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 By the end of his 40-year career, though, the push and pull between gamine and elegante had been replaced by a conservative Right Bank aesthetic.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 a The 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 cartoonish Cleopatra/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.

In other news, Rick Owens Fall 2021 Men's. “I’m always conscious of my own aggression. And the older that I get, I feel like I should have reached a level of serenity that I just haven’t; I get impatient, I get itchy, I snap at people sometimes… Aggression is something that I’m fascinated with because I’m constantly conscious of wrestling with it, personally. And I think that that’s true of every man.”

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.

Givenchy is a French luxury fashion and perfume house. It hosts the brand of haute couture clothing, accessories and Parfums Givenchy, perfumes and cosmetics. The house of Givenchy was founded in 1952 by designer Hubert de Givenchy and is a member of Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture et du Pret-a-Porter. It is owned by a luxury conglomerate LVMH. From 2 May 2017 until 10 April 2020, its artistic director was Clare Waight Keller, the first woman to hold that position. On 15 June 2020, Givenchy announced that Matthew M. Williams, of 1017 ALYX 9SM would succeed Clare Waight Keller as the Creative Director of the House.

The most famous ambassador of the brand was Audrey Hepburn in films such as Sabrina (for which Edith Head claimed the Academy Award), How to Steal a Million, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Charade.

In 1953, Audrey Hepburn and Hubert De Givenchy met by the intermediary of Gladys de Segonzac in a way to create her costumes for Sabrina by Billy Wilder. As Gladys de Segonzac had organized the meeting with 'Miss Hepburn', the fashion designer thought that he was going to receive Katharine Hepburn. Dressed in a pink and white gingham privateer, a T-shirt and a gondolier hat, the British actress received some prototypes of the future collection. Audrey Hepburn decided to wear Givenchy clothes on and off the screen, such as in Sabrina (1954), Love in the Afternoon (1957), Funny Face (1957), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Charade (1963), Paris When It Sizzles (1963), How to Steal a Million (1965) and Bloodline (1979).

Beginning as a client, she became the muse of the house for forty years, in many classic films. In 1961, Audrey Hepburn installed the reputation of the house by wearing the famous "little black dress" in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

In 1957 Givenchy created a floral aldehyde fragrance, L`Interdit, for Miss Hepburn’s sole use.

Givenchy's other famous patrons include Empress Farah Pahlavi, Gloria Guinness and Marella Agnelli, as well as the Guinness, Grimaldi, Rothschild, and Kennedy families. Jacqueline Kennedy famously wore Givenchy clothes to the funeral of John F. Kennedy.

Givenchy attracted many other celebrities, including the likes of Lauren Bacall, Babe Paley, Michael Norman, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlène Dietrich, Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis, Beyoncé Knowles, Princess Grace of Monaco and even Wallis Simpson, for whom he created some special garment bags to keep the duchess’s orders from being viewed by other clients. The collection of attire (dress, coat, perfume, etc.) furnished for Simpson would later become known as 'blue Wallis'.

Today, Givenchy dresses many Hollywood stars, including Cate Blanchett, Emma Stone, Lady Gaga, Julianne Moore, Julia Roberts, Rooney Mara, and others. In May 2019, Givenchy confirmed that singer, songwriter, actress, model, and record producer Ariana Grande would be the new face of its Fall and Winter campaign that was unveiled that July.

In other news, Leica and Mykita team up for camera-inspired collaboration to create sunglasses with uncompromising quality and clarity of vision. Mykita and Leica have pioneered sun lenses with optical grade quality.

For the first 43 years of its existence, the house of Givenchy was a monument to conservative good taste.

Givenchy launches its first collection from newly appointed Creative Director Matthew M. Williams aptly entitled “Teaser.”

For both women and men, the edited line from the Spring 2021 ready-to-wear collection features playful, somewhat subversive and effortlessly sophisticated looks. As embodied by a long, tailored blazer with a draped collar and sleek, high-rise trousers with fusion at the ankles, directional pieces accentuate modern tailoring for women. Denim pieces are embellished with bold, intricate treatments that give them distinctive cracked or lustrous finishes. The House's famous 4G logo reproduces a light, denim-like jacquard with a textured weave. Statement outerwear features a lightweight, tailored three-quarter-long croc-print calfskin coat bonded with Nappa and voluminous croc-print leather or black ottoman urban windbreakers. 

The series of "Teaser" capsules will debut exclusively in seven Givenchy stores in Europe, Asia, and the US, as well as in selected countries on givenchy.com. It will be followed by the first formal decline for Summer 2021 by Matthew M. Williams, which will bow across Givenchy’s worldwide retail network.

In other news, the review of Rick Owens Spring 2021 fashion show. At Rick Owens, fashion is a continuous dialogue – one season flows into the next, one experiment perhaps repeats again in a new way, one garment from the past remade anew, or one mistake in a previous year’s show now corrected.

Givenchy Creative Director Matthew M. Williams Launches A “Teaser” Capsule Collection.

GIVENCHY LAUNCHES TEASER CAPSULE COLLECTION

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.

