Editor’s note: Matthew Williams’s appointment as the new creative director of Givenchy comes in the lead up to the fall 2020 couture season. We are celebrating the house and the métier by posting archival Givenchy collections. This one was presented on July 11, 1995, in Paris.
Hubert de Givenchy opted to ease out of fashion with a gracious whisper rather than a bang. Plenty of those would be provided by his immediate successors, the British iconoclasts John Galliano and Alexander McQueen. In fact, Givenchy seemed to take a business as usual approach to his fall 2005 couture outing.
Though Givenchy would present a ready-to-wear collection later in the year, this was called “The Last Show,” and it hewed to the traditional categories: Jour, cocktail, soir. The ladylike suits, LBDs, and charity circuit evening looks he showed “ensured his loyal, older customers wouldn’t be left with nothing to wear,” noted Vogue.
The only visible markers that this show was out of the ordinary were the made-over front-row—Sean Ferrer, son of Givenchy’s muse Audrey Hepburn was in the house, as were Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Lacroix, Valentino, Issey Miyake, Emanuel Ungaro, Paco Rabanne Claude Montana, Kenzo Takada, and Oscar de la Renta—and the designer’s decision to invite les petites mains to share his final bow. “I know their names, their faces, their smiles, and above all their ability,” Givenchy told the Palm Beach Daily News. “I hope that they all know that their names are engraved in my memory and in my heart.”
There were few dry eyes in the house, but there were perhaps even more loose lips as gossip spread about who would take over the house. The answer came just a few hours after “Le Grand” took his bow: John Galliano. “When asked how they felt,” reported Vogue, “Givenchy said ‘happy’ and Galliano said ‘rich.’”
Givenchy sold his company to LVMH in 1988 and signed a seven year contract. The changing of the guard at his house was indicative of the subsequent shake-ups and talent shufflings wrought by the corporatization (and democratization) of the luxury industry, repercussions of which are still being felt to this day. Designer fashion once aimed at the elite was becoming more aligned with pop culture, celebrity, and marketing. Ironically the aristocratic Givenchy in some way paved the way for this to happen.
When the designer made his debut in 1952 with youthful separates, he chose as his muse the famous model Bettina Graziani (the paramour of Aly Khan), who was known, according to her New York Times obituary as “the most photographed woman in France.” It was Givenchy’s relationship with one of the most photographed women in the world, Audrey Hepburn, that really put him on the map. If their initial meetings was the stuff of slapstick—Givenchy thought he was scheduled for a fitting with Katharine Hepburn, and in walked Audrey—their longstanding collaboration was based on true friendship and likemindedness that additionally synched with the zeitgeist.
The Givenchy-clad Hepburn became an archetype for a new era. “Though they might have missed it, or not identified it as such right away, people who encountered Audrey’s Holly Golightly in 1961 experienced, for the very first time, a glamorous fantasy life of wild, kooky independence and sophisticated sexual freedom; best of all, it was a fantasy they could make real,” writes Sam Wasson in his book Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. “Until Breakfast at Tiffany’s, glamorous women of the movies occupied strata available only to the mind-blowingly chic, satin-wrapped, ermine-lined ladies of the boulevard, whom no one but a true movie star could ever become.” Never underestimate the power of a little black dress—or a liberated woman.
