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 the seigneur à loisir in 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.
