Hubert de Givenchy
French
fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy is known for his elegant haute
couture designs and professional relationships with clients like Audrey
Hepburn.
QUOTES
“Dressing a woman is
to make her more beautiful—isn't that the point of it all?”
—Hubert de Givenchy
Fashion
Designer (1927–2010)
Hubert de Givenchy
was born to an aristocratic family in Beauvais, France, on February 21, 1927.
After attending art school, he worked for several important fashion designers
in Paris. He opened his own design house in 1952 and was immediately praised
for his chic, feminine designs. Givenchy's most famous couture client was
actress Audrey Hepburn, who wore his designs in Breakfast
at Tiffany's (1961), among other
films.
BIO.
Givenchy
RESORT 2014
Photo: Courtesy of Givenchy
by Hamish Bowles
Riccardo Tisci’s Givenchy resort played with a capsule
wardrobe of classics—the trench, the safari jacket, a strapless summery
elastic-waist dress, a print tee—and took them from chic understatement to
hyper fashion embellishment. The saharienne jacket was deconstructed to become
a chiffon blouse with its pockets in a solid fabric, worn with wide-leg cargo
pants or elaborated gored skirts.
Those smock-waist peasant dresses—often layered over lean pants—in a crisp cotton poplin and an intriguing macramé textured lace in gleaming white opened the presentation, but this restraint soon gave way to Tisci’s brilliant pattern mixes. The strong photo-print stories included a pattern of scattered confetti that was transformed into a cool New Age take on the classic polka dot; and clusters of manipulated pink rose camouflage. This motif was stylishly used as the surprising collar facing of a trench (where it also bloomed on the back of the sleeves); wrapping the black lace leg of cargo pants; or to smother a slim blazer, pant—and matching executive case. There was further embellishment in the chokers of bright colored rhinestones and punk studs that sparkled at the throat.
Inspired by the layered patchwork clothing of Holly Hobbie, Tisci added deep ruffled peplums (in trench coat gabardine, leather, or luxe duchess satin). These were used to bundle the waist of many of these looks—as though you had knotted your parka, biker jacket, or trench at the waist. Strictly for the fashion-adventurous.
Those smock-waist peasant dresses—often layered over lean pants—in a crisp cotton poplin and an intriguing macramé textured lace in gleaming white opened the presentation, but this restraint soon gave way to Tisci’s brilliant pattern mixes. The strong photo-print stories included a pattern of scattered confetti that was transformed into a cool New Age take on the classic polka dot; and clusters of manipulated pink rose camouflage. This motif was stylishly used as the surprising collar facing of a trench (where it also bloomed on the back of the sleeves); wrapping the black lace leg of cargo pants; or to smother a slim blazer, pant—and matching executive case. There was further embellishment in the chokers of bright colored rhinestones and punk studs that sparkled at the throat.
Inspired by the layered patchwork clothing of Holly Hobbie, Tisci added deep ruffled peplums (in trench coat gabardine, leather, or luxe duchess satin). These were used to bundle the waist of many of these looks—as though you had knotted your parka, biker jacket, or trench at the waist. Strictly for the fashion-adventurous.
Givenchy
RESORT 2014
Givenchy
SPRING 2014
Photo:
Monica Casa/Indigitalimages.com
by Hamish
Bowles
“I’m obsessed
with Madame Grès,” confessed Riccardo
Tisci
backstage at his show, explaining that he finds the work of that legendary
sculptor turned couturier “very romantic and very dark, with this obsession of
making everything so precisely—like the pleats—and then those almost-African
colorations.”
Taking Madame Grès’s legendary draperies as a starting point, Tisci also looked to the sensual drapes of traditional Japanese kimonos, and to the swathed fabrics used in African and Indian ethnic dress.
The result was a tour de force of modern elegance that moved Riccardo’s Givenchy image forward from the power of his aggressive urban silhouette and his now relentlessly imitated prints, and into a gentler but no less alluring world—even if the girls walked in a giant circle around a set of piled-up wrecked cars (an installation that evoked the fierce and fearsome atmosphere of Alexander McQueen’s Fall 1997 “It’s a Jungle Out There” collection). “People are expecting something from me,” Riccardo said, “so it is very risky, but to be sexy you don’t have to be in high heels with a vinyl jacket—you can be in flat shoes and still be a very sexy woman.” So the only purses the girls carried were simple origami-pleated lanterns, and every look was shown with a flat Japanese slide (in tones such as poison green and rich orange) secured by a colored plastic band, and with its thick sole studded along the sides with crystals. And the clothes had a sophistication that spoke to the education Riccardo has absorbed from Givenchy’s haute couture ateliers (his couture collections are on hold at the moment), with their skilled dressmaking techniques and use of elaborate embroideries.
