth the wait,” he vowed, referring to his eventual couture launch. Instead, he is putting on his first standalone menswear show for Givenchy during the Paris schedule this month—a response, a representative said, to the demand for menswear the brand is experiencing. Accessories like the techy, techno-y TK-360 knitted sneakers doubtlessly play a part in that, while new bag proposals like a stretched-out take on the Antigona and the very tactile G Hobo shearling bag will please Williams’s female audience.
7 June 2022
If Matthew M. Williams’ runway shows feel like stadium concerts, his pre-collections are the total opposite. Fuss-free in every way, they strip his Givenchy aesthetic down to its core: stark, streamlined, and distinctly contemporary clothes with industrial accents. “It’s very direct in how people would wear the looks. It’s not over-styled,” he concurred, during an appointment for his spring 2023 proposal in the house’s Avenue Montaigne showroom. The women’s opening look was a literal case in point: a finely knitted black stretch suit with flared trousers that created a languid silhouette, worn with just a bra. It had a kind of Gen Z exec realness—austere but sexy—likewise reflected in clean-cut blazers and leather jackets, polished workwear skirts, perfected baggy jeans, and cultivated cargo trousers.Williams doesn’t talk about the inspirations or meaning behind the clothes he designs. “I really just design from instinct: what I think is cool; how I see women dressing,” he said, reiterating a point he has stuck to since his arrival at Givenchy. But ask him what musical artists he’s into at the moment and you might get an inkling: “Oh,” he said and lit up. “I’m always listening to Cardi, I like this new guy named Yeat, I like this kind of house group called Overmono, I like this singer-songwriter called Ethel Cain, who’s incredible. I don’t even know how to explain it. She has a unique, beautiful voice.” A quick Google Image search and you can see the fashion influence, although it goes both ways. When Williams discovers an artist, he said, they get showered with Givenchy.It probably won’t be long until we’ll see Yeat and Overmono—all very on-brand already—in the dystopian spider web hoodie, the eight-pocket denim cargo trouser, and the voluminous tailoring of the men’s side of this collection. Like the womenswear, there’s something approachable about Williams’s menswear when seen through a pre-collection lens, even if those intricate leather motorcycle pieces are anything but easy to create (or attain). Even the more glamorous parts of his women’s offering had a pronounced straightforwardness about them, exemplified in an archival ocelot print featured on a coat, blouse, and bag, and the minimal column evening dresses inspired by a gown from Hubert de Givenchy’s spring 1967 haute couture collection.The haute couture show that was meant to take place this July—and would have been Williams’s made-to-measure debut—has been put on hold indefinitely.
Asked if the looks he had been working on for that collection will filter into his next ready-to-wear show, Williams laughed: “I don’t wanna talk about that! It will be worth the wait,” he vowed, referring to his eventual couture launch. Instead, he is putting on his first standalone menswear show for Givenchy during the Paris schedule this month—a response, a representative said, to the demand for menswear the brand is experiencing. Accessories like the techy, techno-y TK-360 knitted sneakers doubtlessly play a part in that, while new bag proposals like a stretched-out take on the Antigona and the very tactile G Hobo shearling bag will please Williams’s female audience.
7 June 2022
Simplicity isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you flick through the Givenchy looks, or see the giant double-tiered light structure they were presented on. But there was a newfound straightforwardness to Matthew M. Williams’s second runway proposal for the house, which felt a little more streamlined than seasons past. “I’m interested in making clothes that people wear, and that ease of it, so I guess it was finding those archetypes for today that I found interesting,” he explained before the show.Rendered largely in dark green and black, the collection was a mainly streetwear-focused wardrobe composed of the stereotypes that come with the territory, at least from a fashion perspective: layered and tiered T-shirts and sweatshirts with logo graphics in the vein of metal band merchandise; baggy denim trousers and leather tracksuits; and voluminous floor-length pimp coats that floated along the stadium-like structure bathed in the light of four surrounding LED lamps that looked like those used on football fields.“It’s a language of light that we’ve been building for the show,” said Williams. “It’s about coming to an arena for me; that’s the all-encompassing mood.” As a former creative director for the music industry, he expresses himself in the grand gestures of music videos and concert venues. It was clear in his throbbing and quite invigorating soundtrack (which he insisted was intended to be light), in his sprawling La Défense venue that many a show-goer bemoans because of the 45-minute drive to get there, and in his natural dialogue between sportswear and eveningwear.Drawing on adornments and constructions he found in the house’s archives—from Audrey Hepburn’s pearls to the intricately strapped back of an evening dress—he translated the decorative language of Hubert de Givenchy into the contemporary tropes he was investigating. From eveningwear to easy-wear, if you will, it materialized in pearl embroideries on jeans, beaded tops used for layering (which later turned into cocktail dresses), and long T-shirts sliced up from the bottom to resemble a kind of garter belt.“It’s just about today. My work is really instinctual,” Williams said. That was clear in the black fabric gloves he wore backstage and for his bow, and the balaclavas that featured in the show. “With Covid, people have been wearing masks, so I’ve been exploring these balaclavas and gloves for that reason. It’s almost a new archetype people are using in their daily lives.
In America, a lot of the kids of friends I know wear them.” At Givenchy, you could say Williams was simply mirroring our current culture’s everyday approach to clothes on a very elevated runway.
6 March 2022
In October, Matthew M. Williams presented his first live-audience runway show for Givenchy in an arena-size, big-budget orchestration reflected in a collection that spared no expense on intricate cuts, treatments, and trimmings. Texture and surface work are Williams’s trademarks, but at Givenchy, it’s often his simple gestures that stand out. It was clear in the consolidated nature of this pre-collection, which served to elucidate some of the details of his runway spectacular. “It’s a pre-collection and it’s a spring drop, you know, so there’s less layering,” Williams said on a phone call from New York. “It needs to be elevated and cool but also something that people can really wear. I think that’s why the proportions on the silhouette are much more real.”In its “riffing on archetypes,” as he described the exercise, this collection made some viable proposals as to how Givenchy’s tailoring—which Williams said is doing well with his clientele—can appeal to a new generation of suit wearers. The key constellation here is uncomplicated cuts with minimal but noticeable detailing: tailoring like the men’s black tech suit buckled at the waist, or the women’s slightly boxy skirt suit adorned with hardware, or the men’s relaxed three-button navy suit worn over a detachable hoodie under-piece. You could even add the monogrammed denim suit to that exemplification, although it technically doesn’t count as tailoring. At the house of Givenchy, a little austerity often does it.“We gave a jacket to Elon Musk for SNL, and I’ve seen him wear it maybe three or four times after that. A lot of people we give the tailoring to continue to wear it,” Williams said. It’s a compliment worth holding on to. As observed in the gritty plaid jackets or super-textured rip-and-repair jeans, efforts to make Givenchy a streetwear brand are valiant and no doubt lucrative. Take for instance the 360 knitted sneakers, theG-woven sandals and mules, or the new 4G soft monogram bag—or, indeed, the Kenny, named after Kendall Jenner. But somehow you can feel the ghost of the old house gently pulling its current custodian toward a more classic expression. It’s in the preened and polished sartorial sector that Williams’s Givenchy can really make a statement in a fashion climate where such dress codes have become a matter of choice rather than protocol.On that note, Williams said that his first haute couture collection for Givenchy—originally planned for January 2022—has been postponed.
“We’ve decided to push it to July now, but I’m working on toiles. You might see some previews during the award-show season.” Some of us are hoping to see some daywear couture in there too. When it launches, Williams has the opportunity to construct his output like an organic couture house, allowing his ideas to develop experimentally in couture, resolving them through his ready-to-wear, and letting them trickle into pre-collections like this one.
15 December 2021
This January, Matthew M. Williams will show his first haute couture collection for Givenchy. “It’s been drawn; we’ve just started the toiles,” he revealed during a preview for his first live show with an audience since he joined the house at the start of the pandemic. Underpinned by his couture aspirations, his third ready-to-wear collection was like a release of grandiose proportions: a massive explosion of ideas and ambitions bottled up for too long, until finally the cork popped.Inside the gargantuan La Défense Arena, Williams erected a proportionately giant oval light structure in which some 70 models traversed and intersected with military panache. The vastness was Young Thug’s idea. He recorded an original soundtrack for the show (quite catchy), and only a stadium experience would do. “Having everyone see it in real life definitely informed what you’re going to see today,” said Williams, and his intentions were clear.Tackling an amplified 1940s silhouette—sculpted shoulders, nipped-in waists—he worked the fabrication and surface decoration of every garment to inextricable degrees, turning up the impact factor of looks so you could literally see the details from across the arena. Scanty bloomers erupted in unyielding ruffles; column dresses were encrusted with thick, rustling mega-sequins; and bolstered bolero jackets took shape through dense micro-plissé structures.“The pieces are really, really worked and complex,” said Williams, his mind clearly in couture world already. In many ways, the collection felt like a precursor to the idea of doing couture. It manifested in zealous design value, which often made for rigid and constricting-looking constructions like knee-high dominatrix clog boots, as well as tight neoprene tailored jackets harnessed tonally in deconstructed corsetry or implanted with resolute peplums poking out from their hips.Williams collaborated with New York artist Josh Smith, interpreting his semi-abstract paintings through his own textural lens, working motifs of containers painted with clowns and words into the surface of his signature vulcanized jeans, or those of scary balloon smileys into ripped leggings. “Josh has a much different aesthetic than I have: lots of color and brightness. It was a nice opportunity to emerge out of my comfort zone and explore a new space,” said Williams.
The creative dialogue between the two was expressed most eloquently in a series of Smith’s paintings—which Williams said portrayed the Grim Reaper—adapted into intricate knitwear and leather tops, some overlaid in filters of transparent fabrics printed with similar motifs, creating a kind of illusion within the styling. Those looks were “just” streetwear, but they represented Williams’s passion for texture from its most compelling side. At a time when streetwear designers are becoming couturiers, Williams will do well to use his couture ateliers for poised experimentation like this.
3 October 2021
The gritty glamour of kids, who’d hang out around train tracks and tag random things in graffiti, is an ideal particular to those who grew up in the 1990s. It’s an archetype Matthew M. Williams, 35, knows well, and one whose seduction has never left him. Those kids were cool, their style seemed effortless even if it wasn’t at all; it looked like they lived on the edge when, probably, they still had to be home for supper. The designer’s spring film for Givenchy triggered that nostalgia. Projecting the badass sensibility of ’90s adolescence onto the luxury stage, Williams portrayed a coarse teen attitude through the refined and hyper-polished Parisian lens of Givenchy.Shot in a railyard you wouldn’t associate with the City of Light, the film interweaved images of the French capital’s Statue of Liberty replica and the Eiffel Tower, linking together the designer’s American background and Givenchy’s Parisian persuasion. Looking for ways of uniting the two, Williams called upon the Seattle-born, Mexico-based airbrush artist Chito to create illustrations for the collection. They had been executed by hand—and will also be in production, albeit not by the artist himself—observing the savoir-faire practices of the house. Evocative of graffiti art, Chito’s motifs manifested as cartoonish or emoji-like characters with a certain Mexican sensibility about them.Raised in California, Mexican culture was a natural part of Williams’s childhood. “Chito is Mexican-American, as were most of my friends growing up. It’s something in my upbringing that I really appreciate and admire,” he said during an appointment in Givenchy’s showroom in Paris. Airbrushing, he explained, “hits a sweet spot for me, because growing up, I used to go to car shows with my dad. There would always be airbrushing on cars, and you’d have these memorial T-shirts made.” For Williams, the injection of childhood memories served to warm up the starkness of his industrial aesthetic, while retaining the countercultural toughness of the collection’s spirit.The artworks—which featured throughout the collection, on backpacks, and on Rimowa luggage— entered into a natural conversation with the intricate textures, hardware, and industrial graphics that define the designer’s work both at Givenchy and his own label Alyx.
Tailored jackets came with big, square velcro closures; a half-and-half blazer with a hard bottom mesh panel was so vigorous it sat like a corset, and spiderweb tops offered a hand-spun alternative to Williams’s latticed metal cage dresses.He used a varsity jacket transformed into a little bolero as an illustration of the house’s dialogue with America, past and present. “The house has a great connection to America historically,” Williams said, referring to Hubert de Givenchy’s influence on Hollywood, “and these are the elements of America that are very inherent in me, with an elegance of Paris.” Most tantalizing was his jewelry. Inspired by Chito’s motifs, it took the form of big rings and prayer necklaces with colorful pendants that looked like something out of a candy shop, or a creepy fun fair, depending on the tint of your glasses.
2 July 2021
The ‘open brag’ is a term used by the digital generations for showing off newly-acquired luxury items and statement pieces on social media. Objects of peer envy, they’re often of an esoteric nature: shoes, bags, and garments that aren’t traditionally pleasing to the eye; a little awkward, quite subversive, or ugly-cool. Their coolness is community knowledge: if you know, you know. You can apply that methodology to a lot of the things Matthew M. Williams designs for Givenchy. His tenure at the house seems strategically targeted at Gen Z and those who mirror themselves in them—at least if last year’s social media campaign featuring the most followed celebrities in the world is anything to go by.“At the end of the day, it goes back to instinct and what I desire. I’m not so strategic. Hopefully the customer likes what I like,” he said on a phone call from Paris, but his sophomore collection seemed quite tailored to that Gen Z segment. Silhouettes were graphic and intense in a way that echoed the volumes of skate-wear in more sartorial lines; “micro-macro,” he called them—exaggerated as if made to be seen through a screen. Textures were hyper-tactile in that mesmeric way that a phone cover in faux crocodile or neon fuzz makes the brain want to reach out and touch it. And accessories had the quaint and sculptural quality about them that makes them memorable and Insta-worthy, like an out-of-place-object in an unlikely setting.It was embodied in big, furry coats and gilets with matching balaclavas—horned, like last season—and giant furry mittens like something out of a Jean M. Auel novel, but perhaps more “extra-terrestrial,” as Williams said of his hoof-like platform shoes, fit for a centaur. Presented in the industrial Paris La Défense Arena (which the designer said reminded him of his former career dressing musicians) with headlights hovering above models’ heads like they were on the run from a flying saucer, the collection was very sci-fi inferno but with the lockdown-inspired outdoorsy twist we’ve become accustomed to this season. In fact, if our grounded moment in time has turned designers’ minds to the great outdoors, this was the grave outdoors—the tougher, trendier version.Speaking of tough and trendy things, supersized Cuban chains spoke to a current social media mania, while hardware on tailoring and as embellishment on dresses continued Williams’s clash between the Givenchy ateliers and his own industrial world.
He translated that same sensibility into his first big push for the red carpet, in kind of aquatic evening dresses shingled with rigid sequins, which cascaded into vivacious hems like the crashing of waves. Their lines reflected Williams’ ongoing proposal for a women’s silhouette, expressed in knitted bodycon numbers or column dresses. “They’re sensual and elegant and show female empowerment,” he said.
7 March 2021
Following the thread of ourIn Vogue: The 1990s podcast,we are closing out the year and heading into the new one with a series of newly digitized archival shows from the decade that fashion can’t—and won’t—let go of. Designed by John Galliano, Givenchy’s spring 1996 couture collection was presented on January 21, 1996, at the Stade Français, Paris.Drama. It swirled around the announcement of John Galliano as creative director of Givenchy, and it spilled over when the Brit made his couture debut for the French house.Hubert de Givenchy was just 25 when he opened his own maison in 1952 with a focus on young mix-and-match pieces, an aesthetic that accommodated a “start-up” budget. He chose the model Bettina Graziani as a muse, and his first hit was a frilled blouse named in her honor. In time Givenchy was taken under wing by the couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga, and his work became more restrained. The designer’s association with Audrey Hepburn refashioned the couturier-celebrity connection. Givenchy and Hepburn clearly had synchronicity, and the pared-down silhouettes he made for her felt modern. By the end of his 40-year career, though, the push and pull between gamine and elegante had been replaced by a conservative Right Bank aesthetic.Galliano was stepping into Givenchy’s shoes. Pre-debut, rumor had it that he might revisit the couturier’s Hepburn era, but the rumors were (mostly) false. The British designer distanced himself literally and figuratively from Hubert. The show was held in an indoor stadium on the outskirts of Paris, and the collection, ripe with many charms, was pure Galliano in its imaginative historicism.For unexplained reasons the show opened with aThe Princess and the Pea–like scenario. The first gowns evoke Franz-Xaver Winterhalter’s 1855 portrait,The Empress Eugénie Surrounded by Her Ladies-in-Waiting,a seeming reference to Charles Frederick Worth, the Paris-based British couturier. Tuxedo clad Helmut Newton heroines followed, then flappers, styles from the 1940s, and 1950s looks. Conjuring a Roman holiday were the finale dresses, made of red sari silk woven through with gold with a cartoonishCleopatra/Cinecittà vibe.The collection was unmistakably a Galliano production, but there were subtle Givenchy-isms throughout in the bows and neat suits. The taffeta tops were a distant echo of the Bettina blouse, and Carla Bruni in a draped black column dress was a credible latter-day Holly Golightly.
Reactions to Galliano’s couture debut were mixed. Twenty-four years later we’re free just to swoon over the romance and fantasy of it all. The industry, however, is still feeling the effects of the “pea” placed in the mattress that day, which was a new, punkish template for reinventing a heritage house: molding it in one’s own image.
28 December 2020
As one of the millennial designers currently infiltrating the fashion establishment, Matthew M. Williams fits his generational profile so well. Talking about his first pre-collection for Givenchy, he evaded questions of the specific visual references that may have inspired it, choosing instead to focus on nerdy things like cuts and fabrication. Save your mood boards and sketches for the old guard. “I don’t really work like that, actually. I’m more on the body, touching materials. Sometimes there’ll be imagery that inspires things, but it’s very instinctual,” he said on a video call from Paris, ticking all the boxes.Williams is emblematic of a new wave of designers for whom fashion is often less about producing the flashy statement piece than about perfecting the unassuming wardrobe staple—of course, with an endlessly-studied twist. If that approach honors the school of Martin Margiela and Helmut Lang, today’s emerging class paints a contrast to those forerunners in an unapologetic focus on themselves as target audience. “What I find exciting is often things I would wear myself,” as Williams said. “As somebody who shops, if I’m buying a suit and I want to wear a t-shirt with the suit instead of a button-up, I want that brand to have a nice t-shirt for me to wear.”Millennial designers have grown up in the digital age of fashion fandom, spent their twenties saving up for $800 cult-brand hoodies, and learned to obsess about trouser hems. They’re also well-versed in the grammar of icons— whether that’s a varsity jacket or an Hermès, well, anything—and, crucially, in the art of subversion. You could apply all those teachings to Williams’s new collection for Givenchy, which proposed a series of wardrobe staples subverted through his soft-versus-aggressive lens. Let’s illustrate: a classic letterman jacket chopped into a bolero and realized in a super luxe, tonal red knitwear; a rather normal long-sleeved black day dress hacked up at the waist like a little piece of architecture; or businessy blazers with complex lapel and collar structures seemingly morphing in and out the fabric.“For me, it’s really finding that tension between my real world—how I wear clothes on a daily basis—with this magical dream world of the Maison,” he said. More often than not, that implied a bellicose level of fabric treatment, leatherwork, or embellishment. But next to his rigid materiality, Williams also made a case for the comfort-wear of the post-pandemic shopping landscape.
Knitted, slightly figure-hugging dresses continued to outline his womenswear silhouette for Givenchy, while silk leggings and EVA-soled suede sliders represented the elevated sportswear element of the collection. Interestingly, Williams’s take on Givenchy isn’t very sporty at all, something you might expect from a designer his age. “I do wear suits,” he reiterated. “It feels more like me.”Of course, that’s not to say that a generous amount of logos—another pillar of the social media generation—didn’t find their way into the collection. Williams latticed a lace dress in Givenchy’s archival four-G logo, embossed them on bags—including the new ‘4G Bag’—and forged them in bag chains. “I’m doing the logos through construction and materials as much as possible,” he said, presenting a leather jacket with Givenchy embossed across the lower back as an example. “Sometimes when there’s branding, it’ll be more subtle.”Those words could have been the tagline for a collection that ultimately showcased a more restrained and clarified take on Williams’s vision for the house. In October, his first social media campaign—in which Kardashians, Jenners, and their likes dressed up and shot themselves in his first collection—reached 500 million people. As the first products under his creative direction hit Givenchy stores this month, we’ll soon see the effect of the brand’s new millennialism on the shop floor.
15 December 2020
Shirtless and tattooed, the pictures of Matthew M. Williams that Givenchy released on his first day on the new job this June set social media on fire. “Yeah, I don’t really look at the internet that much,” he said at a preview of his first collection for the couture house. His new employers reportedly didn’t mind the strong reactions. Williams is a 34-year-old American urban-wear designer joining a luxury house in a new age of creative director stardom. Givenchy relies on his personal image to make this union a bankable one. And his debut proposal reflected that in so many ways.Williams, who was dressed in a sharp black suit and a bleached techno haircut, had stocked an antechamber with Givenchy-labeled black lemonade from Wild and the Moon, the go-to place for any health (and brand) conscious millennial in Paris. Placed front and center was his new lock jewelry inspired by those hung on the bridges of Paris by tourist lovebirds, who throw the key in the Seine. (Williams confessed to having done that once, too.) “It’s no secret that I’m really into hardware, and that’s what I lay the foundation with when I start a new project. It comes into shoes, bags, clothing,” he said. Williams is also obsessed with texture—from the reptilian to the volcanic and the densely embellished—as fervently illustrated at his own label Alyx.His Givenchy debut read entirely like a morph between those codes and the black-clad elegance of the house he now inhabits. Suspended between the formal and the super casual, the devil was in the fabric treatments. Dressy garments were practically bathed in conditioner and money and champagne, while industrial garments looked as if they’d been washed in paint and acid and run over by trucks on the freeway, again and again and again. If it sounds like the costume department from the Hostel films, it’s not far off. There’s a twisted expensiveness about Williams’s clothes that feels clinical and dirty all at once.It’s a dense and rich aesthetic loved by the Kardashian-Jenner clan, who’ll surely be wearing this collection on their Instagram accounts in a matter of days. (See: the red trouser and backless body styled tone-on-tone, the sculpted torso snoods, or any of the sci-fi armor-sleeved tailoring.) Williams, of course, earned his stripes working on creative things with Kanye West, and has been grouped with designers like Louis Vuitton’s Virgil Abloh and Christian Dior’s Kim Jones.
(He even made buckles for the latter’s first collection there). When he got the Givenchy gig, some wondered how Williams’s output would differ from their territory of savoir-faire fused with streetwear.
4 October 2020
Clare Waight Keller’s mood board was papered with scans of Nouvelle Vague movie posters, archival imagery of Hubert de Givenchy’s midcentury collections, and artwork by Helena Almeida and Ketty La Rocca, as well as movie stills of the achingly beautiful Anouk Aimée. Together the research yielded a Givenchy collection with an assertive graphic verve. Black, white, and red were its dominant colors, with motifs that included dots, checks, preppy rugby stripes, and La Rocca’s giant apostrophes.After last season’s side trip into upcycled jeans and hippie florals to wear with them, this was a more formal collection, with an emphasis on the demonstrative tailoring Waight Keller has made her speciality at Givenchy. Its demonstrativeness this season was derived from strong shoulders, from which fell soft, full, and feminine sleeves, as seen on items including a double-breasted jacket, an evening coat, and a retro-elegant dove-gray caped dress. Elbow-length gloves added a sense of occasion to many of the ensembles.The softly draped, boldly printed dresses that appeared midshow resonated more directly with how women are dressing now, i.e., with an eye for attention-grabbing details but also an appreciation of—make that an insistence on—ease. In a couple of instances, they were worn over pants, which is a styling trick you’re more likely to see IRL than the opera-length gloves that accompanied the suiting. Kiki Willems’s caped knit dress operated on a similar principle: Comfort plus circumstance is a potent combination.For evening, Waight Keller zeroed in on fringe and feathers. They’ve turned out to be two of the most popular refrains of the season, seen just about everywhere, but they’ve been part of her Givenchy oeuvre since her first haute couture collection two years ago. Here they came in optic black and white, and they decorated both a relaxed Le Smoking and floor-length dresses with cinematic Old Hollywood flair. The dramatic chapeaus, which Waight Keller likened to cloaks for their face-framing properties, were a lift from HdG’s oeuvre and a nod to the house founder, who would’ve turned 93 two weeks ago.
1 March 2020
The Englishwoman and her love of gardens are inseparable. Clare Waight Keller’s spring haute couture collection for Givenchy was rooted in her recollections of visiting the garden rooms planted at Sissinghurst Castle by Vita Sackville-West and by reading the passionate love letters between Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. “It’s one of the most romantic places in England,” Waight Keller said. “I’m quite obsessed by the place.”Famously it was Woolf’s involvement with Sackville-West and dreaming through the Elizabethan history of the Sackville-West family house that inspired Woolf to write her time- and gender-traversing novelOrlando(which, by the by, is the only literary reference in these identity-exploring times that is putting the L into LGBTQIA+ fashion representation).Hence: the coordinates Waight Keller used to map out a poetic collection that encapsulated her own strengths in tailoring—her white trouser suits and narrow coats—and the summer-garden colors and swirling 3D-petal forms of dresses. But it was also, Waight Keller said, “my own love letter to Hubert de Givenchy because I went into the archive for this collection and looked into the history of the house from the very beginning.” Photographs of the pristine flower-lace gowns he made in the era he designed for Audrey Hepburn were pinned to her inspiration board. Givenchy, as it happens, was dedicated to garden design too.Waight Keller extracted ideas from the sculptural millinery of the 1950s and the rounded cloche shapes Givenchy developed for demi-transparent umbrella hats that swooped back over the shoulders, amplifying the volumes of tops and ball gowns to bloom with the colors of pansies, anemones, irises, and marigolds. The outside edges of the jacket of a neat black pantsuit were implanted with a halo of gypsophila embroidery.Within the garden varieties of the collection, there was modernity—the multilayered tulle petal-pink skirt overlaid with Chantilly lace and worn with a sheer black T-shirt, for example—as well as all-out romantic fantasy. For years, spring collections at Givenchy were the place for girls to come seeking wedding dresses. Waight Keller finished up her show by sending out Kaia Gerber as the ultimate fantasy bride in an off-the-shoulder cut-lace white chemise and a hat so huge it almost formed a canopy under which to take her vows.
