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 January 19, 1997, in Paris.
The spring 1997 season marked a turning point for the couture. Two years after John Galliano succeeded Hubert de Givenchy, he had shuffled over to Christian Dior (replacing Gianfranco Ferré), and Alexander McQueen had been slotted into Galliano’s place on Avenue George V. Vogue titled its analysis of the goings-on “Couture Clash,” and divided the métier into camps: old guard against the avant-garde; agents provocateurs versus the éminences grises. The appointments of these renegade Brits to the head of French heritage houses marked another kind of clash, as well—a culture clash. Both Galliano and McQueen were proudly working class.
Shock was a tactic McQueen had already employed in his own shows and he seemed to have no problem translating that into épater les bourgeois. His debut collection was executed in gold and white, a palette taken from a Givenchy label, and featured strict tailoring for femme fatales as well as corsetry for bombshell types. Many pieces had gold stump work with a militaristic or czarist feeling, and there was a filmy blouse that might (or might not) have been a nod to Givenchy’s first hit, the Bettina blouse. It seems fair to say that in this case the designer was not able to reconcile the opposing forces he set loose. The simple elegance of a “Maria Callas” dress or a ruffled cape with a Renaissance madonna and child on the back was undercut by accessories such as sheep horns (at least one pair came from Isabella Blow’s herd) and cattle-like nose rings. Breakfast at Tiffany’s this was not.
At the time, Vogue quoted excerpts from an interview McQueen did with Le Figaro in which he said that he had “no respect for Hubert de Givenchy,” and that he accepted the position “because I love fashion.” It should be noted that the collection was conceived and executed in less than three months, and ultimately dismissed by McQueen himself in about half of that time span. If he was not interested in appeasing the staid front row of well-heeled and perfectly coiffed grandes dames, McQueen was respectful of the atelier. Here’s how Kate Betts documented her preshow visit with the designer for Vogue:
“Inside, McQueen, wearing sneakers and cargo pants, tells me he has no intention of becoming the Saint Laurent of the ’90s. For a 27-year-old, he’s got a lot of gumption. We’re sitting in the big salon, an elegant room that has fallen into some disrepair, vases of half-dead flowers perched on an ugly makeshift coffee table. McQueen seems pleased with the way things are going, especially with the ateliers. ‘You know, I worked for Marc Bohan when he was at Hartnell, and it was the worst experience of my life. He was so snotty with the ateliers. I think they really like me up there,’ he says, pointing to the ceiling and the Givenchy workrooms beyond. ‘They don’t think I’m some silly little kid from London fussing around with a hemline.’ Catherine Delondre, the premier d’atelier, seems to genuinely like McQueen, even though she was a Givenchy loyalist for 33 years: ‘At first we weren’t sure, but then when we saw the things coming out of the atelier, we thought, This is really couture.’”