The show opened with long jersey dresses in tones of Buddhist monk orange, earthen and tobacco browns, and charcoal blacks that wrapped artfully around the body to reveal finely pleated bustiers often suspended from a leather samurai harness. The sophisticated elegance of Japanese style was reflected in kimono jackets worn over pants that had a languid grace. A tribal shawl in perforated leather might be frothed with a cloud of glycerined condor feathers, or a tabard dazzled with a crystal face that looked, as Riccardo said, like a Japanese computer nerd’s interpretation of a tribal mask. That idea was reflected in make-up magician Pat McGrath’s extraordinary faces on some of the girls—with hand-applied crystals glued to create a jeweled face (a process that took eight to ten hours).
The season’s sunray pleats broke forth in the poetic finale evening dresses, where a skirt of black sequins might swing in movement to reveal rainbow embroideries hidden inside the folds, or a copper, opening to reveal blood red, whilst a tuxedo had its own pleat skirts fluttering over the pants. A tuxedo jumpsuit was insouciantly tumbled off one shoulder to reveal a stripe sequin T-shirt underneath. As Riccardo promised, it was a new and subtler but no less powerful way to approach the idea of the sexy and alluring Givenchy woman.
Taking Madame Grès’s legendary draperies as a starting point, Tisci also looked to the sensual drapes of traditional Japanese kimonos, and to the swathed fabrics used in African and Indian ethnic dress.
The result was a tour de force of modern elegance that moved Riccardo’s Givenchy image forward from the power of his aggressive urban silhouette and his now relentlessly imitated prints, and into a gentler but no less alluring world—even if the girls walked in a giant circle around a set of piled-up wrecked cars (an installation that evoked the fierce and fearsome atmosphere of Alexander McQueen’s Fall 1997 “It’s a Jungle Out There” collection). “People are expecting something from me,” Riccardo said, “so it is very risky, but to be sexy you don’t have to be in high heels with a vinyl jacket—you can be in flat shoes and still be a very sexy woman.” So the only purses the girls carried were simple origami-pleated lanterns, and every look was shown with a flat Japanese slide (in tones such as poison green and rich orange) secured by a colored plastic band, and with its thick sole studded along the sides with crystals. And the clothes had a sophistication that spoke to the education Riccardo has absorbed from Givenchy’s haute couture ateliers (his couture collections are on hold at the moment), with their skilled dressmaking techniques and use of elaborate embroideries.
The show opened with long jersey dresses in tones of Buddhist monk orange, earthen and tobacco browns, and charcoal blacks that wrapped artfully around the body to reveal finely pleated bustiers often suspended from a leather samurai harness. The sophisticated elegance of Japanese style was reflected in kimono jackets worn over pants that had a languid grace. A tribal shawl in perforated leather might be frothed with a cloud of glycerined condor feathers, or a tabard dazzled with a crystal face that looked, as Riccardo said, like a Japanese computer nerd’s interpretation of a tribal mask. That idea was reflected in make-up magician Pat McGrath’s extraordinary faces on some of the girls—with hand-applied crystals glued to create a jeweled face (a process that took eight to ten hours).
The season’s sunray pleats broke forth in the poetic finale evening dresses, where a skirt of black sequins might swing in movement to reveal rainbow embroideries hidden inside the folds, or a copper, opening to reveal blood red, whilst a tuxedo had its own pleat skirts fluttering over the pants. A tuxedo jumpsuit was insouciantly tumbled off one shoulder to reveal a stripe sequin T-shirt underneath. As Riccardo promised, it was a new and subtler but no less powerful way to approach the idea of the sexy and alluring Givenchy woman.
Givenchy
PRE-FALL 2014
Photo:
Courtesy of Givenchy
by Mark
Holgate
It would be
easy to reel off the sources that Riccardo
Tisci drew on for his Givenchy pre-fall. Like some
hifalutin Instagram feed, Tisci posted his various current visual
preoccupations onto his mental mood board: the Bauhaus, Gustav Klimt, Africa,
Surrealism, Piet Mondrian, and . . . well, the list goes on and on and on. But
in the end, what proved to be a far greater inspiration to him for this
collection were his considerable achievements at the house of Givenchy. In the
less than nine years since he took the helm, he’s taken what was a house that
was best known for a bow, and turned it into a name that defines the very
essence of what we think of as urban coolness. By being so assiduously creative
in the present, Tisci has been able to gift the house with a greater past than
it ever had before.
