Clare Waight Keller is an incredibly fluent and conversational public speaker. This morning, she walked across the parquet floor of the Givenchy couture showroom, stuck her hands in her marine blue trouser pockets, and gave a small group of guests a complete and personal explanation of her “deep dive” into menswear. “I went into my own self, really, back into the ’90s, and how I felt when I was really young, how we’d dress on not a lot of money. At Givenchy we have young Parisians from schools here, and there’s this same perverse poshness, wearing tailoring in a really sharp way, with a shirt or T-shirt,” she said. “Quite clean, really.”
In other words, a new kind of youthful aspiration—to look smart and gorgeous no matter what—is coming down the line, taking menswear up several significant fashion notches from the commonplaces of the street. “To me, Givenchy is an elevated house,” she said. Even in distressed times, with luxury stores under attack from the “gilets jaunes” every Saturday, the world still looks to Paris to take the lead when it craves a chic idea of how to dress. Waight Keller—British as she is—nailed that frisson in the single- and double-breasted, flared-trouser suits she sent out.
If you wanted to get intellectual about it they might have seemed like a gender blend between Hubert de Givenchy and Audrey Hepburn, in those famous pictures of them casually strolling as friends along the Seine—when tailored flared trousers and belted trenchcoats were the quintessential Thing. But relevant fashion is always about designers hitting the right time, not trotting out house costume themes—and this suit resonated on multiple frequencies. Take the flared trousers. In a way, the over-the-shoe thing they had going on indeed evoked what poor boys wore in the ’90s, but they were also calibrated precisely to a certain elegant slimness in the leg. Waight Keller attributed this to the “softness and fluidity I like for men,” and put it down to the “crossover palette I dip into” from the womenswear into the menswear.
There was a lot else in the show—including an oversize peacoat with painted buttons, a parka in slick black, and a reflective-tissue trenchcoat. But to project an intended trajectory, you need the conviction of one strong and definite look. Those suits—and specifically those Givenchy trousers—did that. Dads and grandads everywhere will feel a pang to look at them. Much as they’ll chuckle about wearing such suits in their youth, unfortunately they really can’t now. This was a statement for the young and the fashion-obsessed, and it showed the way forward.
