"Back to the roots," Riccardo Tisci said after presenting his beautiful, quite refined collection for Givenchy. He was talking about the house's founder, Hubert de Givenchy, and his Parisian couture of the sixties, but Tisci might as well have been discussing himself. In his earliest days at Givenchy, seven years ago now, he explored his Italian Catholic heritage, and he did so again for Spring. Back then, his point of view was darkly romantic, gothic even. Today he let the light in. Not only in terms of his palette—baby blue, his color of choice, joined white, black, and shades of gray—but also in terms of fabric. Organza ruffles like angel's wings were pinned down by gold and silver clips at the shoulders or in the middle of the back, as if without them they might just flutter away.
The show's music echoed the runway's conversation between past (both recent and distant) and present. At one end of the Lycée Carnot, Mathias Lecomte played an organ installed on a giant wooden stage, and at the other, the Berlin DJs Discodromo were installed at the decks inside a Mylar-covered cube.
Tisci's Catholicism turned up in other ways, too: in the priest collars on his sixties shifts; in the voluminous bishop sleeves on a striking black jacket; in the split skirts worn with crisp, dry blazers and pants, like church vestments. Given the nature of his fixations this season, and the super-controlled way he executed them (earlier this week at Balenciaga, Nicolas Ghesquière also taught us that ruffles can be minimal), the collection didn't deliver the sexual-depth charge that Tisci is so capable of. A quick look at the gold chokers and the Carlo Mollino-inspired Plexiglas, plastic, leather, and nailhead heels, though, confirms that it didn't lack for eroticism, either. Not for nothing did one of Tisci's faithful greet him backstage with the phrase "I'd like to be a Givenchy nun."