21 January 2020
Yeshwant Rao Holkar II, otherwise known as Maharaja of Indore, was an extreme dandy of the decadent 1930s, a prince of untold wealth who lavished fortunes in the jewelry houses of Paris, and turned heads across continents with his bespoke tailoring and exquisitely fashionable wives. Clare Waight Keller caught the exhibition about him that recently closed at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and came out impressed by “this incredible drifter through different cities, who decided to abandon India and embrace modernism.” There was something, she said, about the Maharaja’s “cross-cultural traveling” that inspired the characters who were slouching with a certain cowboy insouciance around the Givenchy haute couture salons this morning. But by the looks of them, she might as well have been talking about one of the modern dandies who was sitting in the audience instead, among them the unmissable Luke Day, editor of BritishGQ Style, who is never seen without his cowboy hat.Whichever roundabout way they come at it, all menswear designers are looking at big issues to do with masculinity and, more often than not, tinkering around with whether the suit can be made attractive-slash-relevant to young men. What’s going to be the next big thing is open territory at a time when—bam!—a whole generation, introduced to brand-frenzy through the thing called streetwear, has graduated to young manhood with the knowledge that a) desirable wearables cost a lot of money and b) there is no thrill like being part of a pack, and yet just ahead of it.Waight Keller is right in reading that post-hoodie and -ugly trainer surge as a new stretch of opportunity. She’s projected the next phase of Givenchy at young men who are “fashion” in a different sense. It’s a vibe she’s gleaned from how the impeccable Hubert de Givenchy dressed in the ’70s, and how the likes of Day and his friend Ben Cobb (the new suit-and-flares co-editor of Katie Grand’sLovemagazine) dress on a daily basis and on Instagram.So her take on tailoring is neat-to-the-body, and styled with a metal-tipped swagger leant by square-toed boots, the occasional Stetson, and a note of contemporary perversity. Showing in the couture headquarters of the house, she transferred over the latex bodysuits she’s used in women’s, inserting them as high-necked T-shirts. Oversize sweaters, worn with tailored trousers, added range.The Maharaja reference, she explained, entered with the silver bejeweled embroidery she proposed for eveningwear.
Here, it veered toward the Alexander McQueen menswear zone that Sarah Burton has been mapping out in recent times. But then again, McQueen and his tailoring is part of Givenchy history, too. He showed his final collection for the house in these very rooms. It was for women, of course. Twenty years ago, nobody imagined that men would ever be in the market for almost couture-like finery. They are now, and it’s Waight Keller’s intention to wrangle these 21st-century dandies in from the streets, the red carpets, and (who knows?) maybe even a few palaces.
16 January 2020
Clare Waight Keller has to cover all Givenchy bases—from women’s daywear and eveningwear to men’s suiting to utilitarian sportswear—in her pre-fall collection. We started talking about the last category first. “Arctic surfing, volcanic surfing....” I had to double-check I’d heard her right. “Yes, it’s kind of extraordinary, these amazing things people do. It’s about being with this extremeness of nature. So I’ve been using these membrane fabrics and layers; these permeable fabrics, some of which are organic and recycled,” she added. “These new fabrics have to go through so much testing to get them to market, so it takes a little longer.” She pointed out a khaki green printed recycled polar fleece and crisp, neatly tailored organic cotton shirts.Designing to be more mindful of Givenchy’s environmental impact is, she says, “very much top of mind.” One of the ways she’s tackling the issue is by aiming to build more versatility and longevity into her collections. “We need to wear our clothes for longer. It’s the throwaway aspect [of fashion] which is destructive. So the thought process, particularly in women’s, is to have a quieter sense of permanence. And I like the idea that so many of the pieces can be relayered.”One of Waight Keller’s strengths has always been her woman’s understanding of lived fashion—the practical wisdom accumulated by a designer who has to streamline and make sense of her own wardrobe; that endless round of packing, traveling, and quick changes of gear familiar to every woman who needs to tap-dance her way through the performances of professional life. In this collection, she’s taken an intelligent approach to tackling the extravagance of one-wear evening dressing by suggesting, for example, how a very French, Givenchy-esque black dress with gold buttons on one shoulder can be worn over a pair of tuxedo pants. Or again, how those same trousers can go under a short, strapless tailored dress to create a chic tunic look.In a way, there’s a flicker of a memory of how Donna Karan used to solve things for executive women in the ’80s in this, but brought forward for Waight Keller’s generation. Underpinning the coats, there’s a series of jumpsuits—one of the biggest-selling categories in these times of ours. She knows why: “They’re just so quick and easy to pull on, like a dress—done!” Getting them right is all a question of fit, though.
One of the styles, in mint, is a trompe l’oeil outfit which seems to be composed of a matching shirt and trouser: “The knack is that the cut of the trouser fits to the waist normally, and then it’s a matter of blousing over the top.”That focus on practicality through design smarts is what will persuade a woman in a changing room or in front of her own bedroom mirror. Ditto, perhaps, Waight Keller’s nifty idea that her watermelon taffeta caped dress can be worn frontward or backward to give at least two looks’ worth for the money. Sure, there are several of the Givenchy couture–derived dresses here that will service Cannes and other early summer dates—nice ’40s-ish balloon-sleeve lace, and so on, for the wedding season. Waight Keller has all these categories covered for the label, as she must; but perhaps her greatest skill is her stealthy way of sneaking in female utilitarian psychology under the glossy cover of Givenchy glamour.
2 December 2019
English designer Clare Waight Keller moved to New York in 1993 for a job at Calvin Klein. It was the American designer’s glory days: Kate Moss and co. were on the runways wearing slip dresses and streamlined black tailoring; studio assistants wore Birkenstocks. “When I arrived in New York, I was very much a tomboy, and there was this raw, boyish energy,” Waight Keller said backstage today. Givenchy being a French house, she’s set up her new Spring collection as a conversation between the minimalist New York she remembers circa ’93—down to the plain white box background of the runway—and the much more exuberant Paris she visited at the time, which was still recovering from the couture excesses of the ’80s.Waight Keller’s previous collections here have similarly been a dialogue between tailoring and flou. Last season she gave her suits a 1940s gloss. For Spring, the cut of her jackets is slim and elongated, and they’ve been paired with Bermuda-length shorts. It’s somewhat difficult to pinpoint what makes a Givenchy suit a Givenchy suit under Waight Keller, beyond a sense of discipline and rigor.She’s had more success building a vocabulary around her dresses. She likes a lively floral print, silk plissé, and a voluminous silhouette. She’s also made black-and-white combos something of a design signature. This season her floral dresses have a covered-up sensibility that reads much more 2020 than early ’90s—necklines inched up to the chin and skirts tented to the floor. Though it wasn’t all as modest as that sounds. Kaia Gerber wore a blush pink satin bra and a black leather pencil skirt that Calvin Klein might have liked the look of.The collection jumped around quite a bit, and its story lines competed rather than complemented one another, but the most surprising element was all the denim, from short shorts to holey jeans to a V-neck dress made from two different colored washes. The show notes described the jeans’ ’90s vintage upcycled fabric “pointing to a conscious future.”Waight Keller’s dip into the recent past was prompted by her summertime reading of Allison Yarrow’s book90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality, in which the author argues that the vilification of women like Hillary Clinton, Anita Hill, Marcia Clark, and more at the time laid the groundwork for a sexual predator U.S. president and the current threats to our reproductive freedoms.
Imagine if society had embraced those women and gotten worried enough about the climate crisis to begin upcycling back then. How different the world might be.
29 September 2019
Clare Waight Keller’s haute couture for Givenchy so far has been marked by a certain rigor. This no doubt stems from her deep respect for the house and also, possibly, from the fact that couture is a new métier for her, though she has many years of ready-to-wear experience to her credit. Well, chalk it up to the confidence that comes from time well spent; Waight Keller, who’s been at Givenchy now for two years, got sort of radical on the runway tonight. There was an engaging new looseness to the collection—not in terms of fit, which at times was quite strict. This was freer in its spirit.Backstage the designer explained her process. “I wanted to step it up a notch for myself, to push it into something that has a little more theater. It’s the idea of an anarchic woman who comes through the château and all of the elements of what you’d find there. I like the idea that the château wasn’t perfect. It was part of the way I discovered the spirit and the girl of this show.”Of those elements, she said graphic flooring inspired the tweedy, slightly disheveled black and white pieces that started the show; curtains the voluminous silhouettes of taffeta dresses and capes; and pewter the dense silver embroidery of a men’s blazer and coat. The authoritative, elegant tailoring Waight Keller has been honing these past several seasons didn’t go unrepresented for women. A lavender cape coat was a subtle stunner.Her project here, though, was to tap into that spirit ofnoblesse radicale,which is what she titled the show. The feathers that sprouted from ball gowns represented, she said, a “bird woman trapped in the house.” The brides—there were two—conjured visions of a deluxe Miss Havisham, with their mad layers of pleated silk, lace, fringe, and feathers. All this quite cleverly connected with what makes couture such a compelling practice: the element of fantasy and the indulgence of even the most sensational of whims. This show will be remembered as the moment that Waight Keller decided to go out on a metaphorical limb. How satisfying to watch her engage with these wilder instincts.
2 July 2019
The designer who dresses Meghan Markle showing in a Florentine Palace where Queen Victoria sojourned in the late 1880s and early 1890s? It was hard to resist the anticipation that Clare Waight Keller might be drawing royal parallels in her first full-blown menswear show for Givenchy. In the event—which was held in the vast formal gardens of the Villa Palmieri—the connections she made were much more interesting and unexpected; ideas sparked between her own memories of the 1990s and the hyper-modern dandyism of today’s Korean street culture.“I find what’s happening incredibly vibrant,” she said. “Particularly young men in Seoul, who are meticulous about fashion, sort of tribal, sort of cultish, and highly accessorized. They have a real passion for a look. Seeing them there reminded me of how we wanted to be in the ’80s and ’90s, of wanting to belong, to have the best of a look.” Her research opened her eyes: “Coming out of Asian culture, there’s this whole underground music subculture, where they take Art Nouveau typography and morph and liquefy it in computers to create album and CD covers. It’s super exciting.”Waight Keller has new eyes on the current state of play in menswear. She’s entering into it at Givenchy at a time when the tailoring-versus-athleisure debate has been running for years. It’s a hard one to crack, but Waight Keller comes with experience, and a focus on innovation. She spent her 20s growing up as a designer at Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. “It was Ralph who gave me a classic education, a good education in tailoring,” she says. “I was in New York the whole of the ’90s, the best time. So that’s why I wanted to bring what I love, the tailoring. I dipped back—to a three-button suit, which felt modern again.”But it was the result of what she called her “deep-dive” into what’s happening in Korea that gave her a relevant way to balance tailored suits and sportswear. At the core is minimalist suiting, with a span of options from a wider, looser shoulder to draped tonic coats to neat jackets. So far, so good for turning into a clean, Helmut Lang–ish look. What made the crucial difference were head-turning fabrics she’d also discovered in Korea. The movement of a super-light pale yellow parka over a beige suit, the slick teal nylon raincoat, and the strange, dense velvet nylons kept audience members talking during the long evening’s after-party.
There was a lot more going on, too: six great slim suits on women (“literally men’s,” she said); tapestry and floral prints; 10 different pant silhouettes; and a finale of beaded and embroidered pieces. “The evening segment for men has exploded for us.” In the end though, it’s always the simple messages that are the clinchers. Here, the lasting takeaway was the uncomplicated sight of those membrane-fine parkas over the suits.
13 June 2019
If you don’t experience modern life firsthand, how can you design for it? Not a problem for Clare Waight Keller: When it comes to the demands of traveling all over the place—on Eurostar, on frequent flights—she’s a pro in applied design observation. “What I’ve seen so much around me, and with my colleagues and friends, are the challenges of dress today when people travel so much,” she says, then laughs, pointing to one of her Resort images of a girl who has a lanyard phone pouch around her neck and a tote in one hand. “The two-bag situation. That is exactly how my life is!”The thoughts that go through Keller’s mind as she posts fleeting glimpses of the Thames, Chelsea gardens, the Mall, and then the Seine, boulevards, and the Eiffel Tower whizzing by inform the basis of her Resort collections for both men and women. An effort-free merge of practicality, formality, and glamour is what she’s after. “I always have core staples: great T-shirts and trenches, well-cut coats and a really good pair of boots,” she says, “but also elements which are a bit more frivolous and fanciful, because you always want a joyous part in the way you dress.”Keller’s diary triangulates between her home-office fixed points and just about anywhere in the world that events and Givenchy responsibilities take her—so hers is an international view. Her travel tips are manifest in pulled-together solutions for the fast-moving scene changes which face working women: a great black poplin dress, loose-ish but chic; a beige jumpsuit; a generous trench with a black faille ribbon bisecting the back; and a series of sharp thoughts about applied tailoring. She pulls out a classic French blazer, emblazoned with doubled rows of mismatched gilt souvenir buttons. “There’s a dove, a leaf, a skull, all kinds of stuff on it—as if buttons have fallen off, and you’ve sewn on your own,” she says.Her consideration of the current popularity of tailoring among women also leads somewhere else. “There’s an aspect of tailoring I’ve even put into dresses, making a kind of perfect column that we haven’t seen for a while,” she says. Well, here we do see it, and exactly who it might be inspired by: a fitted black sleeveless midi, with two flattering rows of brass buttons graduating inwards from hip to waist, and a red stand collar not unlike a guard’s uniform.
Absolutely ideally appropriate for hand-shaking duties if one’s partner belongs to the British military, for example? Asking pointed questions about the Duchess of Sussex is, well, out of the question. But has Waight Keller become conscious of protocol, the formalities a woman in public life must attend to? A nod and an expression which shifts to the middle distance: “There is something about that I do register, for sure,” she concurs, before moving swiftly on.
3 June 2019
A week ago last night, Rachel Weisz wore red latexGivenchy haute couture to the Oscars, where she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role inThe Favourite,alongside her costar Emma Stone. BothFavouriteactresses lost toIf Beale Street Could Talk’s Regina King, but Weisz won the red carpet. Her two-piece vinyl dress got quite a rise out of the Twitterverse.Anybody expecting more of that light kink on Clare Waight Keller’s runway didn’t get it at tonight’s assured outing. Backstage she described her theme as “the winter of Eden.” Though it wasn’t entirely as serene as that notion suggested, she devoted a good part of the season’s development to a very pretty array of plissé floral-print dresses. These were an elaboration on a group of micro-pleated styles she showed forSpring, but where those were floor-grazing occasion numbers, Fall’s ran the gamut from well above the knee to midi length. Fishing wire gave the hems (and necklines and cuffs) their flirty, wavy shape. Inspired by Japanese vases, the dresses’ fresh colors and painterly patterns were quite winning, and given their pleated poly-silk, which skimmed along the body without clinging, they looked like they’ll be easy to wear. She showed them over sheer black hose and ankle-strap sandals.Waight Keller’s other work this season revolved around tailoring. In her year and a half at Givenchy, suiting has emerged as her forte, the Duchess of Sussex and Rachel Weisz notwithstanding. Where Waight Keller showed a definitive silhouette at her solomenswear debutin January—a flared trouser suit—here she preferred to experiment with a range of shoulder shapes, including a shrunken ’90s shoulder, a strong ’40s-ish shape, and, most boldly, a sculptural, rounded style with exposed seams that spoke to the audacious forms that tailoring has taken on other key Paris runways this week. In 2019, Givenchy is not the place to go for a suit with slouch. There was a pair of puffer coats—one for men and one for women—and a snap-front acid-washed denim shacket, but they were outliers in what was an essentially formal collection.After a month spent talking about the rise of glamour, Paris has gone quiet on the subject these last few days. Thanks, maybe, to her couture work and her string of red carpet wins, Waight Keller has a lot to say about after-dark sparkle, which she handled with a good deal of meticulousness.
She also played around with volume, topping a double-breasted corset jacket with a deep flounce of crinkled taffeta and a black gown with an exuberantly pouf-sleeved midnight blue bolero in the same demonstrative fabric. There’s potential where those pouf sleeves came from. As Waight Keller rounds her second cycle at Givenchy and begins her third, she should keep exploring that sense of exuberance and freedom.
3 March 2019
It began with a black jacket: cut through the waist with a proper basque for emphasis, contrasting lapels—one, a blade of white. It began with a pair of latex leggings.“I tried to take the most modern approach possible with everything,” said Clare Waight Keller following her third haute couture collection for Givenchy. Most modern, that is, relative to the maison’s heritage. The text that accompanied the collection referred to a tabula rasa, a blank slate. And indeed, the show was held in the vast, empty galleries of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Waight Keller said she wanted no set, “the purity of the wall.” But what gave these men’s and women’s looks substance and appeal was the suggestion of beauty even beyond modernity. See the model in an impeccably tailored sleeveless jacket twisting around the neck, her forehead coated with a holographic mask, walking to the haunting operatic voice of Montserrat Caballé.Waight Keller will refer to clothing construction as architecture, yet within the same breath she mentions the pursuit of absolute lightness. While this duality represents the essence of haute couture—tailleur and flou—she seems intent on considering a more hybrid approach: a Swiss guipure dress that appeared sculpted, or skirts that were flawlessly contoured before giving way to a cloud of sheer organza. From the sexy racerback of a dress shooting down between the shoulders to the glistening red embroideries shooting through the pleats of a skirt, Waight Keller was working through experiments of form and technique. If some of these engineered outcomes were missing a certain ease, the subtle application of pearls to lace upheld her Meghan Markle–approved instinct for calm grandeur.Backstage, journalists seemed curious about the latex. Waight Keller rightly rejected the connotation of kink; in color, at least, they imparted a painted-on slickness, indeed, a modernity. And in the spirit of couture, these second-skin pieces were entirely bespoke; each one required days to produce in collaboration with specialty atelier, Atsuko Kudo.The latex wasn’t the only novelty, though. An oversize bow has neither relevance nor purpose. An oversize bow that also happens to be a branded backpack has both. Pairing it with floor-sweeping dresses and showing it now rather than saving it to debut during ready-to-wear might not have been the show’s main takeaway, but this felt like a significant development. Get ready for the haute couture It bag.
22 January 2019
Clare Waight Keller is an incredibly fluent and conversational public speaker. This morning, she walked across the parquet floor of the Givenchy couture showroom, stuck her hands in her marine blue trouser pockets, and gave a small group of guests a complete and personal explanation of her “deep dive” into menswear. “I went into my own self, really, back into the ’90s, and how I felt when I was really young, how we’d dress on not a lot of money. At Givenchy we have young Parisians from schools here, and there’s this same perverse poshness, wearing tailoring in a really sharp way, with a shirt or T-shirt,” she said. “Quite clean, really.”In other words, a new kind of youthful aspiration—to look smart and gorgeous no matter what—is coming down the line, taking menswear up several significant fashion notches from the commonplaces of the street. “To me, Givenchy is an elevated house,” she said. Even in distressed times, with luxury stores under attack from the “gilets jaunes” every Saturday, the world still looks to Paris to take the lead when it craves a chic idea of how to dress. Waight Keller—British as she is—nailed that frisson in the single- and double-breasted, flared-trouser suits she sent out.If you wanted to get intellectual about it they might have seemed like a gender blend between Hubert de Givenchy and Audrey Hepburn, in those famous pictures of them casually strolling as friends along the Seine—when tailored flared trousers and belted trenchcoats were the quintessential Thing. But relevant fashion is always about designers hitting the right time, not trotting out house costume themes—and this suit resonated on multiple frequencies. Take the flared trousers. In a way, the over-the-shoe thing they had going on indeed evoked what poor boys wore in the ’90s, but they were also calibrated precisely to a certain elegant slimness in the leg. Waight Keller attributed this to the “softness and fluidity I like for men,” and put it down to the “crossover palette I dip into” from the womenswear into the menswear.There was a lot else in the show—including an oversize peacoat with painted buttons, a parka in slick black, and a reflective-tissue trenchcoat. But to project an intended trajectory, you need the conviction of one strong and definite look. Those suits—and specifically those Givenchy trousers—did that. Dads and grandads everywhere will feel a pang to look at them.
Much as they’ll chuckle about wearing such suits in their youth, unfortunately they really can’t now. This was a statement for the young and the fashion-obsessed, and it showed the way forward.
16 January 2019
Cautionary tales of hubris are far too common in this biz, and the outcomes are rarely pretty. Then again, designers don’t nudge fashion forward by playing it safe. For the Pre-Fall Givenchy collections, Clare Waight Keller chose the myth of Icarus as her overarching message and included various allusions to deities, minotaurs, the sky, and the sea. “Mythology always seems to capture people’s imagination. There’s a dreamlike element, but it’s also grounded in something pertinent,” she explained. Quite likely personal, too. One year and a royal wedding dress later, it can sometimes feel as though there’s some shadowy, collective expectation that Waight Keller’s rise should be steeper, more daring. Certainly, beautifully executed, wearable clothes are enough.In the images, some of which were shot against the backdrop of Maison La Roche, one of Le Corbusier’s marvelous Paris landmarks, the looks don’t immediately signal such epic storytelling or existential questions. Coincidence or not, many of the jackets and coats have been tailored like modernist architecture: engineered without excess. When you see the volumes of sleeves and pant legs, you realize that they have been constructed so no additional styling is required. The subtle checked patchwork of a faux fur coat; the gradient tint of a leather skirt; and the silkiness of a vinyl trench do not go unnoticed. What also comes through is Waight Keller’s continued restoration of Givenchy’s aristocratic leanings, whether through relatively casual knit dresses and cargo pants, or through dressier poufs of plumetis and elongated suiting. Likewise, draped leather boots and the new Mystic bag with its half-concealed hardware suggest more discreet status symbols—which isn’t necessarily an oxymoron. As Waight Keller noted, “There’s this feeling of being somewhat muted about things.”But what about the themes? Well, these were conjured up vividly in the menswear with hand-drawn illustrations and embroidery that Waight Keller said were inspired by Picasso’s own exploration of mythology. Most elaborate: a blouson embroidered with album cover art as though Icarus were a band. Whoever came up with Flew Too Close as the title for this “vocal quartet” (a nod to the four Gs of the logo) put forth some commendable first-degree wit. With the womenswear, and perhaps rightly so, Icarus was harder to detect.
Sure, the ostrich-feathered tunic and the wing-like protrusions of a yellow minidress might have nodded to our fallen hero, but first and foremost, they were chic.
3 December 2018
Clare Waight Keller’s muse at Givenchy this season was a woman who spent much of her life dressing and acting as a man. Even from a young age, her parents didn’t discourage her from this tendency. An androgynous beauty, she had affairs with women and married a man. If she were alive today, we’d call her “gender nonbinary,” but Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a Swiss writer, photographer, and traveler, lived a century ago.In her Chloé days, too, Waight Keller did extensive research and regularly came up with compelling, little-known characters off of whom she built collections. The motorbiking French adventurer Anne-France Dautheville comes to mind. Waight Keller definitely has a type: intrepid. At Givenchy this season, Schwarzenbach provided her with a reason to “collide the codes” of women’s and menswear. Not that she really needed that backstory. The gap between the genders shrinks by the season. A critical mass of labels have combined their collections, with some brands even offering a unisex proposition, i.e., no difference between the male and female offerings.That wasn’t quite what was going on here at Givenchy. The men’s looks were in the minority (the category is still fairly new for Waight Keller), and they remained essentially traditional in ethos—or at least as traditional as a lilac suit worn with white Chelsea boots can be. The womenswear is where the designer did her “colliding,” sending out models with cropped boyish haircuts in tuxedo jackets or leather Perfectos tucked into army pants—a direct lift from a vintage Schwarzenbach photo. This was capably done and quite chic, though not groundbreaking in the way it was when her muse was doing it 80 years ago.Waight Keller took cues from Schwarzenbach photos, as well, for her evening pieces, which were draped asymmetrically or with athletic cut-outs, yet retained the elegant bias lines of the 1930s. The news in the evening category was the prismatic flower-print dresses with engineered prints designed on the computer to be smaller at the waist than at the shoulders or hem, thereby enhancing their hourglass shape. Waight Keller said she couldn’t have accomplished these without her couture training. Minus the little shoulder shrugs that were layered on top to maintain the boy/girl theme, they looked like potential red carpet hits. The Hollywood crowd—of which Waight Keller had a substantial contingent tonight (Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Rooney Mara)—still likes their femininity straight up.