So pre-fall, then, was as much a love letter to all that he has done at Givenchy, in all its multiracial, pansexual, modernist, anti-ageist, globalist, and wildly (and weepingly) romantic glory, as it was to a long roll call of inspirations. There were plenty of Givenchy-isms of his own invention here. The perfecto jacket, its biker toughness textured with kaleidoscopic prints, or morphed into a lean masculine coat. Mannish trousers, spliced with graphic bands and panels. The cliches of glamour—sequins, fox, velvet, ostrich feathers—transformed because of the way Tisci handles them with a resolutely unhistoricist, even sometimes androgynous hand; this time round, the sequins came rendered as the pattern on a long, sharply pleated dress, the velvet as flat, substantial sandals. And perhaps best of all, it was all shown in a presentation, as is Tisci’s wont, on a cast of women whose ethnicities hail from all around the world, shunning the industry’s oftentimes far too homogeneous representation of beauty. It’s not just with his clothes that Tisci continues to push fashion forward.
So pre-fall, then, was as much a love letter to all that he has done at Givenchy, in all its multiracial, pansexual, modernist, anti-ageist, globalist, and wildly (and weepingly) romantic glory, as it was to a long roll call of inspirations. There were plenty of Givenchy-isms of his own invention here. The perfecto jacket, its biker toughness textured with kaleidoscopic prints, or morphed into a lean masculine coat. Mannish trousers, spliced with graphic bands and panels. The cliches of glamour—sequins, fox, velvet, ostrich feathers—transformed because of the way Tisci handles them with a resolutely unhistoricist, even sometimes androgynous hand; this time round, the sequins came rendered as the pattern on a long, sharply pleated dress, the velvet as flat, substantial sandals. And perhaps best of all, it was all shown in a presentation, as is Tisci’s wont, on a cast of women whose ethnicities hail from all around the world, shunning the industry’s oftentimes far too homogeneous representation of beauty. It’s not just with his clothes that Tisci continues to push fashion forward.
Givenchy
FALL 2014
Photo:
Monica Fuedi/Feudiguaineri.com
by Sarah Mower
A suppressed
atmosphere of eroticism has been suggesting itself here and there through the
collections. At Givenchy, it finally broke cover. “I wanted to talk more about
women than young girls,” said Riccardo
Tisci, referring to his frankly grown-up take on female sexuality.
He said he’d found his way into it by looking at the work of the Italian
furniture designer and architect Carlo Mollino, a man with an interest in
insects and taking pictures of naked and scantily clad women (it’s amazing what
we find out about obscure practitioners of the arts through fashion these days,
isn’t it?).
The result was one of Tisci’s best collections to date, a lineup that alternated between forties-influenced semi-sheer chiffon dresses printed with imagery derived from butterfly and moth wings, and strong, modern-looking gray tailoring strangely punctuated with broad bands of color. The contrast of masculine and feminine might be one of fashion’s most overused clichés, but still, Tisci’s riff this time made for a compellingly sophisticated series of great things to wear.
The show took place along a long strip of carpet, a visual device that also seemed to keep the silhouettes—and their editing—within the discipline of the straight and narrow. The dresses came out apace, fragile in rendering but still hinting at something perverse. The tailoring series was introduced with mint-color crombie-style coats and blouses, over pants, segueing into short spencer jackets, black velvet suits, and then chic, narrow evening coats. Amongst all this, the luxury quotient was upped by a passage of pale astrakhan and fur coats, and there was a jolt of surprise when an evening dress came out with a fur bodice placed atop a black chiffon skirt. Finally, the insect-wing patterns were abstracted into dense, multicolored paillette embroideries, including one worn by Stella Tennant, fashion’s most innately elegant grown-up modeling star.
The result was one of Tisci’s best collections to date, a lineup that alternated between forties-influenced semi-sheer chiffon dresses printed with imagery derived from butterfly and moth wings, and strong, modern-looking gray tailoring strangely punctuated with broad bands of color. The contrast of masculine and feminine might be one of fashion’s most overused clichés, but still, Tisci’s riff this time made for a compellingly sophisticated series of great things to wear.
The show took place along a long strip of carpet, a visual device that also seemed to keep the silhouettes—and their editing—within the discipline of the straight and narrow. The dresses came out apace, fragile in rendering but still hinting at something perverse. The tailoring series was introduced with mint-color crombie-style coats and blouses, over pants, segueing into short spencer jackets, black velvet suits, and then chic, narrow evening coats. Amongst all this, the luxury quotient was upped by a passage of pale astrakhan and fur coats, and there was a jolt of surprise when an evening dress came out with a fur bodice placed atop a black chiffon skirt. Finally, the insect-wing patterns were abstracted into dense, multicolored paillette embroideries, including one worn by Stella Tennant, fashion’s most innately elegant grown-up modeling star.
Givenchy
FALL 2014
Riccardo
Tisci
The gods smiled on Hubert de Givenchy
when they blessed him with Audrey Hepburn as a close friend and muse in 1953 and the
blessings continue with the addition of Designer Riccardo Tisci to the fashion house of Givenchy
in 2005 as he continues the Givenchy 'luxury brand of Haute Couture' into the future. XOs
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