His debut did tie common threads to Abloh and Jones’s twists and turns of established dress codes: a cummerbund interpreted as a tonal sci-fi mid-layer, a very normal jean jacket made very special with reflective embroideries, or a tank top skewed into a draped blouse for men. Those things are bankable. At Givenchy’s headquarters, the designer’s predecessor Clare Waight Keller’s midnight glamour had been washed away by crystallizing lights, the salons illuminated like a shop floor. In every way, that’s where the collection was headed. Williams hadn’t worked with a particular inspiration. “I’m not a person who designs in themes. It’s very much product-focused. A lot of it is what I would wear personally,” he explained, adding he did take a trip to the archives that birthed some horn heels informed by Lee McQueen’s era, and nods to Hubert de Givenchy evident in some rigorous tailoring.

The focus on product was seemingly an unemotional process that paid off in the precision of design clearly made to be instantly coveted: mushroomed slides, politely stompy black leather boots, magnified takes on existing bags (some adorned with giant locks), and all the embossed croc leather the phone cover generation could want. Perhaps surprisingly, given the circumstances, there weren’t many logos around. Williams isn’t mad about them. “It’s funny that I get lumped into people expecting that I do that, which I don’t really understand because at Alyx we don’t do that either,” he noted. Instead, he wants his hardware to replace the role of logos.

The notion that a fashion tribe would display its allegiance to a luxury house through crafty embellishment rather than logos is nice, and appropriate for a couture house. Exercised as all-over ring and crystal embellishment on a sporty mesh floor-length dress, it made for a rather bold statement. In fact, Williams’s vision for the Givenchy woman—“very elegant and powerful and chic”—was remarkably graphic and decorative. A transparent white coat covered in fuzzy tinsel, worn over a white laser-cut top that looked like a bustier made from ribbon, with cream trousers, was simply gagging for a scene in an early 2000s music video. At this rate, the ritzy nightclubs of the world better get back in action soon.

“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.”

The campaign features accessories from the Fall 2020 collection with photography by Chris Maggio. The compositions seem almost confrontationally simple: a model holds a bag or a shoe and sits in front of a white backdrop at a gray table, while a block of text floating above their head reads "Balenciaga" and the piece's name. The stars inhabit a curious emotional realm; they seem almost existentially irritated to have to pose for the shot, gazing accusatorially into the frame. The outcome almost feels like an anti-campaign, an indictment of the superficiality of the marketing fashion process. 

Taken with the video forming the other piece of the Autumn 2020 campaign, this commentary seems to be especially complex. There is a striking contrast between those images and the film. While the film tries to make a meaningful emotional connection with its viewers without using words, the simplistic imagery and text here feel cold and detached. Is Balenciaga poking fun at its huge internet stans army, ready to swallow any item bearing its name? And may they point out to the hypocrisy behind their industry peers' recent pattern of performative allyship? 

Whatever the purpose behind that strange contrast, its effect is what matters. All aspects of the campaign are successful on their own, and together they indicate a fascinating dialog about the brand's position – Balenciaga or something else – in how we view and interpret contemporary culture and its issues. 

Several designers who started at Cristóbal Balenciaga's would go on with opening their own later-famous couture houses, notably Andre Courreges, Emanuel Ungaro, Oscar de la Renta but his most prominent and well-known protege was Hubert de Givenchy, who was the lone designer side by side with Balenciaga against the Parisian Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture and also the press over the scheduling of his shows.

Balenciaga releases a new photography campaign that rejects pretentiousness to embrace simplicity.

Chicago-born designer Matthew M. Williams was tapped by LVMH-owned Givenchy to succeed Clare Waight Keller as new creative director of the house. 

The 34-year-old designer who founded the 1017 Alyx 9SM label in 2015 collaborated previously with Nike, Moncler, Mackintosh and Dior. Since 2018, during Paris women's fashion weeks, he has presented his co-ed runways shows and has been rumored to be shortlisted for the Givenchy lead to which he wants to enhance the house based on modernity and inclusiveness. His first Givenchy outing is set to take place in October. 

"In these unprecedented times for the world, together with my community and colleagues, I want to send out a message of hope and I intend to contribute to positive change."

– Matthew Williams, creative director at Givenchy 

The new role of Williams marks the second time when a street fashion designer has taken the helm of a major luxury company, following the hiring of Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton in 2018. Williams and Abloh are even more connected as before launching Alyx, in collaboration with Virgil Abloh, Heron Preston, Justin Saunders and YWP, Williams co-founded men's streetwear brand Been Trill in 2012. The name 1017 Alyx 9SM comes from the eldest daughter of the designer, whereas the numbers refer to the date of birth of the designer and the abbreviation of the label's first studio on Saint Mark's Place in New York City; Since then, the designer has relocated the house to Ferrara, Italy, between Bologna and Venice, and will be relocating to Paris. 

"I am extremely pleased to see Matthew M. Williams joining the LVMH Group. Since participating in the LVMH Prize, we have had the pleasure to watch him evolve into the great talent he is today. I believe that his unique vision of modernity will provide Givenchy with a great opportunity to write its new chapter with strength and success."

– Sidney Toledano, chairman and managing director of LVMH Fashion Group

It feels like there will be more news to come this year, also in regards to the designer Alexander Wang.

The American founder of 1017 Alyx 9Sm becomes the seventh creative leader of Givenchy French House.

GIVENCHY NAMES MATTHEW WILLIAMS AS CREATIVE DIRECTOR

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