30 September 2018
Hubert de Givenchy was one of the first celebrity designers. His affiliation with Audrey Hepburn, whom he famously dressed for her role inBreakfast at Tiffany’s, made his name and hers. Clare Waight Keller, who inherited the house of Givenchy last year after a long line of male interpreters—Galliano, McQueen, Macdonald, Tisci—is undoubtedly the biggest celebrity designer of 2018. She dressed Meghan Markle on the day of her wedding to Prince Harry—much to the astonishment and delight of most fashion watchers. Waight Keller’s name rarely came up in the pre-wedding chatter, but the gown was roundly championed as an elegant, independent choice.That gave tonight’s show in the garden of Paris’s Archives Nationales a frisson of synchronicity. Waight Keller paid tribute to Givenchy, who died in February this year. She is the first creative director at the house to honor his legacy, a gesture that’s at once respectful and humble, as well as brave: To look back is to risk getting stuck there. Waight Keller insisted on the project. “Having met him, and the fact that he passed three months ago, he felt very present in my mind; his legacy felt like something that needed to be celebrated,” she said backstage. “Everybody knows his work with Audrey. But less so the capes, the peekaboos, the architecture, theflou. . . . It was a wonderful trip for me to discover it and reinterpret it my way.”On the board behind her and in a book on every seat were archival photographs of Hepburn and models in frocks from the ’50s through the ’70s. Riffs on those looks paraded down the runway, but Waight Keller made the point that they weren’t reproductions. The show opener was pink and white in Hepburn’s original, but tonight the cape-back top and column skirt were black and icy almost-silver. TheBreakfast at Tiffany’sLBD, meanwhile, was updated with a very au courant hood replacing those multiple strands of pearls. More so, though, it’s the fabrics that are changed. Half a century ago, materials were a lot stiffer and heavier than today’s.Indeed, the pieces here that held the most modern resonance were in thefloucategory: goddess draping on Kiki Willems, a caped ivory gown accessorized with a silver metal harness, and tiers of plissé silk that echoed her last ready-to-wear collection. Waight Keller established her tailoring bona fides at her couture debut in January. Here, history weighed heavily on some of the silhouettes, though there is no arguing with the purity of their lines.
As for the embroideries, they were at their most compelling on a man’s coat stitched all over with starbursts of bugle beads; perhaps they were so unexpected there.At the finale, Hepburn crooned “Moon River” on the soundtrack. It was a touching moment and a moving tribute, made all the more so by the fact that Waight Keller, taking a page from Monsieur Givenchy himself, invited the atelier members to join her for a bow. “He believed in elegance, he believed in chic,” and Waight Keller has both in spades. Still, we’ll be eager to see what she does next season when she releases herself from the past and looks forward again.
1 July 2018
Each spring, Japan seems to exert a magnetic force on creative types. While you can find captivating glimpses from Clare Waight Keller’s recent visit on her Instagram feed, she’s also been going for two decades, which suggests dedication more than FOMO (fun fact: she has a small collection of vintage kimonos). As she tells it, the influence had been percolating on several levels—from the appeal of Japanese fabrics to the late Hubert de Givenchy’s own connection to the country.But if the bicolored belt that cinched an angular column dress recalled a judo uniform obi, and the fantastical graphic motifs splashed across the men’s looks had a distinct manga flavor, her translations leaned more impressionistic than literal. Waight Keller is often strongest when she is most nuanced and she has a consistent track record of keeping her designs wearable. So even here, working in a more vivid and graphic register than what she proposed for years at Chloé, she’s covered a checklist of wardrobe items that are relatively risk-free while delivering at the luxury level. Slouched boots that slant from top to toe; a hoodie in satin chintz; blouses with ridged asymmetric front ruffles; and leather skirts hitting just below the knee—in each, there’s a trace of those aristocratic Givenchy codes that dovetail with her own British background. Note, too, the reworked retro flourishes—a zipper up the front of a stirrup pant to expose extra ankle, accentuated shoulders with funnel necks on tops, or else the way a sturdy white canvas jumpsuit is paired with a pleated bow blouse that spirals like a double helix. “There’s a powerful woman in there that I really love; she’s a very strong character who loves a strong shape—something that gives a real sense of fashion.”Ironically, in stripping away her predecessor’s neobaroque vibe, she has yet to establish the power-dressing panache for men that she’s offering to women—that is, beyond the range of well developed bags (i.e. the Jaw hybrid styles) which have strong curb appeal across both collections.This marks the first season since the passing of Monsieur de Givenchy in March and Waight Keller hinted that a more intentioned homage might be forthcoming. In the meantime, the collection’s evening looks—specifically the long-sleeved black dress showered with silver embroidery, and the gradient celadon and rust plissé lamé gown—further the couture spirit we’ve seen most recently at the Met Gala and at Cannes.
“It’s a real joy to be able to work at both ends of the spectrum,” she said. “It’s what I believe in: everything from the really simple everyday to the absolutely fantastic and fabulous.” You can believe she means it.
18 May 2018
It’s a big Sunday for Clare Waight Keller. She presented her second ready-to-wear offering this morning at Paris’s Palais de Justice, and beforehand, she spoke with assurance that her breakthrough couture collection will be well represented at the Academy Awards ceremony tonight in Los Angeles, fashion’s biggest global stage. Moving house and establishing a new voice—Waight Keller headed up Chloé for six years—is more difficult than fashion-watchers often give designers credit for. Two of fashion’s most recent success stories (Céline’s Phoebe Philo and YSL’s Hedi Slimane) put years between their gigs. Waight Keller didn’t have that option; in any case, she indicated today that she’s well on her way at Givenchy.Her starting point this season, she said backstage, was a pair of films,The HungerandB Movie: Lust and Sound in West-Berlin, 1979-1989, an examination of the city’s club scene at that time. Considering her recent design history, this was definitely playing against type, but Waight Keller made a surprisingly seductive argument for a gritty, trashed sort of glamour.Berlin holds a mythopoetic place in our cultural imagination—from the Weimar era (see the excellent new TV seriesBabylon Berlin) right on up to the current-day club scene. That certainly helped her cause. But more so did the assured, modern way she addressed Berliner tropes such as “sleazy” furs (her word). Those opening knockouts, with their assertive shoulders and cinched waists, were fake, by the way, and gloriously so. The fashion industry has turned a sharp corner on its stance on the use of animal fur, and it’s satisfying to see Givenchy joining the movement.Some of the guys’ looks, like the pleated leather pants, proved harder to update, but menswear is still new to Waight Keller. Women’s tailoring is her stealth strength and it could prove an asset when Céline refugees go looking for a new suit. Givenchy’s this season are powerfully yet leanly cut in menswear checks. Waight Keller likes the look of a single-button coat to the upper calf. Paired with graceful trousers and just a chain mail scarf, a black version of that coat was one of a number of compelling looks for after dark, many of which looked as though they were created with the lady dandy in mind. That’s also a Berlin thing; but really, it had to be the ecstatic reactions to her couture collection that informed the sleekly elegant and grown-up black-and-white evening offering. Countdown to the Oscars!
4 March 2018
Clare Waight Keller’s collection showed the mettle of a woman. Grace and dignity have been lacking in the eveningwear arena recently. If anyone questioned why Givenchy would need to step forth again into haute couture, Waight Keller has silenced them.“I wanted to use the strength of tailoring, but in a feminine way,” she said. Over the many formal evenings and red carpet events in Paris, London, New York, and Los Angeles that she had to face in her former career at Chloé, Waight Keller must have learned a thing or two about exactly how hard it is to get away with it without compromising a modern sense of womanhood. Sisters in the public eye—or anyone with the cash—who intend to stun all viewers without recourse to froufrou will take one look at the impeccable narrow coats and precise jackets the designer placed over glittering, complex gowns and recognize: That’s it!Poised empathetically between self-protection and self-projection, Waight Keller’s solutions come as massive relief to grown women at a time when it feels like female power is being eroded. Oftentimes, designers admit they’re intimidated by the houses they step into. Waight Keller immersed herself in the Givenchy archive and came back with the portion of research she wanted: “The structure and graphism Hubert [de Givenchy] had in his work at the beginning.” And then, she said, she absorbed it and got on with working with the house teams in “the complete freedom couture offers.” She added, “One-third of the collection is in black.”She denied that current politics had made her design so much of it. The sculpted, monastic necklines at the beginning of the show couldn’t have been fitted in ready-to-wear, she noted. But her black is nevertheless the color du jour, all over awards season, and it’s certain to attract many clients.Waight Keller talked about being inspired by the idea of a garden at night. “The idea of the moonlight catching the dresses,” she said. You saw that in the pieces that were gunmetal silver, hung with jet or crystal beads, and tiered—devices calculated to look great in movement. It wasn’t a completely perfect collection; she could have edited out the pink and multicolored rainbow dresses. But in this debut for Givenchy, Waight Keller distinguished herself as a woman who deserves to carve out her place in modern haute couture.
23 January 2018
The marble hall of the Palais de Justice is such an imposing venue—in vastness as well as symbolism—that Clare Waight Keller’s debut at Givenchy in early October was, to some extent, overwhelmed by both architecture and expectations. Simply by situating this pre-collection in a private home in Kent, south of London, the maison’s first female creative chief and native Brit has signaled a more personalized yet no less aspirational vision. She confirmed as much when we spoke by phone, since the Paris showroom visit did not sync with her weekly Channel commute. “There’s something about a domestic environment that feels relevant to me right now; it feels connected to the way we actually live and where we see ourselves,” said Waight Keller.The intimate outdoor-indoor setting also accommodates two of the season’s key statements: covetable faux fur and enveloping shearling coats, plus versatile pleated skirts and dresses. Yes, regarding the former, she’s a convert, convinced that today’s light, luxe alternatives measure up, especially when boasting graphic herringbone or zigzag patterning and high-impact volume. “It feels much more modern to be looking away from the past in that aspect,” said Waight Keller. “There are newer ways to presenting old ideas.”Apply this sentiment beyond fur and you arrive at the revival of the heritage 4G emblem, which existed long before broadband networks but has been relegated to Givenchy’s beauty packaging. Here, it’s been deployed boldly on sweaters and as subtler punctuation points. Get ready to see a lot more of it. But Waight Keller’s strongest mark on the house so far is how she is rethinking a familiar town-and-country mix. Everyday pieces have become color-blocked in hues as throwback as they are hyper-saturated (apparently, using red was a big deal for her). All those clean botanical and spotted prints are shared across the men’s and women’s collections (note the anthuriums, whichThe New York Timesrecently declared “an It flower”). Her emphasis on strong-shoulder tailoring, along with the presence of longer, fluid skirts and chic studded leather pants, all reference historic codes without stiffness. Meanwhile, her evening dresses, with their cascades of pleats and panels of velvet, are a deft departure from Riccardo Tisci’s adventures in transparency and tease at the couture to come.As for the men’s offering, the designer said she’s aiming to establish a broader base, which for the moment seems like a commercial hedge.
But the new GV3 bucket bag and pointed bicolor boots are destined to turn heads, just as the artisanal zodiac earrings prove a striking, individualized finishing touch (they were inspired by vintage cigarette cards). “You feel the strong character,” said Waight Keller, who is a Leo. Sure enough, that creative side is coming through.
5 December 2017
To mark the changing of the guard at Givenchy, the LVMH-owned house secured the Palais de Justice, a magisterial building of mid-19th-century vintage on the Île de la Cité, never before used for a fashion show. It’s Givenchy’s exclusively for the next three years and it’s dazzling. Clare Waight Keller, the British designer formerly in the creative director’s chair at Chloé, has inherited Givenchy from Riccardo Tisci, who left the label in February after 12 years. That’s an epoch by today’s they’re-in-and-then-they’re-out-again standards. While he was here, he transformed Givenchy into one of the red-hot labels of Paris fashion without so much as a nod in the direction of the archives. Which means that, in a season of debuts, this one was the most keenly anticipated.In a preview, Waight Keller said she did indeed look back at house founder Hubert de Givenchy’s dynamic sketches, and that she came to the conclusion that he started everything with the shoulder; also, that he was a fan of graphic print. She said she chose two: a clover from 1961 and the animal motifs of 1981. Her color cues came from the archives as well: lots of black and white with pops of mint and red. Waight Keller met the 90-year-old couturier last week and left their hour-long meeting feeling like she had his blessing. He confirmed her impressions about his design aesthetics.On the runway, that strong shoulder and the graphic patterns were much in evidence. She opened with a double-breasted brass-buttoned coatdress cinched with the season’s de rigueur fanny pack and followed it up with a breezy dress in three different sizes of clover print. Salable stuff, but not high fashion of the kind the industry has been trained to expect from Givenchy. Waight Keller, who had a lot of success with accessories at Chloé, introduced the GV3—a new multi-strap handbag named after Givenchy’s original address on Paris’s Avenue Georges Cinq—and her V-point knee-high boots looked cool and were designed with a woman’s eye for comfort and practicality. Men’s will prove a steep learning curve; her opening salvo looked like Tisci by way of Hedi Slimane. The show ended with evening, which is more Waight Keller’s element. Any one of the little black dresses could end up on Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, or Julianne Moore, all of whom sat front row. Still, the whole remained less than the sum of its parts.There is no right answer about how to approach a heritage brand in 2017. Do look at the archives or don’t. . .
Acknowledge your predecessor or ignore him. . . What’s required are clothes with a heart and soul, something to get the blood pumping. Waight Keller has a big support system behind her at Givenchy and she’s done this before. Let’s give her some time.
1 October 2017
This is the firstGivenchycollection sincethe announcement of Clare Waight Keller as artistic director, hence the temptation to look for clues of her early influence in a visit to the Paris showroom. But given that she only began settling into her role a few weeks ago, the communications team underscored that this triptych lineup of monochromatic looks came entirely from the women’s (and men’s) studios. The maison, nonetheless, seems determined to not appear in limbo: The now-familiar Infinity and Horizon bags were given myriad makeovers, and Sway, a new, well-developed hybrid style, could easily become a mainstay. A flagship opened on the Via del Babuino in Rome two weeks ago, which explains the lookbook locations spread out across the Italian capital.Each architectural backdrop loosely corresponded with the theme of each grouping, so what might qualify as the updated classics were positioned in front of the Museum of Roman Civilization with its mid-century modernist peristyle. Here, the construction of suiting in gauzy tulle and the total lace look comprised of a cape top and ample pleated lace trouser reaffirmed that Givenchy’s foundation—its workmanship—remains not only sound but seductive. Shooting the intensely blue “urban” repertoire at Corviale, an imposing Brutalist housing project southwest of Rome, offered an electrified contrast; a flounced workwear parka and filmy organza utility-pocket jumpsuit will appease the Givenchy constituency that hopes the label will maintain its cool curb appeal. The pieces saturated in fuchsia came closest to the all-red Fall collection presented uponRiccardo Tisci’s departure. Within the dark interior of the Palestra del Duce, the familiar Neo-Gothic influence appeared as a knockout dress assembled from a medley of lace; while the snarling Rottweiler sweatshirt made only a cameo this time, the house’s best friend had been cropped and tamed underneath an integrated silk blouse.Altogether, the collection offered a striking, stylized hedge before Waight Keller defines Givenchy on her own terms. But whereas placeholder collections typically aim for inconspicuous, this one unmistakably marks the moment with unabashed Givenchy Spring ’18 messaging, as if aware that people will wear the label loud and proud, no matter who is at the helm.
14 June 2017
Riccardo Tisci has left the building. As we wait for the news about his successor at Givenchy—all we could elicit today was an assurance that the announcement would happen “very soon”—the studio team has designed an interim collection. As these things go, this was a clever one. For Fall 2017, the atelier chose 27 looks from Tisci’s 12-year oeuvre, each one, as a PR rep put it, “as representative of the house codes as possible.” He didn’t mean Tisci’s codes; he meant Hubert de Givenchy’s, and he included lace and ruffles in that number. But, of course, the pieces in the new Fall collection bear Tisci’s stamp. If the house has a global image now it is not thanks to its founder or his earlier successors; it is due to the untested young Italian, barely 30, who took over in 2005.As famous and successful as he became, Tisci required a while to warm up and grow into his role, truth be told; the great majority of the pieces in this collection date from 2010 and later, which is five years after he took the job. That’s a point worth making, considering that these days creative directors are lucky if they last three years, let alone nearly twice that. Tisci may be the last of his kind, which isn’t a good thing for fashion. Consistency is the ugly stepsister of change in this business, but it’s just as essential. Maybe more. It takes time to establish a voice and make it connect across markets and media. Let’s remember that fact as we greet Givenchy’s new creative director in the coming weeks. Days? And let’s honor all that Tisci contributed to this house—most recently the best-in-show beaded flapper dress that Emma Stone wore when she picked up her Best Actress Oscar at the Academy Awards last month.And now a word for the studio team. They came up with the timely idea of presenting this interim collection entirely in red, the color of the season. Whoever replaces RT should be happy to know that these guys and girls have their eyes open.
6 March 2017
Riccardo Tiscihas had three bites of the cherry in showing and telling the story of his Spring couture collection. First, he presented these 13 extraordinarily beautiful dresses in motion, tagged onto the end of hisFall menswear showin Paris. Then, during the couture days, he exhibited them on suspended dummies at Givenchy’s headquarters, so that viewers could eyeball every sequin, and marvel at the peach embroidery of rooster, heron, and ostrich feather on a single transparent dress. And then lastly, he released the lookbook pictures you see here.Well, they did deserve their close-ups, confirming that the red checked dress with a high ruffled neck, a deep back, and 3-D sequins—the one with an overtly pioneer look about it—really is the best. The backstory behind the whole thing was revealing. Tisci had pulled late-19th-century portraits of Native American women wearing Victorian dresses off the Internet. He stressed he didn’t want to directly appropriate their cultures or to offend, but that’s where his eye was drawn: the stimulus that started the collection.
25 January 2017
It was Riccardo Tisci’s fortune to be the designer who was showing a collection in Paris as President Trump was being inaugurated. That, really, was an awesome position to be in, especially for an Italian who has long been inspired by and involved with America. “I try to be positive, to see things positively for the future,” said Tisci. His solution was to look “west at America, through the eyes of a child.” He added that his mood had lightened—a counterintuitive statement, perhaps, for someone who has long been classified as a Goth at heart. “For nine years as a designer, I did darkness,” he conceded. “I’ve just come out of that.” As Tisci put this show together, he said he felt “serenity.”No heavy shadow of history appeared to fall across his collection. As Tisci offered post-show, he’d been inspired by “stars, stripes, totem poles, and looking at incredible images of Victorian women in the West.” He hastened to add, “I don't like to steal anyone’s culture.” To give him his due, Tisci has been an industry pioneer in normalizing diversity in modeling, and his menswear show reflected that, all the way through to the casting of the various women-friends—Joan Smalls, Liya Kebede, and Kendall Jenner included—who wore his incredible couture collection at the end.But let’s begin at the beginning. Suits have been a subject of this menswear season—how to make them palatable to a new generation being the operative issue. Givenchy’s midnight blue single- or double-breasted tailoring, with oversize, contrasting buttons, made a convincing case; a theme which circled back for evening, with variations on black tuxedo suits, all of them sparkled up with diamante brooch-like jewels for buttons.Strong as those passages were, the nub of the collection is always what Tisci does to elevate streetwear to aspirational-designer-trophy level for his followers—and they’ll likely be stoked by the ideas he came up with here. Rather than follow the big-shouldered trend, he essentially shifted the silhouette to concentrate on playing around with striped, layered, elongated tunic shapes, worn over narrow trousers. The season’s status shirts came out as cartoony monster-face prints—a reference which seemed to hover nebulously between totemic imagery and Japanese Kabuki masks.
There was plenty more substance as well—great takes on duffle coats, cut in shearling, with sweeping collars and multicolored toggles; an upgrading of hoodies with the clever addition of silk scarves in place of drawstrings. It looked like believable, considered, designed fashion. You could see who’d want to buy it, and they weren’t being talked down to. It was a show which fully held attention, which is saying a lot, considering what Tisci was up against.
20 January 2017
Meryl Streep was wearing a mirror-embroidered dress by Riccardo Tisci at the Golden Globes on Sunday night. It was a low-key, modest look by the standards of today’s awards shows—where acres of cleavage and naked dresses have rather sadly become de rigueur—but thanks to Streep’s provocative, anti-Trump speech, it will go down in Givenchy history. Ten years from now when we talk about Tisci’s tenure at the house, that dress will feature prominently.The Pre-Fall lineup presented today in New York was at least partly a continuation of Tisci’s show for Spring. The mirror embellishments made reappearances, as did the mandala prints, this time on a flared pantsuit in icy shades of lavender. The collection was arranged by category: classic, fashion, and urban, with the mirrors and mandalas falling in the fashion category alongside a nipped-in trench accented with asymmetrical taped zippers. In the classic group, Tisci had cashmere camel coats and jackets with built-in silk scarves, and a lovely jet-beaded black tulle evening gown that came with a sandy-toned slip that suggested the look of a naked dress while remaining blessedly discreet. As for the urban section, it was inspired by American collegiate gear, and, as a member of Tisci’s design studio said—Tisci is in Paris working on the men’s and couture collections he’ll present later this month—it’s aimed at the brand’s youngest clients. Think leather motorcycle pants and lots of logos, the most notable example of which was a logo-intarsia’d mink baseball tee. It won’t go down in Givenchy history, but it’ll sell all the same.
10 January 2017
Riccardo Tiscipresented his new show en plein air in the Jardin des Plantes under a canopy of globe lights. It was a year ago that he tookGivenchyto a Hudson River pier in New York on a gorgeous summer night, but here in Paris there was a bite in the air. The crowd wrapped themselves in the silver Mylar blankets provided on each seat.We were outside again, he said afterward, because he’s been thinking about nature and sensuality. “Women are fighting for power, not only in America, but everywhere in the world,” he said. “So I wanted to do something more sensual and more powerful, and for me, that’s tied to nature.” Enter the trio of agate-print slip dresses layered over long tanks that started the show. They keyed the fiery color palette—red, orange, brown, and pink. But before Tisci really got into that, he sent out another trio, this one consisting of black pantsuits with silver zip details and the patch pockets seen in his June menswear. The models wore them shirtless, with giant agate pendants suspended from tortoiseshell chains.Back and forth it went between fitted, but not severe, dresses and sleek pantsuits. The dresses came in solid neutrals and solid brights, as well as flirty polka dots and stripes.Kendall Jennerwore an LBD printed with mandalas, a motif Tisci touched on last season; only here he did it in a lower key. All the color and print notwithstanding, this was a more subdued outing than Fall. As for the tailoring, it didn’t stray far from the template Tisci laid out with those first three suits, although he did venture a brown one with swingy flared pants and a glam series at the end embroidered with shards of colored crystal arranged in flowerlike patterns. No fashion conventions were broken here, nor did Tisci push his own personal design vocabulary too far, but this collection will keep the Givenchy customer in coquettish frocks and boss suits for the near future.
2 October 2016
DidGivenchyjust take two bites of the couture cherry, or was it more like three?Riccardo Tiscishowed his made-to-measure collection on the runway with his menswear collection in Paris, then shot the pictures you see here onNatalia Vodianova,Kendall Jenner, et al., after the show. And then, in an arrangement to capture the womenswear professionals and the clients, he suspended the same frocks on dress forms at Givenchy headquarters and asked people over to view them, by appointment, during couture week.The rules and schedules that used to apply to fashion are starting to shift in all sorts of unpredictable ways. Tisci’s main point was to demonstrate at close quarters how the clothes are made, and to provide couture customers with a commentary on possible purchases.The close-up view provided the revelation of the varieties of intricate pleating that went into creating the columns. Some are decorated with micro sequins, plastic paillettes, or tiny grommets. A couple incorporate large, flat bows at the waist, which were influenced, said Tisci, by the Hubert de Givenchy archive. There were two tailored outerwear pieces, decorated with mirrored embroidery, and that was the sum of the range on show—though Tisci noted that the templates are merely there as a starting point to be altered by clients when ordering.Givenchy wasn’t the only house to show clothes on dummies to press during couture week;GilesandMiu Miualso did, distributing lookbooks afterward. Perhaps this is the way things will be going, considering how expensive it is to fund runway presentations today. On the other hand, Givenchy doesn’t quite fit the catwalk-abandoning pattern, as it did show haute couture on supermodels, but to the crowd that attends the menswear shows instead of the haute customers who come to Paris during couture week.
7 July 2016
IsRiccardo Tisci, designer of some of the most assertive, even threatening, menswear in the world, mellowing? “I’ve been in a really good place,” he allowed backstage, after a Spring 2017 Givenchy show that, while peopled with warrior-like models, hulking in combat gear, somehow sounded a note of affection rather than aggression.It was long due.Givenchy’s menswear has been dark and foreboding for many a season: Last Spring Tisci erected his own prison; Fall was a vipers’ den. Emblematic of fashion? You hope not. Today’s collection was “much more spiritual,” allowed Tisci. “And happy! Images of sunshine!” He sounded as surprised as we were. Staged in the open air, there was an almost karmic lightness to flyaway, zippered panels at the hips, or nylon sportswear falling open into panes that seemed to effervescently lift up and away from the body. The sunshine was quite literal, too, refracted off multiple mirrors embroidered across hems, looping peplums, and tramlining zips. Those were a nod to Givenchy’s haute couture—Tisci added his Fall showing to his men’s, tagging on 13 slender couture looks to the end of his stream of butched-out, beefed-up, macho-man militia gear.The aforementioned doubtless sells—it’s something Tisci is required to produce, by the business’s suits and by his fan base. It’s not really a chore: He certainly enjoys designing clothes that emphasize masculinity, squaring the shoulder and puffing out the chest. This time, that was most effectively achieved by multiple zippered pockets, some attached to the coats, others strapped into a Desert Strike harness—a spin-off from a backpack that could oddly make viable commercial sense. Three times the space to store your junk, after all.Haute couture is known as the great paradox of fashion—it’s indicative of a house’s heavyweight credentials as a moneymaker, by the very fact it doesn’t make money. You know Tisci’s mirror-embroidered pieces will cost a king’s ransom, but they aren’t meant to sell in any great quantities. The other key decorative motif in the collection was a graphic morphing camouflage with dollar bill imagery—printing money. That’s what that grab bag of sportswear pieces undoubtedly spell for Givenchy, even if you couldn’t silence the niggling feeling that digital print has had its day, certainly as an exciting runway statement.
