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.
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