Riccardo Tisci has a growing band of followers, and in the Givenchy showroom in Paris it's easy to see why: The showy, sometimes apparently unconnected statements he strives to make in his runway collections are here redrafted into whole sentences that make sense. For this resort collection, for instance, the feathered puffballs of haute couture were echoed in a dusty pink, frilled, shredded tulle day dress, which, by the kind of happenstance smart designers engineer for women, looked unpremeditatedly right with an oversize khaki jacket. The season's Out of Africa theme was also well articulated but not overdone in camp shirts à la Parisienne and an elephant-head print on a breezy black satin T-shirt. And for evening, Tisci was smart enough to return to finessing the item he's not just revived from Hubert's archives, but made into something of his own: a chicly modern spiral-cut little black dress.
