It’s a big Sunday for Clare Waight Keller. She presented her second ready-to-wear offering this morning at Paris’s Palais de Justice, and beforehand, she spoke with assurance that her breakthrough couture collection will be well represented at the Academy Awards ceremony tonight in Los Angeles, fashion’s biggest global stage. Moving house and establishing a new voice—Waight Keller headed up Chloé for six years—is more difficult than fashion-watchers often give designers credit for. Two of fashion’s most recent success stories (Céline’s Phoebe Philo and YSL’s Hedi Slimane) put years between their gigs. Waight Keller didn’t have that option; in any case, she indicated today that she’s well on her way at Givenchy.
Her starting point this season, she said backstage, was a pair of films, The Hunger and B Movie: Lust and Sound in West-Berlin, 1979-1989, an examination of the city’s club scene at that time. Considering her recent design history, this was definitely playing against type, but Waight Keller made a surprisingly seductive argument for a gritty, trashed sort of glamour.
Berlin holds a mythopoetic place in our cultural imagination—from the Weimar era (see the excellent new TV series Babylon Berlin) right on up to the current-day club scene. That certainly helped her cause. But more so did the assured, modern way she addressed Berliner tropes such as “sleazy” furs (her word). Those opening knockouts, with their assertive shoulders and cinched waists, were fake, by the way, and gloriously so. The fashion industry has turned a sharp corner on its stance on the use of animal fur, and it’s satisfying to see Givenchy joining the movement.
Some of the guys’ looks, like the pleated leather pants, proved harder to update, but menswear is still new to Waight Keller. Women’s tailoring is her stealth strength and it could prove an asset when Céline refugees go looking for a new suit. Givenchy’s this season are powerfully yet leanly cut in menswear checks. Waight Keller likes the look of a single-button coat to the upper calf. Paired with graceful trousers and just a chain mail scarf, a black version of that coat was one of a number of compelling looks for after dark, many of which looked as though they were created with the lady dandy in mind. That’s also a Berlin thing; but really, it had to be the ecstatic reactions to her couture collection that informed the sleekly elegant and grown-up black-and-white evening offering. Countdown to the Oscars!
