Hubert de Givenchy once said, ‘the shortest path to elegance is simplicity’. It’s an ideal that was at the heart of everything the designer created, but in particular his very first collections, which embodied comfort and ease at a time when Paris’ other couturiers were confining the female body in impractical shapes. His looser, youthful separates were radical – in 1952, at least – and made to meet the changing desires of women in a post-war era. Simple elegance through the lens of youth, as it would happen, could also neatly describe Matthew M Williams’ vision for the house as its creative director in 2023, over seven decades on from Givenchy’s bold start.
Mapping a journey through the 180 collections that have come in between, a new fashion book – a 500-page bible on Givenchy published by Thames & Hudson – charts the story of one of the world’s leading houses. Leaving no stone unturned, it painstakingly details each of Hubert de Givenchy’s singular collections and those crafted by his successors who, since 1995, have breathed new life into the house’s codes of innovation – from young British agitators John Galliano, Alexander McQueen and Julien Macdonald, through the dark romance of the Riccardo Tisci years and the sleek glamour ushered in by Clare Waight Keller, right up to Williams’ tenure today.