Although they’re often center stage, and always front-of-house in the salesroom, the immediately identifiable Givenchy graphics have never been the sum total of Tisci’s aesthetic. They’re simply the ones that are easiest read. The sum total is, actually, precisely that: no single style or item, but in the entirety of his fashion vision, and how adroitly he’s fashioned his Givenchy man. As the models filed past, there was no danger of thinking that this collection had come from the hand of another designer.Tisci’s shows are specific and distinctive, uncompromising and unapologetic. They’re entirely true to his vision, and his vision is, after over a decade at the helm, intrinsically tied with maison Givenchy. There’s a comfort, a happiness even, to that kind of security. Given the uncertainties of current designer firings and hirings, and the number of houses swirling without distinct leadership, surely there’s no better place for Tisci to be right now than here, at Givenchy, doing his thing.
24 June 2016
Just as on the runway, the lineup of lookbook images is always deliberate; it provides a trajectory that reveals how we’re meant to read a collection. The latestGivenchyoffering opened with a cropped, belled jacket and short skirt—both in crisp white, both bordered in gumball-size pearls—which reinforced the polished esprit at the heart of the house, althoughRiccardo Tisci’s neo-baroque flair is unmistakably there. This elevated look defined one of three themes that the creative director employed for Resort, and while it may not strike with the same graphic gutsiness as the ancient Egyptian falcon motif reprised from Fall, it suggests he’s finding new interest in the old Givenchy codes. See also the black double-faced jacket with a flattering basque and exposed seams; the matching zip tops and skirts in delicate tulle and lace; the contoured plissé soleil pieces; and even the latest Horizon handbag, which pivots toward a more mature sensibility without compromising on edge. Styling exercises, meanwhile, don’t come more fun than Look 7, an all-black ensemble consisting of four layers that successfully managed to fuseBreakfast at Tiffany’s with Beyoncé.Around this point, classic gives way to what Tisci conceived as the “skinhead romantic” grouping, where the curtain of tulle reappears in ghostly pink paired with a bustier dress supported by thick buckles and a day-to-night bomber. Thanks to wedge boots laced skyward or studded leather triangle bras intended to be exposed, the overall attitude ended up tough, seductive, and tailor-made for his empowered and extroverted tribe. The “urban” notion benefited from mixing logo T-shirts with color-blocked leather motorcycle pants and sport jersey dresses with jackets trimmed in dynamic scrollwork. Let it be known that Givenchy’s concept of camouflage consists of an abstracted paper money pattern.Alongside the women’s collection, a men’s proposal played off the same themes to different outcomes, so that the falcon visual was maxed out as a total athletic look or was heat-bonded onto jacket tails, while red striping and workwear paneling effectively blurred the line between daywear and nightclub.While both offerings were primarily shot on the streets of Naples, providing backdrops that spanned from refined to rundown, a denim range shot in studio rounded out the season.
Modeled byBella Hadid, the styles range from skinny with a shadow of stars replacing back pockets, to an ample trouser and jacket patterned in a grid of Swarovski crystals. They don’t share much aesthetic DNA with the Givenchy of yore, yet the workmanship is apparent. Plus, it never hurts to close a lookbook with a little sparkle.
9 June 2016
At the time of hisSpring ’16 Givenchy showin New York,Riccardo Tiscisaid the event marked an ending, putting a cap on his first 10 years at the house. That made his Fall show tonight a new beginning of sorts. Why not turn to Egypt, the cradle of civilization? The Carreau du Temple, home of Tisci’s earliest shows forGivenchywhen he was still an unknown, was transformed into a wooden maze for the occasion—not unlike inside the pyramids, Tisci pointed out afterward. The maze narrowed the audience’s field of vision; there were the people across from you and the models on the runway, but none of the celebrity watching and other distractions of a typical show. Somewhere around a corner wereBradley Cooper,Kanye West, Kris Jenner, andCiara.It was a novel, clever touch, and there was plenty to take in. Tisci traded the romance and simplicity of last season’s lingerie and tailoring for psychedelia and mysticism. Mandalas decorated blouses and dresses with exposed backs, and the Eye of Horus and other Egyptian iconography appeared on engineered print frocks. And that was just the print side of the story. Tisci also explored military tailoring, pairing his generously cut officer’s coats and jackets not with pants but with shorts and trompe l’oeil pumps–slash–knee boots. He trotted out leopard spots and python skin. The studding that was so prevalent at his men’s show in January reappeared here in a more minor key. And he also did some fabulous little metallic leather jackets pieced together to look like bird wings.Icarus? That’s Greek mythology, not Egyptian, but as a refresher, he was the son of Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth; against Dad’s advice, Icarus flew too close to the sun and fell into the sea. Death by hubris. Leaving the symbolism aside—always a safe bet—this was a familiar Givenchy collection, less a new beginning than a reworking of many of the signatures on which Tisci rose to fame. In that light, the pair of little black dresses with fur trimming on the collar and/or the short sleeves that looked less like Riccardo Tisci and more like Hubert de Givenchy were a happy surprise.
6 March 2016
Now here’s a peculiar thing: According to one of the arcane regulations of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the French governing body, in order to qualify as haute couture, a collection must contain 50 handmade outfits, for both day and night. Fifty! To ordinary eyes—which typically start to glaze over after about six looks, these days—the 12 womenswear silhouettesRiccardo Tiscislipped into theGivenchy menswear runway showwere enough to transmit his “couture” statement. Or at least, they were, when he followed up with an evocative video, showing the clothes in movement, intercut with close-ups of the glittering lines of minute crystal on tulle, the pentagon-shaped patchworks of snakeskin and velvet, the marrying of lace and leather, the rivets and the rivulets of bugle beading.Tisci’s couture was the first to introduce the sheer nude dress to fashion—an idea that, against all probabilities, proved prophetic as eventwear. There’s another black lace example as a reminder here. What looks newer, though, is the way he nailed the feeling for cloaks, matching them to the fabric of long dresses—not so much as a cover-up or coat substitute, but as a complete look. Let’s hope this one catches on, too.
27 January 2016
In a saturated, fondant-pink cube like a hollowed-out hunk of marzipan, lit with fluorescent tubes like a Dan Flavin sculpture,Riccardo Tiscishowed his latestGivenchycollection. Oddly, given the confined space and intense light, the theme was freedom. Tisci enjoys tackling big themes and abstract notions such as freedom or love or the dark obsessions of the soul. Translating those kinds of ideas into cloth is tricky. Nevertheless, in the end, he’s a fashion designer: It’s his job.The other problem with trying to wrestle those kinds of proto-philosophical musings into a bomber jacket is that it can all come off a bit glib. Where was the freedom, really, in Tisci’s Fall 2016 offering? The palette was controlled, the decoration precise. For Tisci, it was sort of plain. There were snakes on his plain—a new Givenchy house motto reared its head; it was a cobra. Maybe it had escaped its cage? It appeared half a dozen times as intarsias, prints, and odd cutout bomber jackets that looked a bit lumpy, as if said cobra had swallowed something oddly shaped.Freedom brings us, of course, to the land of the free: the U.S. of A., a land Tisci has been enamored with for years, even upping sticks to show his 10th anniversary collection there in September. Tisci’s interpretation this time round was actually America via Africa—Botswana, specifically, where renegade street gangs dress up in leather-heavy Marlboro Man drag in the kind of odd collision of cultures the designer adores. He felt free to throw in Berlin club kids and Moroccan colors for good measure, balancing his men atop a pointed-toe, Cuban-heeled cowboy boot. The cowboys got rhinestoned, with crystals and gleaming copper rivets the size of a dime and the color of a newly minted penny pocking the surfaces of coats, the groin of trousers, the plackets of denim jackets. You name it, it was riveted.As a critic, you didn’t see snakes, or screaming faces, or a crucified figure withGivenchyscrawled above. You saw pounds, dollars, yen, yuan—and maybe Botswana’s pula, although it’s unlikely Givenchy has a store out there yet. In other words, business as usual. Riccardo Tisci is one of the most successful menswear designers in Paris. You see echoes of his signatures—namely, the giant prints frequently layered over other giant prints, everything engineered to match perfectly—in multiple collections.
You also see them on the backs of multiple men, who throng Givenchy boutiques and pick over eBay in fervent search for more of the same. They’ll have a field day when this collection hits stores. In that respect, Tisci played to his strengths—his strength being commercial, this time at the expense of the creative. This collection was heavy on the metal, but light on new ideas, restating rather than innovating. Which is okay—every designer deserves a season fallow, pulling back in order to push forward. Tisci’s done plenty of pushing—he should feel free to rest on his laurels for a season or two. However, Paris menswear is throbbing with energy for Fall. Tisci’s timing was off.
23 January 2016
Roughly 24 hours before releasing its Pre-Fall collection images, Givenchy posted a video on Instagram that offered a few whiplash glimpses of Riccardo Tisci’s latest offering. Against the seductively sullen backdrop of Berlin, a subset of his recurring gang (Irina Shayk, Deion Smith, Leila Goldkuhl, Kris Gottschalk, John Kolic) appeared, united by an intimidating sense of style and director Matt Lambert’s skittish cutaways.In the spacious Avenue Montaigne showroom, meanwhile, the vibe was far calmer; here, the winter sun acted as a spotlight, singling out such pieces as a white lace-encrusted sheath, a sheer black tube skirt that nodded backward to Fall 2012, and—holy hue!—a fuchsia silk camisole-skirt combo. This wasn’t the only disruption to the binary black and white that ruled the Spring collection; pink sequins and gold thread formed a swirling floral motif on a nylon bomber, embroidered pansies burst forth from a black cardigan, and a motif of red flowers on silk chiffon seemed caught in motion blur. Also noteworthy: the return of a Givenchy monogram introduced in the last men’s collection; have fun finding the brand letters interspersed between stars, like a word search puzzle. It’s a graphic with staying power, whether as a knit or an embossed bag.The same could be said for most of the collection, which eschewed street style shock value for nuanced confidence. Pajama suiting, an oversize striped mohair cape, a shawl-collared camel coat, leather paneled jeans, and double-stacked platform loafers capitalized on the classic without being basic. Double-faced pleated jersey and smocked leather and lace went even further. None of these details—certainly not the cosmic sequined and Swarovski-studded caftan over a vintage-inspired gown—would register in an Instagram video. But props to the sharply edited urban bohemians for setting the scene.
7 January 2016
As more than a thousand people traversed the rush hour–choked West Side Highway and flooded onto Pier 26—all dressed to the nines (or maybe the threes or twos, given the skimpiness of a few notable looks)—it’s fair to say that one of the very last things they were expecting was to be immersed in a contemplative experience. Yet this is what they got fromRiccardo Tiscion the night he brought hisGivenchyshow to New York City, coinciding with the 14th anniversary of 9/11. There was no all-out gig fromRihannaandKanye West(as had been the speculation when “performances” were mentioned), and no inaugural walk fromCaitlyn Jenner, which had been optimistically rumored, given Tisci’s strong credentials as fashion’s first champion of transgender models.Instead, with the aid of his coconspirator, the artist Marina Abramovic, and the cooperation of a staggering sunset across the Hudson, Tisci made his show into a meditation on the losses of 9/11, and on slowing things down in our heads, perhaps to mourn, but also to remember how lucky we are to be alive. The audience—the seated professionals and celebrities, and the standing public—were made to wait and watch for a good hour, absorbing the spectacle of blue sky and white and pink-tinted clouds as Abramovic’s slow-moving performers, dressed in white shirts and black pants, acted out simple, strenuous, and repetitive rituals—one with a ladder, another with a tree, a third with a faucet gushing water.Stop!Abramovic seemed to be saying.Slow down and feel something!And meanwhile, in the foreground, the nonstop parade of personalities kept coming, and kept on being photographed and Instagrammed.As far as style is concerned, this was also Tisci’s opportunity to revisit and refine the ideas he’s been working through for his whole career. This year—in which a Givenchy store opens in New York City—is Riccardo Tisci’s tenth at the house, and there was a serene sense of celebration and coming of age amongst the clothes. It was a collection which spelled out and repeated almost-calligraphic black and white variations of the same sentences: Ivory slip dresses and rouleau-strapped camisoles with lace edges, worn over excellently tailored black pants cut to taper gently over pointed shoes. Supple crepe tuxedo jackets with tails, soft kimono coats, and transparent organdy trenches glimmering with jet embroidery. Many, many body-skimming sparkly silver shifts.
Aficionados of Tisci’s track record in Paris would also have re-applauded the most spectacular of his couture dresses—one with a degrade feather effect, and another with leather patches applied on tulle in the shape of alligator skin—which had never before been shown on live models (as opposed to showroom dummies). And then there was the face decoration, taken to the nth degree of freakishly beautiful elaboration, in studded golden jewelry, tulle frills, and lace.That calm exposition of skill and taste, which surely grows out of nineties memories, will stay in the minds of everyone who was on Pier 26 tonight. The tragedy of 9/11 can never be overwritten by any fashion show—and nor should it be—but at the same time, anyone who condemns fashion for concerning itself with current feelings is wrong, too.
12 September 2015
Without quite casting him as a human rights activist, Riccardo Tisci's new collection for Givenchy was concerned with the state of the incarcerated male. There was a cage on stage. The collection's signature embellishment was a huge jailer's key dangling round the models' necks. But there was more to this than Tisci's well-established way with a dramatic presentation.Not for the first time his religion was his guide. If his Instagram account scarcely paints a picture of a life lived in pursuit of spirituality, Tisci is serious about his Catholic roots. His inspiration was Jesus Christ, the most famous prisoner of all time and, as such, an icon for men in jail. It fascinated Tisci that Jesus is just as much a pinup on a cell wall as are pictures of pneumatic beauties torn from magazines. So he put them both on his catwalk.Jesus was depicted in his thorn-crowned passion across T-shirts, sweatshirts, and men's skirts. He was printed ID-style on the oversize tees that are familiar from jail-based reality TV shows. Jesus was also a shadow print, Shroud of Turin-style, on prison denims and overalls. (This particularly spectral effect was one of Tisci's best-evers.) But alongside Him on the catwalk were women who, in their feathered, petaled, fringed, and lacey dresses in cool ice-cream colors, could scarcely be any less of a jailbird's fantasy. And when Naomi Campbell closed the show in nothing more than a glittering jacket thrown over a black bikini and thigh-highs? Well, milord, the case rests. She was the bad girl that bad boys would see in their dreams.Tisci played out the tension across a gratifyingly tight collection. If the overalls made the biggest impression, the knitted kilts over pinstriped pants (like sweaters tied round the waist, Tisci explained) were an evolution of his modern tribal gear. The T-bar sandals that shod the collection were a welcome alternative to the socked horrors we've been seeing for the past while.
26 June 2015
Riccardo Tisci has been at Givenchy for 10 years and has never touched denim, at least not on the women's side of things. But—surprise—it made an appearance in his new Resort collection today, which was shown in a suite at the Mercer Hotel. A dark-rinse shirt with playful multicolor snaps and high-waisted, ever-so-slightly cropped jeans with raised front seams occupied the relaxed, casual space that boxy sweatshirts and other athletic references have in his recent collections.Otherwise, though, the new lineup revisited and renewed the signatures Tisci has been developing over the last decade. The Victorian silhouette of his latest runway show carried over into a peplumed, sleeveless jacket boasting a single oversize button at the waist and an even more distinctive peplum skirt with generous cutouts at the sides of the knees. Absent last season's jet beading, a leopard print lifted from Robert Mapplethorpe photographs provided the collection's graphic interest. Tisci's got a thing for erotic photography; Carlo Mollino was a reference point for Fall '14. These leopard spots, like the ones found in that show, won't be for the tame. Tailoring, always a Tisci forte, came one of two ways: strict and masculine, as in a sharp jacket and trim trousers cut from a lace-textured silk, or with the rounded contours of mid-century couture. We preferred the efficiency of the former. But speaking of contour, his evening pieces were particularly body-conscious this season, with draped and ruched shoulder lines and sky-high slits. They'll be popular with the designer's celebrity friends.
17 June 2015
Katy Perry, Jessica Chastain, Amanda Seyfried, and Kim and Kanye, of course, were throwing off some serious heat at Givenchy tonight. Talk about a scene. Ten years into his run at the LVMH-owned house, Riccardo Tisci's still the hottest ticket in town. But if the front-row situation was cause for neck craning, it had nothing on what came down the runway.We're not just talking about the first black velvet dévoré dress. That was fairly conservative by Givenchy standards. It was also the model's kiss curls and braids, and her giant septum ring and faceful of glued-on gems, that made you sit up for a better view. Tisci's done septum rings before, but tonight's face jewelry was at another level, and it was one side of the designer's Fall mash-up. "Victorian-chola girl," is how he described the collection, and, as usual, it was a deeply personal trip.As an Italian, Tisci has always had a thing for Latin archetypes. The California chola girl qualifies. The clothes themselves, though, hued closer to the Victorian side of the story he was telling backstage. It's a period that's been in the air this season, maybe because of the Costume Institute's recent exhibition of mourning attire,Death Becomes Her. Tisci is the kind of guy who would probably get off on the notion that widows were once considered a threat to the social fabric. But remember, people have been calling him a goth, the dark side of Victoriana, since his very first couture collection for Givenchy, back in 2005.Many of the details here were things he's touched on in previous collections. The subtle Catholic cross stitched into the bodice of a dress, the corseted and peplumed jackets, the dresses over cropped pants—they'll all look familiar to Givenchy fans. But everything was taken to a higher level: The execution was flawless and the clothes' dark allure was more intense than ever. The collection showcased Tisci's indisputable skills as a tailor, but it also underscored his experience as a couturier, even if the house no longer puts on a formal couture show. The final series of looks were ornately embroidered with jet beads—on a strapless bustier dress; on a slimline, bias-cut net gown; and on a pair of tailcoats with wide, short sleeves. You'll see the dresses on a red carpet sometime soon, very likely on one of tonight's front-row stars. As for the face jewels? Tisci indicated backstage that some would indeed be offered for sale. Like everything else here, they were scintillating.
For Tim Blanks' take on Givenchy, watch this video.
8 March 2015
Riccardo Tisci has often used his Catholicism as an inspiration, but the thing about tipping your cap to God is that you have to acknowledge his opposite number, and that's what it felt like Tisci was doing with his latest menswear offering. The show notes referred to his "darkest obsessions," and there was a satanic tug to the presentation, with its red and black color scheme, its echoes of voodoo and candomblé, and its catwalk of red glitter, like a highway to hell. Pat McGrath explained that the gothic extremities of the makeup she'd created were all extemporizations of African masks, but there was something fiendish about them.Tisci said he's been obsessed with collecting things his whole life. The venue was decorated with an assemblage of vaguely spooky bits and pieces you might find in a desert town south of the border—the sort of place you'd otherwise speed through on a road trip because you felt like bad things had happened there. Except that, for Tisci, that kind of journey represented freedom. "That's what this collection is about," he claimed. And, in a way, that was the story the presentation told, beginning with uptight pinstriped looks liberated by Native American-like patterns, ending in dégradé sequins. But throughout the show there were presentiments of something sinister: models with their faces eerily obliterated, or their lips stitched shut, or their skin dotted with beads as if to suggest an infection. The women who walked in the show were sloe-eyed daughters of darkness, vampish succubi. "The collection's very spiritual," claimed Tisci, but this might have been one time when spirit surrendered to flesh, which was probably a smart business move, because it's hard to imagine his fans having much problem with that."The Devil is not always bad," Tisci said after the show, with a knowing smile. Anyway, for his retailers it was God who was in these details. They were happy to see fewer of the T-shirts and sweats that have been the engines of Givenchy's growth, and more of the sharp tailoring that is the other side of the Tisci coin.
23 January 2015
If the Spring collection projected some kind of sexual reawakening for Givenchy, then Pre-Fall made a strong statement that there is to be no messing around. With a tight edit of 26 women’s looks, Riccardo Tisci moved through suiting, layering, pleating, printing, embroidering, and all-around impressing—because none of this, of course, was as simple as it seemed.The lineup began with essential black pieces that were neither exclusively day nor night thanks to high-contrast ivory detailing, sporty bands of neoprene, blouse collars punctuated with pearls, or a ribbon of silk tacked to a skirt like a misplaced ruff. Repurposed as a belt, those bands also served as a reversible leather leitmotif, weaving through strategically placed slits in mink or military melton wool. The collection then advanced to Tisci-approved polka dots—which is to say, tiny rubberized crosses on chiffon or silk cady. Later on, they recurred as Swarovski embroidery, precisely spaced across a floral-printed, full-length gathered dress. Funny how press notes described the motif as “poisonous romantic flowers” when it was really just baby’s breath. Then again, adorning a techno trench modeled by a redheaded Frankie Rayder, it passed as grown-up goth.The fact that Tisci covered various generational and (presumably) budgetary bases made this collection an appealing outlier for him. Labor-intensive pleating, as one example, was applied to an entry-level jersey jacket dress, as well as a lacquered python skirt that required 60 hours of workmanship. Skirts, generally, were fuller and kissed the calves; longer redingotes felt fresher than the bombshell slinky dress or leather bomber. Even the 10 men’s looks featured leaner layering for broader reach. (It remains to be seen which Givenchy-faithful star couple will be the first to sport the matching carmine-collared camel coats.)Spring’s Tyrolean-style racy laced bodices returned in a supporting role for Pre-Fall; one was paired with a covetable beaver-paneled varsity jacket with down-filled mohair sleeves. Another holdover from last season: footwear styles mounted onto a centrally placed stiletto so that sleek boots or classic T-bar spectator wedges appeared as if nailed to the ground like mannequin feet. Word is, the shoes are well balanced. The collection certainly was.
8 January 2015
Scroll through Instagram and you get a whole lot of different takes on Riccardo Tisci's sensational show tonight: gypsies,Game of Thrones, Joan of Arc. One thing everybody could agree on: These were the baddest bitches on a Givenchy runway in a long time. That, and it was hands down the sexiest collection of the season so far.As Tisci's interest drifted toward the streetwear scene in the last couple of years and he turned the designer sweatshirt into a covetable (and highly lucrative, no doubt) commodity, his collections lost some of the unabashed sexual heat he was once known for. Well, it came roaring back from the first look out here: a little black dress with grommeted lacing between the breasts, worn with peep-toe boots, the tops of which nearly grazed the skirt's hem.After the sex factor, the next thing you noticed was how worked these clothes were, some as elaborately as haute couture. Black-and-white latticed jackets and coats, each more ornately decorated than the last with whipstitching and filigree; Roman gladiator dresses in studded leather backed with lace; fringed tinsel sweaters with giant jeweled medallions nestled at the chest; and, for something a little more low-key—though, to be honest, the one thing this collection didn't offer was much in the way of variation—second-skin black knits with corset lacing tucked into super-high-rise jeans.For the record, Tisci said his reference points were Tyrolean costumes, vintage pinball games (which explained the way the models zigzagged through the crowd), and his earliest days at Givenchy, nearly 10 years ago now. "In the beginning, when I started, it was much more tough and sexy," he said. "I feel like women today tell me that's what's missing from the market." Certainly that's true this season, when so much of fashion has gone boho.Earlier this summer, rumors circulated that Tisci was headed toward an exit from Givenchy and about to take on a new challenge. We gave up playing the designer-musical-chairs guessing game a while ago, but there was clearly no sense of wavering in this collection. The one word that kept coming to mind about Tisci's take-no-prisoners, rock 'n' roll warriors?Committed.
28 September 2014
Riccardo Tisci turns 40 in a month. It's the kind of watershed anniversary that inspires pensive reevaluation in some men. Maybe Tisci is one of them. For his Givenchy show tonight, he went all the way back to his roots with a collection that recalled his first catwalk efforts: the tailoring, the churchy monochrome strictness (black jacket, white shirt, black tie), the school uniform, the sports influence a lot more sublimated than it would subsequently become. The beefy models in their skullcaps looked like the kind of toughs who might hang out on street corners in the south of Italy, where Tisci was born. It was almost as though he was street-casting for a private army. And the handful of women's outfits he showed would easily have dressed their molls. (They had a sexy-widow chic that was reminiscent of Dolce & Gabbana's early days.)Tisci also reintroduced romance to his menswear by making his favorite flower, gypsophila, also known as baby's breath, the presentation's visual relief. By show's end, the floral effect was a crust of pearl-studded embroidery on the back of a bomber jacket. It was still, however, muted in comparison to his past extravagances, which underscored the impression that this offering was some kind of holding pattern for Tisci. He is still young enough that he could move his career forward from this revisited starting point to a completely different path than the one he's already taken. Imagine, no Rottweilers, no Madonnas, no mutant Bambis. This collection certainly felt like enough of a blank slate to spark speculation about possible future directions for the designer.
26 June 2014
You knew you were in for something different from Riccardo Tisci when you saw the runway. For the past two seasons, the models seemed miles away from the front row as they did their loops around the Halle Freyssinet. Tonight you could reach out and touch them as they breezed past you down the carpeted catwalk. The intimate setting suited his new direction: The man who gave the world the designer sweatshirt has grown up. This was a very womanly, very French collection, and it was just as convincing as when Tisci was looking at the street. "This time it was about celebrating elegance and bon ton," he said backstage. "My own bon ton, of course."The trio of dresses that opened the Givenchy show cued the new mood: softly printed, just sheer enough to offer a glimpse of a bra underneath, and worn with black stockings and strappy heels. Tisci's ladies were not quite models of decorum, as would become clear as the show progressed and the animal prints got bolder and more colorful. By the end, the butterfly intarsia on Jamie Bochert's gown was so magnified it was essentially abstract—fierce and wild. Tisci's pretty is laced with plenty of sex—the show had the erotic charge of a Carlo Mollino photograph.But for every pussy-bow blouse and dress, there was also a powerfully cut suit. Tisci's avant-garde tendencies have held the spotlight in the past, but tailoring just may be what he's best at. His pants this season are high-waisted and full through the leg with the graphic Bauhaus-inspired banding at the pockets that he used in his men's collection in January. The new jacket is cropped and boxy. Three sharp outfits in glossy brown leather trimmed in fur suggested he still has his eye on the street, but the overwhelming impression here was one of sophisticated luxury. See the leopard-spot coat edged in beaver and astrakhan, or the blush-pink fox with the metal grommets. Fur even featured on some of the evening pieces, others of which combined simple pleated black skirts with densely beaded sleeveless bodices.Nobody missed the sweatshirts.
