Riccardo Tisci has often used his Catholicism as an inspiration, but the thing about tipping your cap to God is that you have to acknowledge his opposite number, and that's what it felt like Tisci was doing with his latest menswear offering. The show notes referred to his "darkest obsessions," and there was a satanic tug to the presentation, with its red and black color scheme, its echoes of voodoo and candomblé, and its catwalk of red glitter, like a highway to hell. Pat McGrath explained that the gothic extremities of the makeup she'd created were all extemporizations of African masks, but there was something fiendish about them.
Tisci said he's been obsessed with collecting things his whole life. The venue was decorated with an assemblage of vaguely spooky bits and pieces you might find in a desert town south of the border—the sort of place you'd otherwise speed through on a road trip because you felt like bad things had happened there. Except that, for Tisci, that kind of journey represented freedom. "That's what this collection is about," he claimed. And, in a way, that was the story the presentation told, beginning with uptight pinstriped looks liberated by Native American-like patterns, ending in dégradé sequins. But throughout the show there were presentiments of something sinister: models with their faces eerily obliterated, or their lips stitched shut, or their skin dotted with beads as if to suggest an infection. The women who walked in the show were sloe-eyed daughters of darkness, vampish succubi. "The collection's very spiritual," claimed Tisci, but this might have been one time when spirit surrendered to flesh, which was probably a smart business move, because it's hard to imagine his fans having much problem with that.
"The Devil is not always bad," Tisci said after the show, with a knowing smile. Anyway, for his retailers it was God who was in these details. They were happy to see fewer of the T-shirts and sweats that have been the engines of Givenchy's growth, and more of the sharp tailoring that is the other side of the Tisci coin.
