The obvious place to start at Givenchy would be with Audrey Hepburn, but Sarah Burton is a more subtle designer than that.
Instead of rewatching Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Alexander McQueen’s protege-turned-successor studied old photographs of Hubert de Givenchy’s first show, in 1952. She was struck by the minimalism of “stripped back, not fussy” clothes, she told Vogue before the show. “It is quite clean, quite pure, obviously postwar,” she said.
The headliner of Burton’s Givenchy debut, a Paris fashion week hot ticket, was an hourglass-shaped jacket with an exaggerated waist and curvaceous hips (pictured top right). “I wanted to strip it back to silhouette, which is the backbone of this house,” she said after the show. A new logo, Givenchy Paris 1952, was emblazoned across a mesh catsuit or on the strap of a Mary Jane flat shoe, and there was a hat tip to that decade in the form of cone-shaped bras. Burton said the look was “quite Hitchcock”, a reference that neatly skewers both the 1950s genesis of Givenchy and the fashion-noir of the house of McQueen, which still shapes Burton’s thinking.
Givenchy stands for black dresses, clean lines, flat shoes, giving it arguably the most modern aesthetic of all the famous French fashion houses. But while Dior and Chanel have turned fashion into blockbuster entertainment and successfully seduced a young fanbase, Givenchy is still defined by Hepburn nibbling a croissant in sunglasses and pearls in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a full 62 years ago. A revolving door of six designers in the three decades since Hubert de Givenchy retired have failed to put a pin on Givenchy’s place in contemporary culture. That is now Burton’s job.
This was a major fashion moment, as the first show by a new female creative director, in an industry which has recently seen women overlooked for top jobs. But Burton, who took her bow in her trademark jeans and jumper, does not do jazz hands. Her ideas were fresh – that compellingly curvy jacket might come to replace the menswear-style blazer which has been ubiquitous on streets and shop floors in recent years – but the presentation was understated.
There was no traffic-stopping front row. A few twists of lemon yellow, as teased by Timothée Chalamet, who was dressed by Burton in yellow for Sunday’s Oscars, were the exception among muted colours. Party dresses were as short as tutus, but still looked understated, with simple styling and clean lines. A beloved figure both for her talent and for the sensitivity with which she handled being handed the keys to the house of McQueen in the jagged aftermath of her boss and mentor’s shocking death, Burton has earned the right to do things her way. The dominant emotion at the show was thankfulness that after a year out of the limelight she has returned to fashion’s frontline.
Hubert de Givenchy, who once said of his client and close friend Hepburn that “she was not like other movie stars, because she loved simplicity” would have approved of the chic minimalism. It is telling of the restrained coding of the house that one of Hubert de Givenchy’s most famous looks was a funeral coat and black chiffon veil, which the designer stayed up all night to make for Wallis Simpson when the Duke of Windsor died in 1972.