1 March 2014
Fashion empowers. Givenchy's Riccardo Tisci loved basketball when he was a child. Decades later, when success as a designer had opened doors for him, he was able to learn about a dozen new worlds. The lines on a basketball court; the lines of the Bauhaus; epochal twentieth-century design movement: past, present, future gracefully eliding on a catwalk in Paris in a collection of clothes for men on January 17, 2014. Sound portentous? Well, Tisci has a habit of bringing that out in people, such is the nature of his grandiose presentations.Today's was centered on a basketball court whose markings were picked out in neon. The models walked with hair slicked to their heads, which were wrapped tightly in nets. They looked like members of a Latino gang. But, insisted Tisci, that was how a gentleman in the twenties, contemporaneous with the Bauhaus, would have preserved his look when he slept, and gang members were simply borrowing from that tradition. A delightful notion indeed, especially when it was hardly bygone male beauty regimens that dictated the tone of the collection.Rather, it was a casual new take on tailoring—trousers looser, puddling at the ankle; jackets elongated, coat-length to create a new suit—and an abstract approach to graphics. If his rottweilers and Madonnas have made Tisci one of the most identifiable, and copied, designers in the world over the past few years, here he shelved the figurative in favor of swooshes of paint and linear Bauhaus-influenced strands of color. He also defined the line of garments with zippers. That won't put the fakers off for long, but today, in this moment, Givenchy had an elegant severity that underscored Tisci's role in turning the sweatshirt into this season's high-fashion essential.
16 January 2014
Every designer is a mash-up artist, but Riccardo Tisci relishes the mix more than most. Africa. Gustav Klimt. Bauhaus. They all came together in his bold new Pre-Fall lineup for Givenchy—Africa in the primary color scheme, Klimt in the mosaic prints, and Bauhaus in the geometric color-blocking, not only on trouser legs and the hem of a tailored jacket, but also on a fantastic feather chubby, its plumes exactingly sheared to accentuate its graphic lines.Tisci sees the pre-seasons as a time to reinvent past successes, so there was the Perfecto from last Fall, done here in trompe l'oeil style on a wool coat, or shown on its own in a bright mosaic print. Spring's halter gowns also got a refresh; the best came in a butterscotch-colored plissé leather with a knit bodysuit underneath. A cherry-red sequined cocktail dress that draped across the torso was likewise reminiscent of his recent runway show. But Tisci looked forward, too.He's had a personal fixation with polo shirts since he was a teenager, and they made their first appearance in a Givenchy women's collection today. Tucked into the cutout waistbands of long full skirts worn with flat men's shoes, their boxy, oversize shapes were all but camouflaged. He hinted that we'd be seeing more of them in his men's show later this month.
5 January 2014
Tonight at Givenchy the photographers were kicking up a fuss about Kim and Kanye, as usual. We were back at the Halle Freyssinet, and the show was once more in the round accompanied by live performers. But beyond those first-impression factors, we saw a very different Riccardo Tisci. The hothouse flowers, the Disney deer, the mad bunching of fabrics around the waistline from Fall—all gone. In their place was something that was by comparison rather restrained, every last look gliding out calmly on flat sandals.Tisci is one of the most popular high-fashion designers working today; members of his fan club are instantly identifiable in their graphic tees and sweatshirts. Backstage he hinted that it was time to do something else, and smartly so. He had the same inclination a year ago and turned to ecclesiastical ruffles. For 2014, he's done a lot of thinking about Japan and Africa. "It's a car crash of the two cultures—the fragility of Japan and the draping of Africa," he said. To underline his point, Tisci had a smoking pileup of vintage Benzes, BMWs, and Jaguars in the center of the runway.The crash was lurid in its made-for-Instagram way, a counterpoint to the clothes, which were elegant not quite to the point of refusal. Kimono-inflected suits came with twisted lapels, flaring sleeves, and interplays of matte and shine, with a filmy little layer between jacket and pants—like stepping out the door in your silk robe and pajamas. Dresses were draped a hundred different ways: from a ring below the throat, from an integral necklace that dipped to the navel, from a rugged leather strap slung over the shoulders like suspenders. To begin, Tisci showed them in stretch jersey, and by the end they were awash in pastel embroidery, or pleated and strewn with sequins, slinking quickly into flashy territory. The jersey dresses were the ones that resonated. They were thousands of miles away from last season, and still indisputably Tisci.
28 September 2013
Nerd Africa? That was Riccardo Tisci's label for his Givenchy collection, though it wasn't the first thing that came to mind when his distinctly un-nerdy warriors had filed off the catwalk. Techno-tribalism maybe; Tisci's prints were based on the technology of sound dissected and reconfigured as tribal patterns. Boom boxes and reel-to-reels and home studios broken down into their component parts, rearranged in a perfectly symmetrical pattern, detailed in bright primary colors—that was Tisci's news for today. The designer works the same silhouettes season after season—formal in precise tailoring, sporty in shorts over leggings with a sweatshirt and/or parka on top—and lets his prints do the heavy lifting for the collection.No surprises there, because his prints have effectively functioned as Tisci's autobiography up till now. This chapter was all about his shift in affection from Latin America to Africa. He said he loved the freedom of African boys, the way they layered clothes. He was also remembering images of small kids carrying huge boom boxes. But Tisci's tribes were actually a pretty catholic bunch this time round. (That's small "c," by the way, though there was a mention of Jesus in this collection as a reminder that Tisci is the most Catholic of contemporary designers.) All the stripes echoed Africa, but they looked like rugby stripes, too. He also dipped into L.A. skate culture, a recent fascination.It's all going to make the Tisci tribe even more visible than it already is. Next spring will see streets streaming with striped teens. But that's an upbeat image, just like the collection itself. "It's a love moment," Tisci happily admitted backstage. Yep, love came knocking when he wasn't looking for it—and it couldn't help showing itself on the catwalk.
27 June 2013
Riccardo Tisci had the show of his career in March, and he followed it up by cohosting the Costume Institute'sPunkshow in May and picking up the CFDA's International Award last week. "This year has been beautiful and amazing for me," he said. It's no wonder his Resort collection had such an upbeat, optimistic feel.He started with a series of layered white lace looks, one of which was worn by Joan Smalls to the CFDAs. They were gorgeous, and they reverberated throughout the presentation. In the mix was a confetti print, and a camouflage rendered not in shades of green, but in a collage of different floral patterns. If you looked closely, you could see the purple pansies from the panther collection, and the pink roses from Fall. Crystal baubles with spikes in onyx and mother-of-pearl added sparkle.Tisci took cues from his March show for his Resort silhouette, as well. Fall's bomber-jacket bustier hybrids morphed into more season-appropriate belt-parka combos. The dresses over pants he did in black-on-black on the runway were rendered here in white-on-white. He mentioned Holly Hobbie rag dolls as an inspiration, a reference point that couldn't be more unlikely. Fashion's favorite Goth? Not this season, at least.
9 June 2013
Just beautiful. Riccardo Tisci's Givenchy show tonight was one of those fashion moments that true believers slog through four weeks of shows for. It gave you goose bumps. Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, a longtime friend of the designer's, performed three songs, establishing a mood that was heartfelt and tender. He opened with "You Are My Sister." Tisci, of course, is the youngest of nine children, all the others girls. This collection was the Givenchy frontman at his most personal and romantic, riffing on pieces from his eight-year history at the house, the faint whiff of nostalgia balanced by its fierce nowness.Swarmed by friends and fans backstage, he said, "I always go to the Givenchy archives. By accident I was in the room with all my stuff, and I found things I did when I was younger that I did here in different ways. It's eight years this season that I've been at the house. I was like a gypsy—you know, gypsies are always recycling old clothes. It was really one of the most fun collections I've done in my career."Fun for the audience, too, who checked off the references as they came strutting by on striped snakeskin boots. No one is more responsible for fashion's current fixation on the sweatshirt than Tisci; acknowledging the fact, he opened with a new one, its front emblazoned with Bambi, more Disney-cute than his previous prints. A grunge element came through in plaids and leathers, and oversize sweaters got a fair share of his attention, too; one was paired with a sheer tulle ankle-length skirt embroidered with purple and yellow flowers that called to mind the designer's panthers and lilies collection.As boyish as the sweatshirt is, one of Tisci's big ideas this season put the accent on the feminine. A significant number of the looks were cinched at the waist with Perfectos whose tops had been shorn off—glorified belts, really, that created a provocative, peplumed silhouette. And let us not forget the flowers and paisleys, which bloomed and swirled on butch jackets and sheer femme skirts, in lush contrast to the monastic whites and blues of Spring. The models wore matching bracelets from which dangled big, engraved medals. A fitting accessory for what could very well go down as the show of the season.
2 March 2013
Riccardo Tisci won't be presenting a couture collection for Givenchy next week. "So I wanted to make a much more couture collection for menswear," he said after his presentation tonight. There was an ulterior motive. Much as he loves seeing people around the world in the Givenchy tees and sweatshirts that have become a virtual uniform for Kids Today, he was keen to challenge himself—and them—by offering something more chic, more…well,couture-ish. And there it was, in experimental new cuts, collarless and lapel-less, and in a new depth of fabrication. For instance, the signature printed tees now came in cashmere, velvet, taffeta, or leather rather than the usual jersey.The collection was Tisci's love letter to the U.S.A. "I've been obsessed with America since I was a kid," he explained. "It's the typical Italian dream of someone who wants to be somebody." But it wasn't the typical America he celebrated. Two concentric circles of candles had a distinctly occult vibe. ("A séance or an exorcism," suggested DJ Honey Dijon.) The show had barely begun when a pentagram appeared on an argyle cashmere vest. It signposted the show's presiding spirit, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work is one of Tisci's longtime passions. His monochrome signature echoed throughout in images of flowers, neoclassical statuary, the Stars and Stripes, and, always, sex. "Everything related to America but in a very dark way," said Tisci. "This is the dark side of my personality." Last season, he was on the side of the angels. This time round, it was the devil's turn.He's always used sports references. Here there were gridiron jackets that looked as stitched together as Frankenstein's monster. Such was the shadowy suggestiveness of Tisci's designs that even something as normally benign as the parka knotted round the waist of one black-leather-shirt-and-shorts-clad model took on a sinister import. "Sinister" also suited a leather-patched duffel in a glazed charcoal tweed, a leather-chested blouson whose seams were articulated with big silver zips…in fact, the adjective seemed appropriate for the provocatively overwrought tone of the entire collection. Tisci was pushing hard, maybe too hard. But too much has never been enough for him. Can he keep it up?
17 January 2013
It must have been the ruffles. After his hyper-feminine collection for Spring, Riccardo Tisci has turned to the hyper-masculine work of the Italian designer Walter Albini, and his countryman, the architect Gio Ponti. Pre-fall is all sharp angles, with both geometric patch-working and color-blocking figuring prominently. Many looks were sliced at the shoulder; the asymmetric silhouette was one of the big successes of his last show, and he revisited it here, but along stricter, neoclassical lines. Even the color palette—white, black, brown, and tan—came off a bit butch. Flat men's shoes accessorized all the looks, driving the point further home.Touches of lace lent a welcome softness. Button-downs were elaborately constructed with the stuff, almost like mosaics, and it was also stitched together Rorschach-style on a pencil skirt. Tisci hasn't completely finished with ruffles, either, and that's good. They added some sensuality to a collection that came off a little cool. Today, they had a less formal feel than they did for Spring, accentuating and decorating the waistline of one of his signature skirt-pant combos, or trailing down the front of an easy cashmere jersey dress.For evening, he kept the story streamlined, showing one-sleeve long dresses with an open side seam that revealed men's trousers. No red-carpet fodder here. He's saving that for the awards circuit and for his dates at this year's Met gala, where he'll play cohost.
6 January 2013
"Back to the roots," Riccardo Tisci said after presenting his beautiful, quite refined collection for Givenchy. He was talking about the house's founder, Hubert de Givenchy, and his Parisian couture of the sixties, but Tisci might as well have been discussing himself. In his earliest days at Givenchy, seven years ago now, he explored his Italian Catholic heritage, and he did so again for Spring. Back then, his point of view was darkly romantic, gothic even. Today he let the light in. Not only in terms of his palette—baby blue, his color of choice, joined white, black, and shades of gray—but also in terms of fabric. Organza ruffles like angel's wings were pinned down by gold and silver clips at the shoulders or in the middle of the back, as if without them they might just flutter away.The show's music echoed the runway's conversation between past (both recent and distant) and present. At one end of the Lycée Carnot, Mathias Lecomte played an organ installed on a giant wooden stage, and at the other, the Berlin DJs Discodromo were installed at the decks inside a Mylar-covered cube.Tisci's Catholicism turned up in other ways, too: in the priest collars on his sixties shifts; in the voluminous bishop sleeves on a striking black jacket; in the split skirts worn with crisp, dry blazers and pants, like church vestments. Given the nature of his fixations this season, and the super-controlled way he executed them (earlier this week at Balenciaga, Nicolas Ghesquière also taught us that ruffles can be minimal), the collection didn't deliver the sexual-depth charge that Tisci is so capable of. A quick look at the gold chokers and the Carlo Mollino-inspired Plexiglas, plastic, leather, and nailhead heels, though, confirms that it didn't lack for eroticism, either. Not for nothing did one of Tisci's faithful greet him backstage with the phrase "I'd like to be a Givenchy nun."
29 September 2012
Riccardo Tisci brought together dueling impulses in his Fall Couture collection: On the one hand, he returned to the simple lines of the sixties, when Hubert de Givenchy was at the center of the Paris scene. On the other, he riffed on the look of gypsies, specifically the gypsies you encounter in present-day southern Italy, where he's from. The haute and the street—it's the kind of mix this designer loves.After seven years at the house, the Tisci codes are instantly recognizable, and copied nearly as quickly. Beaded fringes will be multiplying at the fast-fashion brands as quickly as machines can string them. Here at the mother ship, of course, the beads were painstakingly strung by hand, red and black ones in a pattern that together created a mosaic design to match the embroidery on the top of a floor-length cape. It was the collection's pièce de résistance, and under it, the model wore a jumpsuit made from jersey on top and beaded velvet on bottom, complete with attached open-toe, kitten-heel booties.Beyond It factor, which he has in spades, technique is the thing at Tisci's Givenchy. The black nappa fringe on a dress boasting intricate leather embroidery extended all the way to the ground, and a halter-neck gown came with a built-in cape that was obsessively embroidered with sequins not on its outside but on its inside.You felt like Tisci was fighting his own impulses with a pair of nude-colored dresses that featured sheared mink bodices and narrow, unadorned wool and cashmere skirts. And yet that was intriguing, too. It's more than likely that his signatures—a lavishly beaded and fringed cardigan that shaded from cappuccino at the neckline to deep espresso at its hem, for instance—will be the collection's hot tickets. But those restrained column gowns pointed in a new direction, one that's worth exploring further.
2 July 2012
Religion and sex have always gone hand in hand, the basest instincts transmogrified into spirituality—even martyrdom—by ardent denial. As a good Catholic boy from Southern Italy, Riccardo Tisci has a finely tuned sense of the power and allure of both saintliness and sin, but he's never managed to integrate them quite as successfully as he did tonight. The setup—air thick with incense and a sonorously churchy organ to get us in an appropriately reverent mood while we sat…and sat…and sat—had the slightsaveurof cheese on communion wafer, but when dozens of models poured in rapid-fire succession through a lily-bedecked archway, the sheer animal drive of Tisci's vision crushed cynicism like a bug.He said that "the cult of communion" was his starting point. A brocade of a child's communion gown could have looked innocent, but Tisci spookily printed it with vestigial faces that looked like the Shroud of Turin's sisters. In the same way, his plays with layering and proportion would have more easily suggested priestly vestments—there was indeed a certain virtuousness in the white collar that peeked from under black coats—if they hadn't been cut from an ice-pink duchesse satin. If the aprons and flaps also evoked Westwood and McLaren's Clothes for Heroes, that's only because the idea of punk priests seemed made in Tisci heaven. Punk popes too, in the papal-red details on tees printed with abstract Madonna faces.And that's Madonna as in "Mother of Christ" rather than La Ciccone, whose current tour has brought Tisci's clothes to the massed millions. The designer had artists reinterpret classic religious imagery to provide the collection's graphic meat, the tees and sweats that have made Tisci's work for Givenchy such a visible presence around the world. There is some irony in that fact, given that he arrived on the scene as a precision cutter of razor-sharp tailoring. Obviously, that was still pristine-present and correct tonight. A blouson or a double-breasted jacket layered over a long shirt is almost as much of a Tisci signature as a jumbo tee.Almost!In mere months, the Virgin Mary will be as inescapable as birds of paradise are now, and rottweilers were then.
28 June 2012
An old photo of Hubert de Givenchy's muse Bettina (she predated Audrey Hepburn) got Riccardo Tisci thinking "gypsy" for Resort. Scarf prints were the collection's dominant motif, but bohemian this wasn't. Tisci cut the swirling paisleys in shades of red, blue, and gold with geometric blocks of black and white. If he's the one who made the fashion world mad for prints, their graphic treatment here puts him ahead of the field once again. The effect was particularly striking on the collection's opening look, a belted evening dress with long sleeves slit all the way to the shoulders. The capelike look repeated itself on shirts and outerwear, while extended tailcoat details that grazed the ankles on some of the looks likewise added drama.Tisci's gypsy theme continued with slouchy-through-the-rear-and-thigh sarouel pants, but again they were paired with tailored button-downs or the boxy, almost architectural T-shaped jackets and tops that have become a house signature. On the phone from Paris—a back-to-back menswear show and haute couture presentation kept him away—he called the look "romantic, but with a sharpness." We're hooked.
10 June 2012
It was a nippy 41 degrees in Paris tonight, and it felt colder inside the cavernous Lycée Carnot waiting for the Givenchy show to start. Not even the celebrity heat of Alicia Keys, Kanye West, and Sean Combs could stop you from shivering. But the second galloping horses began pounding on the loudspeakers and the neon lights started pulsating to the beat, Riccardo Tisci had the crowd going. Seven years into his tenure at Givenchy, he's as confident as they come.For Fall, he gave his super-influential tailoring an equestrian spin. Jackets were boyish from the front, but all girl from the back with peplums, bustles, and tails. There were more pants here than he's trotted out lately, and they had an easy jodhpur shape—full through the upper thighs, then stuffed into knee-high boots with heel-covering sheaths. There was also a lot of leather: on a second-skin turtleneck dress that flared below the hips, as well as on a black coat reversed in red with kimono sleeves. Furs were patchworks of red, brown, and black.The feminine side of the collection was influenced, Tisci's show notes explained, by the seventies photography of Guy Bourdin. Suspended from the shoulders by delicate straps, cocktail dresses were mere wisps of silk embellished with lace and rows of rhinestones. A red and black number recalled an early show Tisci did for the house, but the version that paired sky blue and orange silk with a purple belt was the keeper here.Today's outing wasn't the silhouette changer that last season was. (You'll have noticed by now that peplums, Tisci's news for Spring, have been absolutely everywhere this month.) While he's been consolidating, others have been catching up. But it's simply a mark of the influence his Givenchy has attained the last few seasons that we look to him to stay out in front of the fashion pack. In any case, we'll be seeing plenty of this collection in the front rows and beyond next season.
3 March 2012
Riccardo Tisci is in a reflective mood. Pre-fall, men's, and now his Couture collection have found him looking back over his first seven years at Givenchy and reworking familiar pieces with what he described as a new maturity. "To me, the mark of a successful designer is having an identity," he said, citing Miuccia Prada, Donatella Versace, and Lagerfeld's Chanel. We'd say that Tisci more than qualifies.His ten-piece Couture lineup was divided into three rooms. The first was devoted to crocodile, and what the Givenchy atelier has done to the precious skin is positively jaw-dropping. For a long, clingy dress, the scales on the hide were individually cut and numbered, then bleached, dyed, and resewn one by one in order onto a tulle body stocking. It took 350 hours to make. The artisans who worked on a cropped and fitted jacket (with the same star motif as the designer used in his menswear show) perhaps didn't log as many hours, but the payoff was just as impressive.Tisci said his two inspirations this season were the 1927 Fritz Lang movieMetropolisand the theme music from a more obscure Russian film, 1924'sAelita: Queen of Mars(add that one to your Netflix queue, pronto). You could see their influence most clearly in the Art Deco embellishments on the dresses in the crystal room. The designer also pointed out the parallels between Lang's high-city/low-city film and his own bejeweled gowns worn over workmen's tank tops. In fact, the tanks weren't as proletarian as all that, coming as they did in a cashmere blend.The standout in the black and white room was a white silk T-shirt tucked into a black silk cady skirt that unzipped almost all the way up to the right hip, the white sequin lining only flashing when the model walked by. In a week of ball gowns as wide as they are high and beads by the bushel, it takes a special maturity to exercise that kind of restraint, but in its own subtle way, it showcased the same kind of bravado as did the models' nose rings and doorknocker-size hoops. This is a designer with confidence to spare.
23 January 2012
Riccardo Tisci's childhood obsessions were the American flag and the Minotaur. One of the spoils of fame is that he gets to explore those obsessions as an adult, in the entirely public arena of a Givenchy menswear show. It took place tonight in a tent under the golden dome of Napoleon's tomb, whose façade had been specially illuminated in red for the evening. The drama of such a backdrop set the bar high for Tisci, but right now there are no other menswear designers in Paris who can pull that kind of hell rabbit out of a hat. Obsession is a powerfully persuasive thang.But even with that looming Napoleonic splendor behind him, Tisci called his show American Dream. Heisrealizing that childhood fantasy, after all: hanging out in L.A., buying a place in NYC. The stars and stripes of Old Glory contributed the key graphic motifs, and the gladiatorial sports of America helped out with the oversize silhouettes. The Minotaur, Tisci's other obsession, loaned the golden nose ring, worn with varying degrees of discomfort by all the models, and a general testosteronic miasma of half-man half-animal magnetism.It was a powerful combination. That's because Tisci has found a formula and he has stuck to it: the hard-edged elegance of monochromatic tailoring on the one hand, the physicality of extreme sportswear on the other. After the show, he said it had taken him his seven seasons with Givenchy to give him the confidence to go back to his early ideas and realize them properly. "Now I recognize 100 percent who my man is," he said exultantly. That man may wear a striped top studded with red enamel stars, or a denim baseball jacket paired with a matching skirt (Tisci's by-now emblematic adaptation of the warrior's kilt). Or he could choose the lush solemnity of the all-black ensemble that opened the show: a double-breasted suit, a shirt, and tie sported by male model of the moment Simone Nobili.Nobili returned at the finale in the same outfit transformed by the addition of jet beading. That was some kind of marker for Tisci's own trajectory.
19 January 2012
To talk about Givenchy's pre-fall collection, you have to start with the footwear. After seasons of ankle boots, Riccardo Tisci's knee-high boots with heel-covering sheaths are automatic silhouette changers (not to mention instant collector's items), adding a cool edge to pencil skirts, shirtdresses, and jodhpur-style pants.Tisci said he was thinking about the 1950's silhouettes of Bettie Page (already familiar to fans of his Spring 2011 collection), as well as 1970's French horseback riding. The Givenchy woman, he explained, "wants a strong look for pre-fall; it's no different than the runway collections." The strongest looks here had to be the jackets. Showing off some of the construction techniques he's picked up during his four years designing menswear, they came with black chiffon insets at the sides that revealed the real camelhair fabric underneath used to keep the jackets' shapes. Menswear wasn't the only element he mined for ideas, though. Curvy polo dresses were pieced together from seven years of prints, and his Spring 2012 iridescent paillettes became another print on a sweatshirt fabric sheath. When your brand is as hot as Givenchy is, recycling pays dividends. Still, Tisci keeps innovating; his killer new boots are proof of that.
8 January 2012
Other designers may be going print-crazy for Spring, but Riccardo Tisci—he of the ubiquitous rottweilers and panthers—is moving on and focusing on tailoring. The designer claimed surfers and mermaids as influences, but we've never seen either species in sexy suits quite like these: jackets that were sharp and soft at the same time, with strong, confident shoulders, and, for contrast, suggestive, undulating lapels and come-hither peplums trimmed not in leather but eel skin, shark, or stingray. Speaking of exotic materials, the jackets themselves weren't exactly cut from workaday fabrics. Chiffon sequins and lasered leather cutouts recalled the most stunning creations in his July couture show.The bottom half of the looks is where Tisci's hypothetical water babies came in. The second-skin tight pants could've been wet suits. And as for the satin short shorts and narrow little skirts, which revealed miles of bronzed leg perched on shark-tooth heels? Hang ten, baby.After last season's kinky ode to Bettie Page and Amanda Lear, we're tempted to call this collection, with its focus on suiting and little polo dresses, the most accessible that Tisci has ever done. Gisele Bündchen in sequins and silk as tawny as her hair-—how could you go wrong? But close inspection revealed plenty of the designer's provocative inclinations. Truncated shirttails and pelmet belts—posterior fins, if you will—directed all eyes to his models' rear ends. It's not hard to picture the sea creatures from this powerful collection replacing the omnipresent Givenchy panthers come Spring. Tisci is riding a wave right now.
