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 7, 1996, in Paris.
For his sophomore Givenchy couture outing, John Galliano returned to the theme he explored inhis 1984 graduate collection, the Incroyables. The title refers to a small group of fashionable and hedonistic members of the French aristocracy who flouted convention during the Directoire period (1795–1799). Known for their affectations, the (male) Incroyables and (female) Merveilleuses’s manner of dress was considered scandalous. The Merveilleuses’s dresses featured empire waists (inspired by classical culture) and were often cut in see-through materials. In Galliano’s 1997 reinterpretations, they read as extensions of slip and lingerie dressing.
Vogue thrilled over the designer’s “negligee frills for Givenchy.” Galliano, noted the magazine, “is now living his ‘Empire’ dream, of Josephine hair and absinthe-drinker’s eyes.”
Emma, the movie based on the Jane Austen novel and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, was not released until after this show, but it made the collection all the more appealing. In it’s romantic historicism it was very Galliano, and not very Givenchy at all. This was the second, and final, couture collection the designer made for the house before replacing Gianfranco Ferré at Christian Dior.
