You can go days at the shows, sometimes a whole season, and not get the feeling: the tingly sensation when you see something that isn’t just objectively right, but subjectively too. Walking out of Sarah Burton’s Givenchy, there was a chorus of women’s voices: “I loved that,” “so beautiful,” “exactly how I want to look now.”
Burton has long had the respect of fashion’s in-crowd, first as Lee Alexander McQueen’s right hand, and then as creative director of the brand he founded. Her departure from the label was a collective lament, and her arrival at Givenchy a group cheer. If the response to her first two runways at the LVMH-owned brand was circumspect in any way it was because Burton was busy laying the groundwork, as the role requires: acclimating to the teams, setting an agenda, feeling her way around and into the house codes by focusing solely on silhouette and shape.
That tentative feeling ended with the definitive collection she showed tonight. Burton seemed to be operating more on instinct this season, letting her many years of experience fitting women in the studio guide her. She doesn’t design for some sort of imagined, hypothetical woman. The Givenchy woman, to use the industry vernacular, is all sorts of women.
“I wanted to make it feel very personal,” she said. “Each woman is her own person, each silhouette is her own character.” The show unspooled in kind: suits mixing with slip dresses, pinstripes mingling with leopard prints, the world’s top models side-by-side with writers and artists including Constance Debré and Isabelle Albuquerque, who’d never set foot on a runway before.
The hourglass suiting Burton set down as a brand template a year ago has been relaxed; she’s applied her exacting way with fit to a whole arsenal of tailoring, from masculine pinstripes to more curvaceous cuts with peplumed hips to a tuxedo topped by an excellent, razor sharp evening coat, which was the most remarked upon look in my crowd. Of course, diversity was her point, so other crowds will have other favourites. A draped red velvet halter top worn with baggy trousers whose volumes were created by double pleats and side seams twisted to the front, say, or a sleeveless black dress embroidered with colourful poppies trailing long silk fringe almost to the floor, or a shaggy shearling coat dyed with leopard spots.
The silk T-shirts worn on some of the models’ heads, like turbans, were the work of milliner Stephen Jones. He said the project brought him back to Givenchy’s Avenue Montaigne headquarters for the first time in 30 years; circa 1996, McQueen was the new creative director at the house. The yellow and white silk twill jacquard of an off-the-shoulder party dress here was in fact based on a fabric swatch Burton has from McQueen’s Givenchy days. It was a minor note in a major show, but it seemed to carry a special meaning. Put simply? This is Burton’s Givenchy now.
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