1 October 2011
Just over a week ago, Riccardo Tisci dazzled the menswear crowd with a lush, colorful show inspired by bird-of-paradise flowers. For his new haute couture collection, it was paradise in general that intrigued him. "Purity, lightness, fragility," was how he summed up his focus. At first glance, this was a much more restrained affair. The ten looks were all white, or very nearly so. But Tisci held nothing back when it came to the handwork.Months and months in the planning, a long tulle dress was decorated with tiger's-eye pearls that had been inserted with crystals to catch the light and arrayed in the exact same pattern as the marks on an ostrich skin. Another gown was even more painstakingly embroidered with tiny silvery-gray caviar beads. In a callback to his women's ready-to-wear, Tisci paired it with a matching jumper boasting a sheer front panel and beading everywhere else so thick it was 3-D. A third dress, the most expensive and time-consuming to make of all the pieces, was entirely sewn of symmetrically placed hand-cut silk tulle paillettes. The result looked like some sort of exotic fish--in the most flattering possible way.And, really, that was just the beginning of the embellishments. Hand-curled feathers; plumes so densely embroidered they looked like fur; dégradé beading that not only changed color but also went from shiny to matte—all rewarded the sort of up-close inspection that Tisci has made a point of his Place Vendôme couture installations. At these presentations, every detail, however small, warrants his attention. On the one hand, a fragrance diffuser misted the scent of spring roses through the rooms; and on the other, Popol Vuh, circa Werner Herzog'sAguirre: The Wrath of God, played on the speakers.Tisci, in other words, hasn't entirely abandoned his dark side, nor lost his taste for provocation. Mingling among all those high-priced embellishments were the oversize plastic zippers that have become a signature of his modern take on the traditional art of custom dressmaking. And don't forget all the flesh laid bare by his cutouts, peekaboo fringe, and tulle. Still, the exquisite technique was the big story here, pointing as it did to the continuing evolution of this designer's unique couture vision.
4 July 2011
Riccardo Tisci always wanted to be a surfer when he was a kid. He could never have known that the biggest luxury conglomerate in the world would one day wave its wand over his wish. And so it came to pass that Tisci got to create a collection of clothes that turned his childhood fantasy into an elaborate, provocative reality.That's been the story of Tisci's life since he was taken on by LVMH six years ago to reanimate Givenchy. Fairy tales do come true. And truer. After establishing himself as the embodiment of fashion's dark night of the Catholic-Gothic soul, Tisci has gone into the light with his new menswear collection. It was dawn in Givenchyworld—tropical-flower prints, crystals and sequins sparkling like dew on leaves, and white… so much white, banishing every trace of the black that has been Tisci's trademark up to this point. More to the point, it was a triumph.Who knows why all the elements that have looked so contrived over the years of Tisci's stewardship of Givenchy should suddenly fall into place as logical, seductive revisions of fashion orthodoxy? Perhaps everything looks better when the sun shines. Maybe when it was dark and serious, it somehow seemed like a big old fashion-student cliché. Whereas here, it was simply unabashed and celebratory. Men in skirts? Get used to them. It's warriorwear from years back. Besides, Tisci wasn't about to get so literal with his Hawaiian subtext that he was going to show grass skirts.Common sense dictates that it's a rare retailer who'd be moving substantial amounts of Tisci's pleated little numbers (even if, in white, they looked like Wimbledon wonders). But the upbeat energy of the collection animated its more sober components. Team Tisci's sporty staples—the bombers, baseball jackets, sweats, tees, and shorts over leggings-were juiced with the bird-of-paradise prints. And his tailoring looked fresh in ivory and army green. That freshness was all promise, but everything about an exuberant post-show Tisci suggested he was ready to deliver.
23 June 2011
A sure sign that Riccardo Tisci's Fall collection for Givenchy was a hit: Zara already has its own version of the black panther print T-shirt in stores. Here's another one: The designer himself revisited the purple-and-yellow-on-black floral today, taking photos of the original prints and digitally manipulating them for sweatshirts cropped above the bust, button-down blouses, and narrow pencil skirts. (That body-loving silhouette also turned up in vivid bird of paradise patterns.)Similarly, Tisci traded in Fall's baseball motifs for basketball mesh and surfing references, accessorizing looks with crocodile-trim sun visors and logo'd lanyard necklaces (logos are becoming a surprising, tongue-in-cheek trend this season). The b-ball mesh, used on boxy tees bedecked with huge blooms, gave the collection a sporty tone that seems apt for Resort.Still, the number that we left dreaming about was the dressiest of the bunch, a navy double-silk long dress with a 1950's-style swimsuit bodice topped by a super-cropped black sweater. It also happens to be Tisci's favorite. In fact, he's so in love with pinups he reported that the menswear collection he'll show in ten days is influenced by them. As for his upcoming Couture collection, he wouldn't say. And the Dior rumors? His lips were sealed on that, too, but from this perspective, his Resort collection looks like a designer in confident, I-can-do-anything mode.
12 June 2011
It started with a roar—a disembodied snarl over the loudspeakers. Turned out it was a panther's roar, going by the look of the first model out: Her black button-down was fastened all the way up to the collar and had a pride of panthers printed on its hem. The top was paired with a pencil skirt that was mostly sheer between the waist and hem, and backstage Riccardo Tisci said, "There's more sex than usual." How could there not be, with the twin inspirations of Bettie Page (the foil to Jerry Lee Lewis in his Fall menswear) and Amanda Lear on the cover of Roxy Music'sFor Your Pleasure? Lear, by the way, was sitting front-row, as were Liv Tyler, Nicole Richie, Ron Wood, Kanye West, and Mugler's Nicola Formichetti.Tisci's show was even more of an event than usual, with his name being bandied about as a likely candidate for the Dior job left open by Galliano's sudden departure. If confidence counts, he's got the gig. As he did last season, he worked and reworked a single silhouette (loose-fitting sweater, varsity jacket, or button-down, and razor-thin knee-length skirt) in a tight, interrelated group of fabrics. In addition to those panthers, he used purple orchid prints, black patent, see-through organza, Gianni Versace-in-the-eighties silks, and—there she was, smack-dab in the middle of a couple of sweatshirts—the original pinup queen herself, Miss Page. Accessorizing it all: fur-covered cat-eye sunglasses, baseball caps with cat ears, and gold-tipped black patent stiletto pumps—meow!—that will surely enter the already crowded pantheon of must-have Givenchy shoes.The laser focus of it all was impressive. You wound up seduced, even if there's little chance of seeing a real girl in a getup like Joan Smalls' patent varsity jacket, satin peplum, organza pencil, and thigh highs. That's the funny thing about Tisci: He's got the vision thing, but it's individual pieces that end up selling. From Spring, it's the leopard-print cropped coat with tails. This season, if Liv Tyler and the Givenchy men's Rottweiler tee she was wearing tonight are any indication, it's gonna be those panther sweatshirts.
5 March 2011
The last time Riccardo Tisci showed a couture collection forGivenchy, the zipper pulls were bones. This season, they were wings. Fashion's favorite goth took flight with a new obsession: Japan. Not the land of obis and geishas, he said, but the Japan of robot toys and the dancer Kazuo Ohno, whose intensely ritualized style of performance, called Butoh, was a huge influence on Tisci's friend, the singer Antony Hegarty. When Ohno died, Antony and the Johnsons performed a tribute concert that so inspired Tisci, the dead man became a sort of muse for the designer. And this was the result. According to Tisci, Ohno provided the romance, the melancholy, and the palette (the color of dried flowers). Robots, meanwhile, influenced the appliqués, the shoes, and the huge hats by Philip Treacy (couple this with Armani last night, and Treacy is clearly the go-to guy for sci-fi headgear).The detail was as crazily consuming as last season's. One outfit required 2,000 hours of cutting and 4,000 hours of sewing. A single pair of trousers had 90 meters of plissé. On this scale, appreciation of the clothes as they solemnly rotated from hangers in a reverentially hushed salon on the Place Vendôme became an almost academic exercise, like examining works of art in a gallery. Maybe not such a bad analogy, given the extraordinary appliqué on a bolero that crossed a robot's face with a Catholic cross, or the organza that was laser-cut and appliquéd on layers of chiffon and tulle to create a three-dimensional spread of vermilion wings. One gown featured a Japanese crane, again appliquéd, that rose phoenixlike from a cloud of feathers. Massive bird's wings were folded across a sheer skirt. The Swarovski crystals and pearls that were crusted on the bodice of another dress began to pop like fish eyes as the dress moved.The craft was undeniable, though in the end, like Ohno's favorite dried flowers, the clothes lacked some of the rude life that Tisci stuffed into his recent menswear collection.
24 January 2011
Riccardo Tisci had to contend with the bubbling frustration that a 90-minute wait can engender (there was scant hair and makeup to account for the show's delay, but there was, mind you, a rather ill-timed blackout). So? Against a version of "Forever Young" that slowed the beats to a sludgy thud, the proportions of Tisci's clothes—shorts with everything—celebrated the sporty ballers who turned him on to menswear in the first place. That was sweet, except that he also introduced a print of snarling Rottweilers, an aggressive extension of the inveterate Gothicism that saw his models step out under an arch of blood-red roses.The dogs, with their whiff ofnostalgie de lacouncil estate, were typical of Tisci's challenge to polite convention. The impulse to provoke is as strong in him as the inclination to reassure his audience that he is a designer who is entirely capable of shaping perfectly tasteful items of clothing, in camel suiting even. He pushes you away, he pulls you back.Break that tense dynamic down in Tisci's new collection, and there was a whole lot to like, particularly in his precisely layered tailoring. And what the hell, if you've got the legs, you might as well show them inGivenchyshorts.
20 January 2011
For Riccardo Tisci atGivenchy, pre-fall used to be a group of basics, but not anymore. "People want another show," he said early Monday morning, and that's just what he gave passersby the day before, shooting his lookbook images on three of his current catwalk favorites—Lea T, Saskia de Brauw, and Izabel Goulart—on a snowy West Village street. The location was designed to highlight what Tisci described as the urbanity of a collection inspired, somewhat paradoxically, by English fishermen and hunters circa the 1970's. A nude lace top, for instance, came with removable rugged nylon sleeves and was paired with a pleated skirt in a compactly woven camel cashmere, while a brown chiffon evening gown was accessorized with over-the-knee lace-up leather waders.Given his influences, it wasn't surprising that Tisci showed a lot of strong outwear, including a parka patchworked from nylon, fur, and faux leather (celebrities, apparently, sometimes prefer fake to real); a shrunken jacket made with cavalry twill and shearling; and his signature trompe l'oeil toppers that look like a blazer worn over a longer coat. The color palette, too, was a departure for the designer. "I didn't touch black on purpose," Tisci explained. "Brown is the new black." There was also plenty of lilac and, picking up where Spring's oversize leopard spot left off, a densely patterned computerized armadillo print.One of the collection's most striking looks was an antiqued lace, to-the-floor dress topped with a bed jacket made from tulle and taffeta rosettes and trimmed with zips. The model wore a necklace with the new Givenchy emblem; called the Obsedia, it marries religious and military symbolism with a 1920's Deco feeling, and Tisci is using it on everything from jewelry to belts to bags. "All the old French houses have an emblem," he reasoned. Tisci's been at the French brand five years now, and he's certainly put his stamp on the house that Hubert built, luring big-time celebrities and igniting major trends, not least of which is the sheer we've seen everywhere the last couple of seasons. Introducing the Obsedia, it would seem, makes it official.
9 January 2011
The juddering crunch of psycho-goth band Salem was the aural intro to Riccardo Tisci's latest show for Givenchy. It established a new kind of rhythm for the house, less Catholic, more pagan. The keynote was the leopard, fast cat of the savanna. It infused the collection on every level, from the tone-on-tone dévoré relief on a jacket to the pattern on a floating chiffon overskirt to the exploded graphic on a pair of pants. Nothing says old-school glamour like that particular animal print, but tapping into his inherent Gothicism, Tisci dragged it into the here and now with his elongated riffs on twenty-first-century decadence.The utter artificiality of his vision loaned the show a powerful single-mindedness. You could attribute it to the fever dream of a kid growing up imagining an unattainable world of richness and beauty—the same dreamy incentive that has driven designers from Balenciaga to Blass and onward. Given that Tisci would now seem to have attained that world, the triumphal tinge of his collections is justifiable. But it's a stark, dark triumph, a fact that was amplified in today's show in the form of the zippers that were used as a decorative element, snaking across and down waistlines, sleeves, and pants. The slightly punky feel of the zips was compounded by bondage flaps and straps.Leopard and zippers aside, the essence of the collection lay in the long, sheer layers with which Tisci draped almost everything. They added an elusive, spectral volume, the kind which hinted at ghosts. It softened the silhouette, making it more accessible, but that is Tisci's proven recipe: some common-sense commerce here, some wanton creativity there. And no doubt that will be his formula for the future.
2 October 2010
The history of haute couture is studded with magnificent obsessives like Cristobal Balenciaga and Charles James. Even if Riccardo Tisci's name never makes it onto that list, his latest Couture collection for Givenchy proved that he shares the grandmasters' fanatical devotion to realizing an intensely personal vision through cut, cloth, and, in Tisci's case, extraordinarily elaborate ornamentation. This season, he opted out of a proper show in favor of intimate presentations, where he could better highlight detailed pieces like the painstakingly patchworked leather coat or the dress in Chantilly lace where the pattern of the lace had been duplicated in appliquéd leather (the dress ended in a cascade of dégradé ostrich feathers—Tisci considers dégradé, lace, and fringe-work his signatures).The darkest color in the collection was the chocolate brown on those feathers. Otherwise, everything was white, flesh-colored, or gold, with a salon dedicated to each shade. Even the baboon fur that was attached to a swallowtailed knit jacket was spookily bleached. Fact is, Tisci didn't need black to exercise his gothic inclinations. He claimed his inspiration was Frida Kahlo and her three obsessions: religion, sensuality, and, given the painter's lifelong battle with spinal pain, the human anatomy. The zipper pulls were little bones, a belt was a spinal column re-created in porcelain. The dominant motif of the collection was the skeleton, laid out flat in the lace appliquéd on a long tulle column, or rendered in three dimensions in obsessively dense clusters of crystals, pearls, and lace on the back of a jacket in double silk duchesse satin. Nestled in the middle? A tiny ceramic skull sprouting angel wings. At one point during his presentation, Tisci rather tellingly muttered, "A romantic way to see death."That jacket was suspended in the all-white "ceramic" room. In the "skin" room, Tisci showcased lace catsuits, one decorated with a Swarovski crystal skeleton that took 1,600 hours to create. In the third, "gold" room was a lace dress that demanded six months of work. Dresses encrusted with gold paillettes, stones, and beads were almost too heavy to lift, despite being revealingly scissored away at the waist. If the detail was breathtaking, it was also quite numbing in its intensity. The last room featured a giant portrait by Willy Vanderperre of Tisci's muses wearing the dresses, seen from the back. "I love that view," Tisci explained, "the spine of people.
" Walk round the photo and there was the same view from the front, the women all posed reverentially like hand maidens. In obsession is born the cult of couture.
5 July 2010
Riccardo Tisci does his gothic-liturgical thing very well. Add a little bit of incense, and the monochrome palette and layers of lace would go down a treat with your local college of cardinals. But Tisci's wild card is a juicy stew of raging hormones—in a word, sex. Like every good Catholic boy, he dwells in a limbo between piety and lust.The lute-plucking overture that preceded his Givenchy show tonight might have been intended to induce a quietly contemplative mood, but the bombast of "Cry Little Sister" from the soundtrack toThe Lost Boysimmediately carried us away to a world of overripe decadence, with two of Tisci's favorite female models, Mariacarla Boscono and Malgosia Bela, working head-to-toe vampire-goddess looks.The ensuing collection played itself out as a battle between purity (white lace) and carnality (animal print). Initially, the designer combined the two: The white lace of his layered shirts was actually a leopard print, as was the moiré pattern on his black suits. But halfway through, a sleeve of leopard spot crept out from under a mandala-embossed white shirt, and from that point on, the spot steadily took over, culminating in a full suit with matching shirt-and-shoes combination.Tisci has definitely created a strong signature for himself, part street (shorts over leggings, bike-messenger layers) and part salon (evening-influenced tailoring), but it's all very solemn and serious. Next time, it would be nice to see him inject some levity into the equation.
24 June 2010
Riccardo Tisci has been at Givenchy for five years now, and the anniversary provided a framework of sorts for the striking collection he showed informally today. "Resort, for me," he said, "is about making sure the shop floors are stocked with the pieces that our girl has gotten attached to." Tisci believers will recognize the palette of black, white, and red, which the designer interspersed with leopard print. (He cited Frida Kahlo and her animal-filled paintings as a source of inspiration this season.)The shapes will give fans a frisson of familiarity, too. Tisci's best-selling trompe l'oeil jacket—it looks like two pieces but is really one—came here in plain white on top and leopard below, or masculine white cotton and feminine white lace. Extending the motif, a three-piece suit consisted of a sharply tailored jacket and cropped trousers with a built-in miniskirt. The designer even remade look one from his breakthrough Spring '10 show, but this time, the stripes on the jacket were crimson lace.What looked novel, not to mention like a very neat idea, were the dickeys (quick, someone come up with a better name), which Tisci tied on at the back of matching tank tops. Two-looks-in-one is becoming a mini-theme at the Resort collections, but the removable collar/vest is also quite in keeping with the religious imagery that's always been part of this designer's aesthetic. The crown of horns from last summer's Couture show has now been replaced by an even more symbolic crown of thorns. Tisci's fans are so devout, some of them just might wear it.
13 June 2010
"I was thinking of the ski world, and the scuba world," said Riccardo Tisci. "And the colors of the Bauhaus." True, his collection incorporated snowflake-patterned knits; neoprene diving fabric; and black, red, and beige as a color code. But the way he melded those materials into his collection spoke more of this Fall's reworking of the aesthetics of the nineties, personalized with Tisci's taste for high-drama Parisian glamour. Sporty piste- cum surfwear this definitely was not.A better way of looking at it was as one of the season's rechannelings of the work of Helmut Lang and Martin Margiela, two towering heroes of modern fashion design whose retirement from the scene has left a gaping hole in women's wardrobes. Tisci's tailoring, like Phoebe Philo's at Celine, is a way of filling that gap with sharp camel coats, tuxedo suits, and lean black pants. In Tisci's case, it's also accompanied by tape-bound throats; red glitter gloves, bags, and lips; and sexy workings of scarlet, black, and nude lace. That's all fully in line with his own gothic taste but also reminiscent of Margiela's styling, back in the long-lost day when "edgy" was the buzzword of the nineties.The scuba-ski dynamic meant traditional alpine patterns reengineered into formfitting bodysuits, sunk into neoprene lower garments that unfurled at the waist by means of zippers (the look happens to cross-reference with a section of Nicolas Ghesquière's collection this Fall). For evening, the fold-down device was transposed to inform the shape of black velvet and satin evening shifts and tunics. To end with, Tisci returned to working with feathers—a feature he's made his own in his couture collections over several seasons. Last in the line: a puff of white ostrich on an organza T-shirt, paired with narrow black pants, poetically trailing a pair of diaphanous "wings" as it exited. It was quite beautiful—and then again, in spirit, inescapably Helmut Lang.
6 March 2010
The buzz around Givenchy has become palpable. Five years into his tenure in the house, Riccardo Tisci is at the point where he's proved himself in ready-to-wear, and now he's hitting his stride in couture. Everyone wants to know what he's thinking, and right this moment he's thinking about the seventies, a notion that's in the air this week in Paris. In Tisci's case, it was the inspiration of the makeup artist, photographer, and art director Serge Lutens that got him going. "I was scared of couture at the beginning, and reacted by staying away from looking at the past at all," he confessed before the show. "But now I'm more confident, I started looking into the archive, and found the idea of this strong, erotic phase of Parisian women I related to."That meant a collection that, first of all, consolidated Tisci's magic command of tailoring. Masculine-feminine tuxedo tailcoats shrugged coolly over ostrich-adorned T-shirts will be manna for women who crave a restrained yet powerful way of walking into a room. The designer followed with cocktail dresses with spiral-cut sprays of organza, jumpsuits in black lace with boleros, and a section of long evening looks that ran from creamy flamenco-influenced layers of Chantilly to more severe midnight blue columns covered with flying capes of black chiffon.It's the element of daring that might turn out to be more publically memorable, though. A vivid glam-rock electric blue and green mosaic-embellished jumpsuit and skirt were the kind of jarring, risk-taking pieces that are guaranteed to be photographed editorially—and taken up by the new fame-seeking music-business generation that recognizes high fashion is a sure way to get noticed. That Tisci has that awareness, as well as the measured ability to appeal to sophisticates, is growing evidence of his power as an accomplished all-rounder.
25 January 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
21 January 2010
Riccardo Tisci's Givenchy is hot. So hot, few could blame him if he declined to change things up for pre-fall. But change things up he did, and the results looked great. "It's much more clean," he said. "I'm going back to Givenchy's roots, looking at late-sixties, early-seventies French style." That means the studding and the heavy embellishing that's become practically synonymous with the Paris label during Tisci's reign is gone. In their place is a mixing of masculine and feminine elements, with a heavy hit of eroticism—the designer mentioned the 1974 filmEmmanuelle. An ivory grain de poudre jumpsuit dipped low in front to expose a flash of a black lace tank. A delicate white blouse with a bow at the neck was paired with tough-chic high-waisted black leather shorts, and a boxy ribbed sweater with a miniskirt of ostrich feathers. OK, Tisci hasn't completely forgotten about frills. The news on the accessories front: The brand's über-popular Nightingale bag now comes as a trolley carry-on.
11 January 2010
At some shows in Paris, the seating arrangements are so cramped that you can physically feel the audience reaction in the body language running along a bench. At Givenchy, there was no possible doubt about what it was. From the very first look out—a geometrically striped black and white jersey jacket over a graphic, lozenge-fronted top and draped pants—everyone was on high alert, jostling and craning for the best possible view.Indisputably, Riccardo Tisci has moved up to the elite group of designers who matter most in Paris. His work has editors pining to buy and rock stars' stylists competing for first dibs—and for Spring, that heat's only going to intensify. What he sent out was a fusion of Arabic influences, goddesslike draping, and, according to the program notes, the results of his new research into sixties Roman couture. If that sounds like nonsense on paper, in fact almost every garment had an intensity of proportion and detail that looked incredible: the graphic jackets; tiny kilts; attenuated drop-crotch harem pants; cool, multilayered, modernized tutus; and draped, wrapped, and swathed tulle dresses.Travel influences often lead to banality, but Tisci's referencing of the kaffiyeh scarf was pushed into allover digital patterns in ways that almost took it into the realm of zigzagging psychedelia. The prints covered blouses, jackets, kilts, leggings, platform wedges, and bags. The silhouette, with its slightly raised waistline, had the effect of making the models look even taller and more impossibly leggy—the drama enhanced by the high, wrapped, wedge-heel boots. For day, the bondage-y footwear came in leather; at night, with the goddess dresses, it was smothered in white tulle.This highly resolved series of looks could only have come about because of Tisci's experience in Givenchy's haute couture. If that sounds high-flown, it is, in a way—but the cleverness is that everything he's doing now has the heartbeat of youth. Even better: Tisci may be the rock world's new dream couturier, but in retail that also translates into accessible, surprising pieces that sell out the minute they hit stores.
3 October 2009
Whether he's designing ready-to-wear or couture, Riccardo Tisci veers between strict-chic and otherworldly, goddesslike creatures called up from imagined lands. This season, ideas about Morocco, Berber tribespeople, and equestrianism informed both narratives—not that the collection read in any literal ethnographic way. It began with fiercely tailored, padded-shouldered coats molded into the waist and over the hips in black velvet or patinated strips of leather—the riding element—and then moved on into sarouel-influenced pants, hoods, veiled and draped silhouettes, and gold embroidery with a Middle Eastern influence. It had drama, too: Karlie Kloss in a long white veil over an ivory patent-leather corset and cream pants, walking like some sort of science-fantasy princess.It doesn't particularly matter any more in couture if a theme doesn't completely hold up to scrutiny. What counts are the other tests that apply to custom-made clothes: the specialness of each individual outfit and the relevance of the clothes to what a fashion-conscious woman might want to wear. It's on those points that Tisci's work at Givenchy makes its impact. The coats and a standout black velvet jacket over draped, tile-patterned gold embroidered pants have a hip, luxe contemporary desirability. Ditto some of the eveningwear, like a slick, high-necked, long-sleeved black pailletted gown, and—when stripped of the fluoro jeweling—the things he does with draped nude chiffon. If Tisci's thought process sometimes lacks coherence, he is still a designer bringing a much-needed sense of modernity to an old tradition.
6 July 2009
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
25 June 2009
The cult of Givenchy now includes Michael Jackson; the gloved one's been snapped by the paparazzi in Riccardo Tisci's studded jackets. It's not necessarily the kind of endorsement that PR companies go after, but the designer is tickled by the association. By coincidence, he's launching a greatest-hits capsule collection called Redux of his signature white blouses and lightweight studded pieces that will be slightly less expensive than his regular offerings. Key looks in Tisci's glam pre-spring lineup, which skews more North African than his recent Wild West and South American journeys, include draped minidresses accented with gold coin necklaces, a gold sequin strapless dress topped by a black tux jacket, and drop-crotch Moroccan pants worn with a soft white blouse or a trim navy jacket. Tailoring in white stretch piqué, meanwhile, is a preview of what he's planning for his Paris show in October.
