Clare Waight Keller’s muse at Givenchy this season was a woman who spent much of her life dressing and acting as a man. Even from a young age, her parents didn’t discourage her from this tendency. An androgynous beauty, she had affairs with women and married a man. If she were alive today, we’d call her “gender nonbinary,” but Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a Swiss writer, photographer, and traveler, lived a century ago.
In her Chloé days, too, Waight Keller did extensive research and regularly came up with compelling, little-known characters off of whom she built collections. The motorbiking French adventurer Anne-France Dautheville comes to mind. Waight Keller definitely has a type: intrepid. At Givenchy this season, Schwarzenbach provided her with a reason to “collide the codes” of women’s and menswear. Not that she really needed that backstory. The gap between the genders shrinks by the season. A critical mass of labels have combined their collections, with some brands even offering a unisex proposition, i.e., no difference between the male and female offerings.
That wasn’t quite what was going on here at Givenchy. The men’s looks were in the minority (the category is still fairly new for Waight Keller), and they remained essentially traditional in ethos—or at least as traditional as a lilac suit worn with white Chelsea boots can be. The womenswear is where the designer did her “colliding,” sending out models with cropped boyish haircuts in tuxedo jackets or leather Perfectos tucked into army pants—a direct lift from a vintage Schwarzenbach photo. This was capably done and quite chic, though not groundbreaking in the way it was when her muse was doing it 80 years ago.
Waight Keller took cues from Schwarzenbach photos, as well, for her evening pieces, which were draped asymmetrically or with athletic cut-outs, yet retained the elegant bias lines of the 1930s. The news in the evening category was the prismatic flower-print dresses with engineered prints designed on the computer to be smaller at the waist than at the shoulders or hem, thereby enhancing their hourglass shape. Waight Keller said she couldn’t have accomplished these without her couture training. Minus the little shoulder shrugs that were layered on top to maintain the boy/girl theme, they looked like potential red carpet hits. The Hollywood crowd—of which Waight Keller had a substantial contingent tonight (Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Rooney Mara)—still likes their femininity straight up.