15 June 2009
Riccardo Tisci was giving quotes backstage. "It was Schiaparelli, animal sensuality, the forties, the thirties," he began, and then pulled himself up with a more cogent submission: "Actually, I wanted to show lots of different shapes for all kinds of women." That last comment made sense. What had transpired on the Givenchy runway in the preceding 20 minutes was, at least in part, a corrective response to the criticism of his last "Western Bondage" collection, which was deemed to be only wearable by the super-skinniest of the fashion brave. In this collection, there were ample representations of Tisci's breadth of appeal: suits, coats, tailored dresses, well-cut pants. Yet there were many other parts as well—fierce, chic one-sleeved spiral-cut dresses with fur implants in the shoulder pads; feathers and goat hair embroidered onto tulle; signature Tisci-esque moments of fetish-y leather and goth mermaid; studs on white leather…and so it went on.If the sheer variety of it all militated against any impression of wholeness, some of the parts were often very good indeed. A passage of palest lemon-beige yielded three interesting short lace dresses with blue glitter shoulder pads peeking through, bookended by two immensely chic pantsuits with matching ostrich boas. Lily Donaldson got to trot around in an enviably modern white asymmetric evening T-shirt, looped about with ropes and feathers, over slouchy black pants. And then, not quite ultimately, came three white fantasy goddess dresses, fabulously draped with glamorous demi-stoles of 3-D plissé fans and ostrich nestled into the neck and shoulder. Their beauty and modernity demonstrated beyond doubt that Tisci has taken much from his experience with Givenchy's couture. Yet perhaps things have now reached the stage where the guy doesn't need to keep trying so hard to prove himself: We believe him. It would actually have shown more self-confidence if he'd whittled his catalog of accomplishments down by a third.
7 March 2009
Erotic turn-of-the-century paintings of imagined ancient rituals and the austere, attenuated ballet costumes of Pina Bausch kindled the beginnings of Givenchy couture. It could have routed Riccardo Tisci back to the dark place of the soul he so loves to explore, but he said he'd consciously pulled away from too much melancholia. It's not quite the time to lay on more agony, after all, and in any case, Tisci is aware of wanting to stretch himself: "It was a little bit of a step up for me, to challenge myself to use color and show more daywear, which is doing very well with clients."So the black floor was strewn with rose petals (a direct lift from a famous Lawrence Alma-Tadema painting, for reference spotters) and the shapely skirtsuits and dresses at the beginning were in pale alabaster—part eighties body-con seaming, part Edwardian shoulder, exaggerated with sheer puffs of organza instead of pads. The color shaded in with draped chiffon gowns in tints of lemon, faded Parma violet, and celadon, which were held back from straight-up classicism by under-glimpses of Lycra, pearl, or crystal-studded bondage straps (a more refined holdover from the Spring ready-to-wear collection).Toward the conclusion, a couple of priestess-y white togas made an entrance, the models' faces half shrouded in cowl drapes. On the runway, that produced a slightly disconcerting air of mystery, but one that will easily be shaken off when these dresses are worn to an event as modern-elegant eveningwear. Tisci's increasing maturity is edging him in the right direction.
26 January 2009
Riccardo Tisci's pre-fall lineup was an aggregation of themes that the Italian designer has been working on since joining Givenchy four years ago. The Peruvian stripes were, he said, a nod to the late Latin songstress Yma Sumac, but they'll also be familiar to those who follow the haute couture. There were echoes of the designer's agro-chic outing for Spring in the collection's mostly black tailored looks, but this time they were tempered with lace and pleated lamé. If an aviator-inspired group struck an off note, Tisci deserves top marks for a Mongolian lamb zippered topper and his body-con knits.
25 January 2009
Riccardo Tisci has won his spurs as the kind of designer whose shows cause mob scenes backstage in Paris. The push-and-shove to congratulate him after his show almost brought down a dividing wall—and to be honest, there's not much of that old-school mania around these days. What triggered it was a collection Tisci described—among flashbulbs and kisses from French celebrities and LVMH executives—as "Western Bondage."There is a thread of hard-core hip in Paris that is picking up that western theme and turning it in a glam-slam direction that flies in the face of recessionary caution. Christophe Decarnin at Balmain is in that posse, too, and there are parallels in London among grittier designers like Meadham Kirchhoff. At Givenchy, the look came out in full force two-thirds of the way in, when the leggings took over—half-leather chaps, half-jeans, or skintight black Lycra with white leaf appliqués flaming up the sides.Admittedly, that's the kind of sight that may frighten the horses in a nervous retail period. Yet fashion also needs the young and the brave to stir things up, and anyway, Riccardo Tisci was careful not to go the whole hog here. His route to the American West has been followed gradually, via Mexico, where the gaucho/Catholic references from his much-acclaimed collection of last winter originated. Something of the lace (now shown veiled beneath semi-sheer dresses) and the frothy white shirts of that collection carried over into Spring, the shirts perked up with gold bows and diamanté brooches in the shape of sheriff's badges. As for the bondage? It was mostly left to crisscross openwork back views, which will presumably remain strictly "editorial." No chance that will be the case with the thigh-high cowboy boots, though. Crazed lines will be forming for those overnight, recession or no.
30 September 2008
Riccardo Tisci is a designer who likes to get mileage out of a theme once he's found it. So far, he's used a trip to South America to fuel his Fall ready-to-wear and haute couture shows, and he's not stopping for Resort. No matter, though, because it's here that the filtering of Latin American Catholicism and gaucho influence makes the most sense as elements of an urban wardrobe.Tisci's skill in developing Givenchy as a go-to blouse house was stamped all over Resort in different ways: undulating plissé frills falling into asymmetric jabots, a crisp linen jacquard lace, shirtdresses, and (a trend to watch) a lot of new scarf action at the neck—either wound integrally into striped and bandanna-print shirts, or as silk squares, knotted Girl Scout-style. Accessory-wise, there was a choice of fully embracing the South American Way—gold cowboy boots, gaucho riding-chap boots—or not. A great fold-over tobacco lizard clutch was charged with the kind of unidentifiable, no-logo chic that is quietly gathering more and more followers to the cult of Givenchy.
2 July 2008
Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy has moved up to the point where he's hitting the tricky balance that couture demands: developing recognizable signatures, on the one hand, and spinning fantasy, on the other. He had a theme for Fall—anticipating the trip to Peru he plans to take in August. That gave him a color scheme, from the tobacco browns of gauchos to the vivid pinks, folkloric alpaca blanket stripes, and patterned knits of Inca culture. To his credit, though, he used those devices to develop more of what his growing audience has learned to love about him: his young, modern, and urban take on chic dressing, punctuated with incisive tailoring and a flair for intense shots of decoration.The latter came across best in two irregularly tiered, densely fringed dresses in pale pink—updates for all the clients who fell for the feathered dresses in his last couture collection. For day, his tailoring alternated between wide-cut, dark khaki pants with luxe bombers and leather jackets and pin-slim long jackets and fitted vests worn over leggings. Added to that, his floor-grazing, asymmetric jersey dresses with trailing trains and the series of sheer, black Chantilly lace gowns under biker jackets and capes gave the sense of a collection that has a central core. Tisci's Givenchy now has a character and confidence of its own.
30 June 2008
Gothicism and Catholicism have been cornerstones of Riccardo Tisci's growing reputation in womenswear, so why would his first foray into menswear start anywhere else? Except it didn't. It actually started with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra sawing its way through Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters," and the ambience of the metal mosh pit hung heavy over the shorts-over-leggings proportion that opened the show (there were leather and lace versions). It was so…definitethat it was easy to imagine the stylists in the audience getting excited by all the great pictures they'd be able to extract from such outfits. One supposes the retailers were slightly less thrilled. And that was even before the black shorts, voile blouse, and black leather kerchief.The boy-scout-gone-bad look aside, there were fortunately some expertly tailored suits, which suggested that Tisci does have a grasp on what the style-conscious male might be craving. The sight of Brazilian Evandro Soldati in a Givenchy football jersey was also a valuable reminder that Tisci is a child of sport-crazed Italia just as much as he is a product of Central Saint Martins in London, where tyro designers learn to turn all that is conventional in the world into decadent extravagance. And BOOM! A head-to-toe fuchsia outfit, at least the fifth such since the Spring season opened in Milan a week ago. Theories on a postcard, please.
26 June 2008
Finally, Riccardo Tisci got up on a runway and did what legions of frustrated editors have been willing him to do for ages: present a collection that put his talent properly and clearly on display for the first time. Not that buyers are disbelievers, or that women haven't run into Tisci's exceptional crisp blouses, sharp jackets, and subtly cut dresses in stores and been pleasantly shocked to find the label inside reads "Givenchy." It's just that until now, something—perhaps trying too hard for concept or atmosphere—has always scuppered the appeal on the catwalk.This season, Tisci got it all under control, and at just the moment to take advantage of the fact that fashion is turning in the direction of his kind of dark, romantic, faintly goth aesthetic. Those on the hunt for new tailoring—something beyond a predictable blazer—will salivate over his black pantsuits and cropped toreador jackets, and the way he showed them with a hugely wantable variety of frothy blouses, from crisp white cottons to fragile, frilled plissé chiffons. Not to mention the slick black patent wedge boots with their tab-and-Velcro fastenings. Or the singular shiny leather puffer that made urban utility look chic again."I've been traveling in South America, and I discovered a romantic sensuality and elegance there I really identified with as a Catholic," said Tisci by way of explanation. The Hispanic influence became more obvious in the black lace and flamenco/matador touches later in the show, but (huge relief) the sense of modernity didn't end up sacrificed on the altar of theme. Where Tisci did ruffles and folkloric wool lace, it was often (and best) in chopped-up abstract appliqués on jackets and coats. Give or take a gold leather bubble dress and a slightly dubious revival of stretch pants, this collection finally shifted Tisci out of the "promising" category into a place where he deserves to be seen as a designer who has come of age.
26 February 2008
The only young-generation couturier working in an establishment Parisian house, Riccardo Tisci is growing into his job at Givenchy with increasing confidence. What he's putting out now has a graphic strength and energy that, after many years in the doldrums, is giving the house an identity of its own. It was there from the first look, a sharp black doublet jacket and flouncy circle skirt with a white frilled under-edging worn by his friend and house mascot Mariacarla Boscono. That modernized dance-skirt silhouette, and Tisci's slightly fierce, youthful tailoring gave him a line to pursue—"Gothic Ballerina" is the way he described it in the program.His slim, long-line jackets—part military, part equestrian—were well-cut elaborations of the look he's been exploring in ready-to-wear. But he also kept up the continuity from his last couture show by doing more with feathered dresses—one, a high-riding ball of ostrich over a simple tank; another veiled in a sheer cage of tulle. No harm in that—every designer needs signatures, and now that Tisci has left behind the contrived conceptual presentations of his early career, what he has to offer is becoming more distinct with every season.
21 January 2008
Givenchy's fall presentation took place in anhôtel particulieron the Left Bank, right next door to Lagerfeld's pad. Red velvet curtains, black-draped antiques, faded grandeur—talk about atmosphere. And to their credit, the 21 outfits weren't completely lost in the shadows. Designed by the Givenchy studio and styled by Panos Yiapanis, the collection straddled a challenging divide of chunky shearling outerwear and pared-down, twenty-first-century boywear.The obvious news was a trouser silhouette that was capacious enough around the waist to encourage a paper-bag effect once belted. Also noticeable was a lack of conventional detail—other pants had no belt loops, and there were shirts with no buttons (they slipped over the head). Such streamlining also applied to the color palette (essentially black, navy, and white), and to the leanness of the knitwear. The shearlings, however, were anything but, which makes one wonder in which direction this collection is headed. After all, the name of Givenchy hardly evokes a hardy outdoor type heaving through sub-zero temps. Still, anything is clearly possible with this house.
16 January 2008
Riccardo Tisci made real strides with his last ready-to-wear show. There were a number of stylish early adopters in Givenchy numbers straight off that runway in today's front row—always a good way to judge a collection's success. But Spring, as it unfolded, found him up to some of his old tricks, laying on far more detail than his otherwise accomplished tailored suiting pieces and right-for-this-season draped asymmetric dresses could handle.Going by the knee-high gladiator sandals and utilitarian leather belt bags and fanny packs, not to mention the models' bleached eyebrows, Tisci's theme seemed to be warrior women, a motif he also referenced at his recent couture show. That would explain the large grommets on everything from sturdy blazers to willowy chiffon (it must be said that using such heavy hardware on so delicate a material is pretty impractical, if not plain silly). If those looks reflected his theme, the oversize polka dots on bubble dresses and the shiny black pearls that studded a waistcoat were more of a leap.The show ended on a high note, though. The designer's unadorned, faintly military jackets, bustiers, and skirts in rugged brown leather revealed that, yes, there is a cool, controlled sense of minimalism lurking underneath all that other stuff. It's a sensibility Tisci should nurture.
2 October 2007
Riccardo Tisci has a growing band of followers, and in the Givenchy showroom in Paris it's easy to see why: The showy, sometimes apparently unconnected statements he strives to make in his runway collections are here redrafted into whole sentences that make sense. For this resort collection, for instance, the feathered puffballs of haute couture were echoed in a dusty pink, frilled, shredded tulle day dress, which, by the kind of happenstance smart designers engineer for women, looked unpremeditatedly right with an oversize khaki jacket. The season'sOut of Africatheme was also well articulated but not overdone in camp shirts à la Parisienne and an elephant-head print on a breezy black satin T-shirt. And for evening, Tisci was smart enough to return to finessing the item he's not just revived from Hubert's archives, but made into something of his own: a chicly modern spiral-cut little black dress.
10 July 2007
Riccardo Tisci has taken his time to show his Givenchy couture collection on a regular runway, rather than in presentations in which his vision—and his audience's ability to focus on it—was blurred by too much high concept. Today he found the confidence to strip away the extraneous theatrics and show what he can do in plain view. As it turns out—and as the many fans of his ready-to-wear already know—his strengths are modern tailoring and ingeniously draped spiral-cut dresses. For couture, he parlayed them into a futuristic take on the goddesses and amazons of Greek mythology.It started with peplumed hunting jackets and feathered skirts, then switched to an exploration of the animal world that included crocodile jackets (the real thing, embellished with appliquéd scales in front, but left as uncut skins in back), oversized fur bombers, and a passage of top-of-helmet to toe-of-shoe looks in dégradé animal print. The tight, overlaced pants and corseted tops had a fierceness vaguely reminiscent of late-eighties Mugler and Montana, or even the late Gianfranco Ferré. That earlier era is gaining fascination for designers of Tisci's age, although he has a softer side, too. That came out in his less assertive suitings and in the highly worked draperies of sparkle-embellished white gowns that ended the show. In all? If, like most young designers, Tisci is still working to define a unique personal signature for himself, he's making progress. With him at the helm, there's a growing sense that the house of Givenchy—which wavered for such a long time before he was hired—is back on a secure footing, and for that, he deserves credit.
2 July 2007
After the Ozwald Boateng interregnum, the Givenchy menswear collection is being put together by the house's resolutely anonymous design studio, so it was obviously a smart move to showcase the new season's offerings as a static presentation, rather than in a show where the slightness of the clothes would be spotlit. As it was, visitors were able to appreciate the subtle details: the satin band inside the turnup on trousers, the polka-dotted lining of a jacket, a tux fabricated from a mélange of cotton and paper, which was light enough for summer, but sure to hold its shape. One inspiration for the collection was apparentlyBlade Runner. There was a hint of sci-fi in the elegant dirigible of light that revolved over the milling throng. And, at a stretch, one could say Ridley Scott's movie also resonated in items that combined a sort of classic anonymity with a hint of looking forward. The biker jacket over a clear plastic K-Way, for example, or the polo that closed with a big black industrial zip. The studio's faith in its single silhouette suggested a quiet confidence, which is a good sign. Even better: a vibe that's (mercifully) less contrived than Boateng's.
27 June 2007
Riffing in a straightforward way on the naval theme that he'd more opaquely alluded to in his Spring Couture show, Riccardo Tisci sent out his most concise and focused ready-to-wear collection yet for Givenchy. All it took, according to his program notes, was a Japanese marine jacket circa the 1920's.Coats and jackets looked particularly strong. A navy fur with a deep, rich pile was the very essence of opulence. Easier to wear, and sure to sell by the boatload, were the fitted peacoats and blazers, including a few winners with face-framing collars cut to look like oversize ribbons.Skirts came long and lean and trailing fishtail hems, while black dresses were wrapped asymmetrically about the body. For trousers, Tisci showed two distinct styles: The first was essentially a sailor pant, high-waisted and narrow through the thigh, then flaring dramatically at the ankle; the less said about the droopy leather drawers, the better.In short, all wasn't perfect. The brass buttons that decorated dresses and coats in Art Deco patterns will, for those who want to wear them beyond the runway, be better in smaller doses. The twisting and pleated pink party frocks seemed out of place among the predominantly black and navy palette. And the white opaque hosiery and glittery heels were styling missteps. But all in all, Tisci has really improved. Good for him.
27 February 2007
The staging of Givenchy's Spring couture—a heavy mist, water dripping onto a gray slab, an indistinct view of a raised tableau in the background—was enigmatic, until you knew the backstory. Riccardo Tisci, the young Italian at the helm, explained afterward that the collection was inspired by his hometown, Taranto, a seaport in Puglia, and "the metamorphosis of sailors into mermaids."In retrospect, it all fell into place: the conceptual deconstructions of admiral's and captain's jackets, the long-trained body-molding gowns trailing across the damp ground. The youngest couturier in Paris, Tisci obviously aspires to say something personal and poetic with his work, and his melancholic and romantic nature is beginning to come into focus. He has a sure touch with dramatic dresses, like the strapless yellow chiffon veiled in black and the mushroom-hued Edwardian gown. And a single, soft suede naval coat unfurling into a train stood out among overcomplicated tailored pieces.Still, his talent—like all talents—needs time to develop. It¿s a big challenge for a relatively inexperienced hand to be thrust into a spotlight where comparisons with the world¿s best couturiers are inevitable, if unfair. Oddly enough, what Tisci needs most is the confidence not to try too hard to fit in with the old guard. His oversize naval caps and his zeal to show that he can cut, say, chiffon shoulders into a tailored cape seem like overanxious attempts to speak in the old-world couture idiom. In fact, that¿s not what he needs to do to prove his worth. When a young designer finds the strength of his own voice, the world will listen, and Tisci should be encouraged to do just that.
22 January 2007
Riccardo Tisci returned today to the venue of his first Givenchy outing of a year ago. That show was roundly trounced by critics, but buyers found things to like in it, especially his beyond-the-ordinary white shirts. Last season's black dresses were also a hit, and increasing sales have given the young Italian confidence. "I'm trying to do my own story," he said backstage.For spring—his all-important third collection—that meant ethnic geometries, which were part of Givenchy's oeuvre, and fetish accents, which are Tisci's own. The elements of tribalism that surfaced in his July couture presentation appeared here as batik-style prints on draped and folded silk jerseys, patent-leather breastplates, and animal-like fringe on a long series of black dresses. The show's circular motif proved both decorative, in the form of cutouts below the neckline, and practical, as in the holes through which the ends of waist-cinching belts were looped. As for the dog collars, striped stockings, and strappy, hobbling footgear that accessorized all this—well, it made for provocative theater.Was this another step in the right direction? One answer will come when the collection arrives in stores a few months from now. The things you'll likely see there are a double-breasted jacket with passementerie detailing, a white denim trench, and more of those black dresses, each one with a new bodice detail. But there are also several elements that you won't come across, like the dresses with arching cutouts that revealed the upper thigh or—say it isn't so—union suits. Tisci remains on the upward slope of his learning curve, and he still has some climbing to do.
3 October 2006
At Givenchy, what's interesting is watching what the young designer Riccardo Tisci can make of the rarefied milieu of haute couture. It is a field now narrowed to a very few players, some of whom were running their own ateliers before Tisci was born, and it is not fair to compare the work of a novice with the accomplishments of masters. Rather, the question is, what do his collections say about who he is and how he sees the world?To judge from this presentation, Tisci is working toward expressing a somewhat dark, contemporary vision of Parisian chic, permeated with an awareness of global undercurrents. The themes in his program notes were drawn from multiple ethnic sources, including Bosnia, India, Africa, and Indonesia. They produced a show, mainly in shades of dark browns and black, that juxtaposed precise tailoring and evening gowns with vast tribal headpieces, veils, and skeletonlike boleros, and suggested imagined worlds of ritual, ceremony, and myth. Clearly, Tisci is a designer sensitive to the notion that fashion is more than a straightforward showcasing of salable clothes. That's to be applauded, even though his fledgling career is a work in progress.
5 July 2006
Just like last season, Ozwald Boateng's catwalk was so long that the models had no choice but to get a move on. Still, their haste seemed unnatural. Perhaps they sensed that some of the more curious outfits that Boateng sent out in this mixed collection weren't worth lingering over. The black-and-white palette and the prevailing air of formality—not to mention the trumpets some of the guys were carrying—suggested that the spiffiness of jazz legends might be a reference point for the clothes. But it's doubtful that Charlie Parker would ever have sported anything like the skimpy black bathing suit and tuxedo-vest combo.A silvery, glazed linen suit had a right-for-now sheen, but it was oddly accessorized with a tight little bow tie. In fact, the accessories generally fought the collection. And proportions weren't ideal either: A three-piece linen suit was too tight; a knit polo had sleeves all the way to the elbow. And yet there were occasional glimmers of the right stuff, as in the effortlessly cool two-pleat checked pants that wouldn't have looked out of place on Gary Cooper. Perhaps Ozwald should just relax a little.
4 July 2006
A new season meant a new attitude at Givenchy. Designer Riccardo Tisci got an earful after his spring debut—and he seems to have taken the criticism on board. Gone was that show's hobbling silhouette, unfortunate footwear, and belabored theatrics. In their place was a collection that paid homage to the heritage of Hubert de Givenchy's house without being one-note. It had suits; it had, in red, the color of the moment; it had volume. Tisci even did sporty.With the rest of the fashion world brooding over somber shades, protective layers, and austerity, you might've expected Tisci to work in that vein—after all, before he took over the reins at Givenchy, what little people knew of him was his way with a cardinal coat and his dark romanticism. Instead, he brought unexpected playfulness to tucked and folded army-green knits, shaggy chubbies, and shiny puffer jackets. And there were ready-for-the-retail-floor little black dresses by the dozen.Tisci's first six models—all women of color—wore some of those cocktail numbers. There are some who might say that their place in the lineup—why not mix them in with the Russian-blonde brigade?—was a little forced. But it still drove home a point about the modeling business' lack of diversity, or worse, an industry-wide blind spot for anyone who doesn't fit a too-narrow definition of beauty. It's an issue few other designers have seemed willing to address recently. For that, and for a much improved sophomore effort, Tisci deserves kudos.
28 February 2006
The creepy swell of theMulholland Drivesoundtrack announced Oswald Boateng's intention to take his audience on a journey. Fortunately, it was an upbeat, bright-hued place he took them to. "I'm not toning it down anymore," he announced with characteristic brio. "I'm going to create a color vocabulary for Givenchy."Boateng started with a pair of narrow, tab-closed trousers in a vivid grass-green, followed shortly by a leather peacoat in the same shade. A tie came in a bold blue that the designer insisted Hubert de Givenchy himself had been partial to. An even brighter shade colored overstitched jeans and a matching shirt. Rather more accessible was a palette of rich autumnal tones—pumpkin, chestnut, rust, and brown—which looked best in velvet jackets and trousers.The collection cantered restlessly across a whole field of references: a black leather military shirt, for instance, sat somewhat incongruously alongside a cardigan coat in a tweedy knit with a long matching scarf. The runway itself, meanwhile, was an endless streak of herringbone boardwalk, a motif picked up in an alpaca-collared coat. Ironically, given all this color and pattern, Boateng was wearing an uncharacteristically somber-hued ensemble when he emerged to take his bow.
30 January 2006
There's only one way to sum up what went on at Givenchy: It was painful. First, the drag of crossing traffic-clogged Paris at rush hour, followed by an interminable wait for the show to begin. Then the pretentious presentation: android-faced women circling endlessly in a white space, trussed up in skirts and dresses so constricting it looked like a special form of cruelty to models.This was Riccardo Tisci's first stab at Givenchy ready-to-wear, and it was a perplexing move both for the designer and the brand, which has been troubled by several swerves in direction over the past few years. From what was possible to ascertain about Tisci's style, when glimpsed at Givenchy's couture show in July, a kind of gothic romanticism might have been expected. That was nowhere to be seen in this collection, which, with its bandaged, below-the-knee hobble skirts and relentlessly seamed, formfitting jersey dresses, was more an homage to the eighties heyday of Azzedine Alaïa and Thierry Mugler, treading on heavily ugly block-heel shoes.The confusion here is as much to do with what Givenchy means to the world at large as it is about the difficult contrivances of Tisci's designs. Since Hubert de Givenchy launched his first collection as a few simple staples to get a woman through her everyday life (a trench, a pair of pants, a black turtleneck, an LBD, and so on), the brand has, in recent times, swung from Alexander McQueen's dominatrix severity to Julien Macdonald's unbridled bling. With Tisci in the hot seat, there's yet another change of gear going on—one that seems diametrically opposed to the approachable, commercial image presented by Liv Tyler in the company's fragrance advertising. Essentially, that leaves Givenchy facing the same question as it was when McQueen arrived: At exactly what kind of woman is it aimed? This nerve-grating collection didn't provide any kind of answer.
4 October 2005
For one mad moment, a low-necked tank in a sailor stripe signaled Querelle of Brest rather than the dapper gent of means whom Ozwald Boateng usually courts with his clothes. And even though this Givenchy collection didn't turn out to be quite that revolutionary in the end, Boateng did cut loose a little. It wasn't just those sailor stripes. The designer was toying with Givenchy's classic bourgeois heritage, spicing it up with a sprinkle of tasty crassness. So there was a sheer polo shirt, and an old gold leather bomber with matching tie, and some trompe l'oeil byplay with layered tops. And how about a broad-shouldered tux in mint green?Boateng didn't put all his eggs in such a tricky basket, however. He also offered navy-striped suits, a seersucker ensemble, and a chambray jacket with jeans, any of which would pass muster at a smart-casual BCBG affair in Paris. But the solo fingerpoppin' strut with which the designer always signs off suggested his true allegiance lies with the show-off.
7 July 2005
If there’s one thing the fashion crowd can’t be accused of it’s an absence of optimism, even in the face of discouraging experience. That, plus a phalanx of heavy security, explains the mob scene outside the entrance to Givenchy, where the ever hopeful assembled to view the first couture collection of a virtual unknown, Riccardo Tisci.After showing his second ready-to-wear collection, last season in Milan, the young Italian, who was educated at Central Saint Martins in London, has become the fourth designer (after John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, and Julien Macdonald) to join the house since Hubert de Givenchy retired in 1995. What he brings to the job is a reputation for a vaguely goth look and a lot of support from the model Mariacarla Boscono and her gang of leggy friends—the sort of credit that plays well on the fashion-jungle telegraph.Tisci’s audience was invited to look in on live tableaux of groups of his clothes, arranged in various rooms of the House. From what was visible, he took the lanky, drifty silhouettes of his last show, treated them to a couture rendering in terms of handwork and materials, and polished it all up with an injection of edgy, young Parisian styling.The result, less aggressive than McQueen and less vulgar than Macdonald, also studiously avoided references to Audrey Hepburn, who, however lovely in her time, has become a bit of a house cliché. Instead, Tisci seemed to concentrate on long dresses, one covered with black crochet lace, another in nude chiffon falling into swags and knots at the front, and a third cut from formfitting emerald velvet—all shown on girls with long, center-parted locks. Luxe items like a crushed-velvet bomber with a rose-petal collar, patent boots, and a white blouse with a zigzag ruffled front (a take on the famous Givenchy Bettina blouse) also looked promising. But just how the collection will measure up on a runway can’t be judged until next season.
6 July 2005
"This is the essence of French classics," Ozwald Boateng said backstage at Givenchy. "It's more about attitude than clothes." Translation: a parade of outfits that—in the herringboned, houndstoothed straightness of the fabrications, in the slight peak of the shoulder line, in the swank prissiness of the accessories—suggested the elegant but screwed-up-tight French gent of global legend. That attitude was also evident in a cape and a trilby hat, the former, claimed Boateng, inspired by one of Hubert de Givenchy's very own, the latter a salute to the style of iconic French actor Alain Delon.But ultimately, this show was less about France than China, the new frontier for fashion. As is his wont, Boateng opened the show with a self-mythologizing short film, shot amid the limestone towers of Guilin, which depicted his designs as a mediating force in a martial arts face-off. And perhaps in China, Boateng's double-breasted blouson, mini-houndstoothed hoodie, herringbone trench, and old gold smoking jacket will strike men as the essence not just of France but of some ineffable Eurochic.
30 January 2005
Sepulchral lighting, gravel underfoot, the soundtrack fromAssault on Precinct 13ominously pulsing—it was a portentous setting for Ozwald Boateng's debut at Givenchy. Then, ten screens lit up around the room, showing a cartoon directed by Boateng that starred an animated version of himself as the label's superhero savior.Given that introduction, the clothes that then came down the runway seemed surprisingly safe: navy jackets over tailored jeans, navy pinstripes, a pale-blue three-piece suit, a pea coat in the same shade paired with brick-red trousers, a white trench, and so on. Some models had phrases scrawled on their faces and limbs; one read, "Je suis un mensonge qui dit toujours la verité" (I am a lie that always tells the truth). Not exactly a superhero's motto.
4 July 2004
The time has come to bid adieu to Julien Macdonald, who leaves Givenchy after three years. Macdonald has not had the easiest of times in Paris. His natural inclination, as demonstrated by his eponymous London-based label, is toward a spangly, none too subtle glamour that would satisfy even the most blatantly exhibitionist starlet. Macdonald spent his time at Givenchy desperately trying to free himself from its history, dominated by the understated chic that its founder created for Audrey Hepburn in the fifties: little black dresses that tapered toward the knees, cropped-sleeve coats that shrugged over straight skirts, and sweet but sober evening dresses with one indulgence: a strapless neckline, say, or a judiciously placed bow.Having resisted the pull of the past this long, Macdonald finally gave in and used the house's roots as inspiration for his last big blowout at Givenchy. The problem was that none of it really worked. His mix of voluminous furs, belted coats over billowing pouf skirts, and fitted cocktail dresses with frothy lingerie flourishes has already been seen elsewhere this week—and in much more convincing forms. Still, if there's anything positive about all of this, it's that Macdonald is happy to be free to concentrate on his own label. That's if the size of his smile as he took the runway at the show's finale is anything to go by.
10 March 2004
With the Carpenters in the air, it was clear before a model set foot on the rustic flagstone runway that this was not going to be one of the disco glitzfests Julien Macdonald habitually throws for his own label in London. Sure enough, the first girl out was wearing a drifty, seventies-era tiered cream cheesecloth tent banded with inserts of macramé and tasseled shoulder straps, followed by a dusty-pink crinkled petticoat dress pulled in with crisscrossed lacing under the bust.Macdonald tightened up his romantic hippy theme with a section of shrunken washed cotton bellhop jackets and biker leathers sweetened in tan leather and cream canvas, sometimes layered atop long blouses and cropped pants. Other modernizing touches, among all the airy gauze and ombré-dyed silk, were the eye-catching Givenchy bags—outsized shoulder-slung satchels loaded with heavy-duty straps and chunky leather braids, or giant wooden-handled semi-circular bags in squashy skins.It made for a pretty summer collection that showcased some of Macdonald's talent with knit (loosely crocheted fishing-net cardigans, for example) and included the sort of luxury details French women like when summering around the Mediterranean. The season-to-season continuity of brand image remains a point of confusion, though, as this collection seems poles apart from the strictly constructed homages to Audrey Hepburn that Macdonald has been producing for Givenchy Haute Couture.
10 October 2003
Perhaps in response to accusations of vulgarity and of too much overlap with his own disco-fabulous London collection, Julien Macdonald chose to go back to basics at Givenchy Couture. Working with the two mainstays of the house’s heritage—the memory of Audrey Hepburn and a reputation for suits—the designer emphasized daywear (something that has evaporated from many couture collections) and made overt references toSabrinaandBreakfast at Tiffany’sin the program notes.Giving a certain customer what she wants is also an aim of Macdonald, and that means clothes that don’t flash too much flesh. The skirt suits were done up in black, high at the neck or with big, face-framing collars, and with sufficient decoration—like overlays of lace or hand-pleating—to distinguish them from ready-to-wear. What made them more Macdonald than Hubert was the fierce form-hugging silhouette, a sign of a sensibility that leans toward eighties influences rather than fifties discretion. He gestured toward a more extravagant glamour in his L’Interdit leopard-print fur coat (a reference to the classic Givenchy perfume), thrown over a dark-brown satin dress. And among his reworkings of little black Audrey-esque pieces for cocktail hour, the designer came up with a flamenco dress with matching matador jacket, trimmed with bobbles, in a style that catches the Paris trend.Though the collection missed the lightness and color that’s emerging elsewhere, it showed Macdonald on his best behavior, making an effort to show off what the house can do with couture fabrics and handwork, yet within safely defined parameters. He threw caution to the wind only once, when a giant gown of iridescent ruffled cellophane blew along the runway, the sole reminder of the identity he normally saves for his London viewers.
7 July 2003
In his third season as creative director at Givenchy, Julien Macdonald showed a collection that was sleek, dark and above all mysterious. Models wore their clothes like battle armor—slim leather and tweed coats over turtlenecks over knee-length skirts, accessorized with thigh-high boots and black leather gloves, often to the elbow. Most of the time the only skin exposed was on their faces. Not surprisingly, the fictional muse that inspired the designer this season is a woman with something to hide. "She's a KGB spy living in Paris," he said backstage after the show. "She's a woman you see only in passing and only at night.”This collection was more restrained and classically sophisticated than we've come to expect from Macdonald; there were none of the gold lam¿ jumpsuits or shredded pastel denims he's been known to do in the past. He seemed to be looking back at Givenchy’s Audrey Hepburn heyday, showing chic, slimmed-down versions of the house’s classic belted trench coat in combinations of wool, leather and tweed. He even closed the show with a series of variations on the little black dress, trimmed with wide bands of crystals that, the designer said, were informed by the Van Cleef & Arpels diamonds owned by the Duchess of Windsor. They twinkled like rainbows under the runway lights—proving that though he may have turned down the volume, Macdonald hasn’t entirely given up on glitz.
8 March 2003
Amid incessant industry rumors—firmly rebutted by his bosses at LVMH—that he is about to leave Givenchy, Julien Macdonald staged a show meant to convince his critics that he has mastered the refinements of haute couture. For this make-or-break collection, he began by going back to basics, which for this house means the iconic clothes Hubert de Givenchy designed for Audrey Hepburn in the ’50s. Macdonald opened the show with his renditions of two obvious choices: the little black dresses Hepburn wore inBreakfast at Tiffany'sandSabrina.But where to go from there? Clarity of vision—and the conviction to develop within a single genre—has always been a problem with Macdonald’s couture presentations. Last season his show was all sexed-up razzle-dazzle, staged against the flashing neon lights of a downtown red-light district. During another season, he presented couture as if he were an intellectual deconstructionist. In an arena dominated by the work of visionary designers, it is this inconsistency that has audiences confused.Following the Audrey-toned opening, Macdonald reverted to sharp tailoring with an aggressive feeling, which put it closer to the hard-edged ’80s than the romantic femininity making news in Paris this week. There were mannish three-piece pinstriped pant and skirt suits, accessorized with matching oversize trilbies. One white military suit came with silver metal bars bolted onto the front of the jacket, a play on frogging that gave the impression of a caged torso. Macdonald also made an effort to employ the techniques of couture by using rope details, cutouts, broderie anglaise, organza and lace to display flesh and female curves. It was certainly his best shot at adult sophistication thus far—but in a city that is breathing lightness, delicacy and color, the hardness of the look seemed strangely off track.
20 January 2003
For Givenchy, Julien Macdonald surfed several of the trend waves that are crashing on the fashion beach for summer. That meant Mediterranean-style versions of the season's ultra-short, sporty and combat-inspired looks, and hot doses of color.Ignoring the house's former reputation for elegant, ladylike suits, Macdonald cut a white piqué jacket with matching micro shorts and paired a classic black jacket with sheer mesh trousers. His focus then turned mostly on resort clothes aimed at those who vacation in places like Saint-Tropez—and whose idea of fashion is to accessorize their hot-pink swimwear with a see-through sport jacket. Rounding out the casually dressy options were shredded lavender denims, and suede jackets and jeans done in vivid jungle-pattern patchwork. For evening, Macdonald channeled the current feeling for goddessy dresses and prints. His best: a black plissé-silk dress with a black empire waistband.
5 October 2002
The real Julien Macdonald has finally stood up at Givenchy couture. At home in London, Macdonald is the razzle-dazzle king of showbiz fashion. Trying to be a refined grownup for the prim-and-proper Givenchy audience hasn’t worked. So, after last season’s essay in intellectual deconstruction, and the previous season’s stab at careful classics, Macdonald is finally showing what he’s made of. It’s brash and it’s loud. It’s got the leather and the bondage and the bodies and the eye-socking rainbows of color. And, hell, why not? If that’s what you do, go on and do it.That means a black leather trouser suit cut into strips and fastened with aggressive bows. It means a white biker jacket encrusted with gold beads over a flouncy white leather ball skirt. A gold guipure lace Napoleon coat, bristling with fringed epaulets. An evening gown pieced from chiffon handkerchiefs that graduate from yellow through orange.The neon minidresses, the punk-pink-dyed mink and the coats and gowns with trailing trains had a straightforward honesty about them. They’re good-time clothes aimed straight between the eyes of the pop-ocracy of the world. If Macdonald’s new bid for a house identity went straight over the heads of the stunned ladies in the audience, so be it. There are plenty of new high-spenders in Paris this week who just might get it, and love it. And even if they don’t, Macdonald can say that instead of pussyfooting around, he’s at last given Givenchy his undiluted all.
9 July 2002
Julien Macdonald has been handed the mandate to carve out a distinct, but commercially-viable identity for the house of Givenchy. For Fall—his second collection as creative director— Macdonald brought in a few of the design ideas currently making the rounds. Patchwork, handkerchief-point chiffon dresses, biker jackets and the somewhat exhausted Casbah look all made an appearance.Macdonald opened with a grayish-brown distressed leather patchwork parka worn with gray leather pants and stacked knee-high boots. His take on biker leathers involved cutting and seaming the jacket short and close to the body, then adding an Elizabethan-style standup collar. There were also Walter Raleigh-esque bloomers worn with swashbuckling boots, English country house tapestries fashioned into coats and bags, Gloriana-style gilded brocade jeans and a tights-and-tunic look perhaps inspired by a few late-night Errol Flynn movies.When he exerts his skills in knitwear—his original claim to fame—Macdonald does best, as he demonstrated briefly in this collection with a huge loopy black sweater and some laddered punk knits. But he quickly returned to glitzier looks, like a lame harem jumpsuit, a gold-edged djellaba coat and some café-au-lait-toned satins for evening. It was hard to find a uniting theme other than a feeling for the Eighties. But fashion skewered that decade to death a year ago, and there is still a sense that this collection is struggling to find a raison d'etre.
8 March 2002
For his second couture collection at Givenchy, Welshman Julien Macdonald had obviously taken to heart last season’s critique of his “risk-free” approach. This time he left solid ground far behind, envisaging an “angel, descending to earth,” complete with pale colors, abstract forms and “proportions straight out of a dream.”How do angels materialize on the catwalk? Apparently, wearing an asymmetric ruched white chiffon smock dress layered over white cotton trousers. Or a black cotton trouser suit with a décolleté back, embroidered with jet beading and black paillettes. Or, like Karolina Kurkova, caught up in an asymmetric tunic with a draped satin sleeve and looped passementeries over hand-painted “watermark” trousers. Phew. While experimentation is a crucial element of couture, some of Macdonald’s treatments felt so heavy-handed, it was little surprise his poor creatures were falling to earth. Some fell with quite a thud. Some even wore head bandages as mementos of their rough descent.While there were some strong, assertive silhouettes on display—especially the embellished and layered jackets—most of Macdonald’s collection was as unsuitable for mere mortals as it was for celestial beings.
19 January 2002
After his awkward debut during couture week, Welsh designer Julien Macdonald is still struggling to find his feet.The house of Givenchy has always been known for its purity of line and simplicity of design—the polar opposite of Macdonald's heavy-handed use of ruching, cord inlays and cabled trims. While some pieces were finely made—notably a striking off-white poplin dancer skirt with layered crinolines and a pink marbleized dip-dye shirt—they got lost in an overabundance of decoration. Macdonald's high-waist pegged trousers, too sheer smocked dresses and fussy riding jackets all felt contrived.Ultimately, this collection fell short of forging the new identity that Givenchy seeks.
9 October 2001
“I wanted to go back to classic ideals of Parisian elegance,” said Julien Macdonald before his debut at Givenchy. “Everyone remembers Hubert de Givenchy’s distinctive brand of sophistication.” Macdonald’s mission is to establish a new, commercially viable identity for the famed house while maintaining a spiritual link to its illustrious past.The Welsh-born designer took his first, if at times overly cautious, steps in that direction by tackling some Givenchy classics, mostly in black. A sheer, ample-sleeved Bettina blouse (named after Bettina Graziani, Hubert’s model and muse of the late ’50s) was paired with a high-waisted leather skirt that swept the catwalk with its generous train; a pale-gray velvet coat was embroidered with sheared mink and crystal beads; and a tulip skirt got a twenty-first-century makeover when worn with a muslin shirt and cigarette pants.Macdonald indulged his ongoing love affair with fashion’s more dramatic side with several formfitting, Hollywood-ready gowns that shimmied down to a cascade of feathers or a shredded hem. A curious eye-popper came in the form of an extensively ruffled skirt worn with a transparent net top that fully revealed model Shalom Harlow’s torso but obscured her face.Givenchy would benefit from a touch that was both more assertive and light-handed. It will be interesting to see how Macdonald responds to that challenge as he settles into his new job.
7 July 2001
Alexander McQueen is going through a particularly good moment: After hosting an exquisite couture party for Givenchy last summer and delivering a breathtaking show for his signature line in London two weeks ago, he presented today a tempered, well-thought-out collection for Givenchy ready-to-wear.Teddy boys, rockabilly and David Bowie were all sources of inspiration for McQueen. Skirts with massive confections of pleats, ruffles and crinolines were worn with massive corset-belts, sharp jackets and crisp short-sleeved shirts—perfect for a Sunday sundae at the fashion wonderland drive-in. There were also long, mannish pinstriped overcoats, sheer shirts with gathered panel fronts and several lingerie-inspired looks. Dazzling apple-green and red- checkered coats, spectator pumps and pegged houndstooth trousers were visually arresting, but more traditional Givenchy customers will go for the chocolate suede bombers, fitted pencil skirts and tortoiseshell-print dresses.
10 October 2000
Alexander McQueen bravely set his show to the X-Ray Spec's punk ballad "I'm a cliché?"—then set out to refute the message by appropriating styling tricks absorbed from a new school of designers. His first look—a man-size jacket in army green worn with a white shirt, narrow golden clip-on tie and a white shirt and hose—defined the new '80s proportions that are establishing themselves so forcefully this season. '80s, too, were the clever twist jersey mini dresses (think early Versace), and the gold lamé wood-grain brocades, used for sharply cut short-waisted jackets and slim-leg pants worn with sleeveless leather tops (Alexis Carrington goes clubbing). A Gothic punky attitude coursed through the show, reinforced through the somber palette of army green, black and purple.As he reinforced with his own name-collection, McQueen is a visionary talent. So it was a pity that this production had the formulaic look of a stylist-led collection, with classic staples tricked up with styling details—like trousers bloused into ankle boots, and jackets cinched at waist or hip with invisibly fastening wide patent belts and Kraftwerk-narrow ties worn with men's shirts. Flashes of McQueen's real talents shone through in the punk-slashed tartan top over a prune patent mini, those twist dresses and a black-and-purple banded leather mini-dress, the bands fastening in back like bondage belts.More exhilarating still was McQueen's bow—he coursed the considerable length of the runway (a beautiful curving corridor in the Musée du Cinema, currently under renovation) on a speeding scooter.
29 February 2000
"Bangee sportswear with '80s influence" could be a way of describing Alexander McQueen's show for Givenchy, staged in what was set up to look like a gymnasium complete with winner's podium and high-powered fans to blow up the models' ponytailed manes. Most of the collection was made up of tracksuits with high heels, but there was also a white leather boilersuit, sexy black pantsuits with yellow stitching, and a leather patchwork coat in brown, acid-green and white. Boxing and athletic uniform influences showed up on nylon bomber jackets, sports mesh tank dresses and blue sweaters with a sporty yellow stripe.
5 October 1999
Curiosity, and fear, of the future was very much in the air whenAlexander McQueenpresented his Fall 1999 fin de siècle collection forGivenchy. Y2K had been generating lots of column inches, as is British “enfant terrible” McQueen, who was shaking up the French house of Givenchy, which for so long was associated with elegance,Audrey Hepburn, and the classic LBD.McQueen opened his collection with a laser show, and sentTron-inspired models in what one observer described as “android couture” down a silvery mirrored runway. Embellishments, embroidered and printed, took the form of circuit boards. Glow-in-the-dark looks added drama to the show, as did the light-up finale pieces. These were made of molded clear plastic “vac-formed from plaster body casts” and fitted out with battery-powered, “programmed flashing LEDs.” The only thing missing in this bright picture of the future was shades.
27 February 1999
Editor’s note: Matthew Williams’s appointment as the new creative director of Givenchy comes in the lead-up to the fall 2020 couture season. We are celebrating the house and the métier by posting archival Givenchy collections. This one was presented on January 19, 1997, in Paris.The spring 1997 season marked a turning point for the couture. Two years after John Galliano succeeded Hubert de Givenchy, he had shuffled over to Christian Dior (replacing Gianfranco Ferré), and Alexander McQueen had been slotted into Galliano’s place on Avenue George V.Voguetitled its analysis of the goings-on “Couture Clash,” and divided the métier into camps: old guard against the avant-garde; agents provocateurs versus the éminences grises. The appointments of these renegade Brits to the head of French heritage houses marked another kind of clash, as well—a culture clash. Both Galliano and McQueen were proudly working class.Shock was a tactic McQueen had already employed in his own shows and he seemed to have no problem translating that intoépater les bourgeois.His debut collection was executed in gold and white, a palette taken from a Givenchy label, and featured strict tailoring for femme fatales as well as corsetry for bombshell types. Many pieces had gold stump work with a militaristic or czarist feeling, and there was a filmy blouse that might (or might not) have been a nod to Givenchy’s first hit, the Bettina blouse. It seems fair to say that in this case the designer was not able to reconcile the opposing forces he set loose. The simple elegance of a “Maria Callas” dress or a ruffled cape with a Renaissance madonna and child on the back was undercut by accessories such as sheep horns (at least one pair came from Isabella Blow’s herd) and cattle-like nose rings.Breakfast at Tiffany’sthis was not.At the time,Voguequoted excerpts from an interview McQueen did withLe Figaroin which he said that he had “no respect for Hubert de Givenchy,” and that he accepted the position “because I love fashion.” It should be noted that the collection was conceived and executed in less than three months, and ultimately dismissed by McQueen himself in about half of that time span. If he was not interested in appeasing the staid front row of well-heeled and perfectly coiffed grandes dames, McQueen was respectful of the atelier.
Here’s how Kate Betts documented her preshow visit with the designer forVogue:“Inside, McQueen, wearing sneakers and cargo pants, tells me he has no intention of becoming the Saint Laurent of the ’90s. For a 27-year-old, he’s got a lot of gumption. We’re sitting in the big salon, an elegant room that has fallen into some disrepair, vases of half-dead flowers perched on an ugly makeshift coffee table. McQueen seems pleased with the way things are going, especially with the ateliers. ‘You know, I worked for Marc Bohan when he was at Hartnell, and it was the worst experience of my life. He was so snotty with the ateliers. I think they really like me up there,’ he says, pointing to the ceiling and the Givenchy workrooms beyond. ‘They don’t think I’m some silly little kid from London fussing around with a hemline.’ Catherine Delondre, the premier d’atelier, seems to genuinely like McQueen, even though she was a Givenchy loyalist for 33 years: ‘At first we weren’t sure, but then when we saw the things coming out of the atelier, we thought, This is really couture.’”
18 June 2020
Editor’s note: Matthew Williams’s appointment as the new creative director of Givenchy comes in the lead up to the fall 2020 couture season. We are celebrating the house and the métier by posting archival Givenchy collections. This one was presented on July 7, 1996, in Paris.For his sophomore Givenchy couture outing, John Galliano returned to the theme he explored inhis 1984 graduate collection, the Incroyables. The title refers to a small group of fashionable and hedonistic members of the French aristocracy who flouted convention during the Directoire period (1795–1799). Known for their affectations, the (male) Incroyables and (female) Merveilleuses’s manner of dress was considered scandalous. The Merveilleuses’s dresses featured empire waists (inspired by classical culture) and were often cut in see-through materials. In Galliano’s 1997 reinterpretations, they read as extensions of slip and lingerie dressing.Voguethrilled over the designer’s “negligee frills for Givenchy.” Galliano, noted the magazine, “is now living his ‘Empire’ dream, of Josephine hair and absinthe-drinker’s eyes.”Emma,the movie based on the Jane Austen novel and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, was not released until after this show, but it made the collection all the more appealing. In it’s romantic historicism it was very Galliano, and not very Givenchy at all. This was the second, and final, couture collection the designer made for the house before replacing Gianfranco Ferré at Christian Dior.
17 June 2020
Editor’s note:Matthew Williams’s appointment as the new creative director of Givenchy comes in the lead up to the fall 2020 couture season. We are celebrating the house and the métier by posting archival Givenchy collections. This one was presented on July 11, 1995, in Paris.Hubert de Givenchy opted to ease out of fashion with a gracious whisper rather than a bang. Plenty of those would be provided by his immediate successors, the British iconoclasts John Galliano and Alexander McQueen. In fact, Givenchy seemed to take a business as usual approach to his fall 2005 couture outing.Though Givenchy would present a ready-to-wear collection later in the year, this was called “The Last Show,” and it hewed to the traditional categories: Jour, cocktail, soir. The ladylike suits, LBDs, and charity circuit evening looks he showed “ensured his loyal, older customers wouldn’t be left with nothing to wear,” notedVogue.The only visible markers that this show was out of the ordinary were the made-over front-row—Sean Ferrer, son of Givenchy’s muse Audrey Hepburn was in the house, as were Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Lacroix, Valentino, Issey Miyake, Emanuel Ungaro, Paco Rabanne Claude Montana, Kenzo Takada, and Oscar de la Renta—and the designer’s decision to inviteles petites mainsto share his final bow. “I know their names, their faces, their smiles, and above all their ability,” Givenchy told thePalm Beach Daily News.“I hope that they all know that their names are engraved in my memory and in my heart.”Photo: Gerard Fouet / AFP via Getty ImagesThere were few dry eyes in the house, but there were perhaps even more loose lips as gossip spread about who would take over the house. The answer came just a few hours after “Le Grand” took his bow: John Galliano. “When asked how they felt,” reportedVogue,“Givenchy said ‘happy’ and Galliano said ‘rich.’”Givenchy sold his company to LVMH in 1988 and signed a seven year contract. The changing of the guard at his house was indicative of the subsequent shake-ups and talent shufflings wrought by the corporatization (and democratization) of the luxury industry, repercussions of which are still being felt to this day. Designer fashion once aimed at the elite was becoming more aligned with pop culture, celebrity, and marketing. Ironically the aristocratic Givenchy in some way paved the way for this to happen.
16 June 2020