His back was turned to us, but the figure was unmistakable. Walking into the vaulted loggia surrounding the courtyard of the Musée de l’Armée in the Hotel National des Invalides this afternoon, we passed behind a titanic statue of Napoleon Bonaparte, who is entombed here. His bicorn hat and oversized redingote (into which his left arm was tucked) created a silhouette as memorable as his many marvelous maxims. These include; “Victory belongs to the most persevering,” “Ability is nothing without opportunity,” and “Imagination rules the world.”
Matthew M. Williams was about to deliver his next gambit in a Givenchy tenure which, despite being an enormous opportunity, did not at its offset see him fulfill the potential of his ability. Creditably, the house persevered. Pre-show I overheard talk which I possibly shouldn’t have that sales of its Voyou bags have recently doubled. The collections have certainly improved. Would Williams’s imagination lead to another step upwards today?
It unfolded as a pincer movement: two expressions of tailoring that surrounded an apparently oppositional force. The opening expression was more relaxed: wide but soft-shouldered double-breasted jackets, loose but boxy, over wide silky pants. The closer was shock and awe: another atelier achieved a barrage of precision-cut sleeveless jumpsuits and evening suits with no side seams. The look which preceded them was also atelier made, an Eisenhower suit. This is of course named after the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces who was also a fan of Napoleon’s pithy aphorisms, especially: “the great leader, the genius in leadership, is the man who can do the average thing when everybody else is going crazy.”
That’s not to say that the crucial middle section of this Givenchy collection was “average”—it was anything but. However on a day when downpours left the menswear press corps dressed like a bunch of nylon-happy hypebeast golf dads, it was notable how Williams concocted a plethora of luxuriously technical trophy garments that you could easily wear in the real world without looking like a luxury victim. An olive and bark brown storm jacket, backed with gleaming labrets, was my own personal defeat: I just wanted it, urgently. The jacket before it worked a lace effect into its paneling, while an earlier version in yellow swapped out the technical fabric for treated leather.
These dadcore delights apart, there were many other apparent “basics”—foundational real-world menswear garments—iterated in an extraordinary way. Williams’s strategy was to pull beyond comfortable banality by changing proportion, material, or both. An oversized field jacket in garment dyed grainy lamb leather, perforated leather zip-up track tops, a crispy thin yellow check shirt with an extended body back, cropped MA-1 bombers, and oversized harringtons were all also apparently “average” until scrutiny revealed the opposite. The only extreme remix, a passing flourish of Parisian savoir-faire power, was the zip-up hoodie and harness top crafted in pale pink faux rose petals.
Many of the pants featured more than generous breaks at the ankle, as if they’d been bought to be grown into. Williams conceded that his conversations with his 14-year-old son now inflect his own design process, and there was a tangible interplay between the apparently matured and maturing in this collection: you could see it being worn by kids wanting to look more adult and adults wanting to look more like kids.
Accessory-wise, despite that eavesdropped Voyou spike, there were only two bags-in-hand. The rest were strapped to the back via various aesthetically decorative arrangements of functional harnessing. Shoes included a new low profile sneaker with a padded, soft upper that was cousin to the ballet slipper we saw at Alyx. And there were some low and long loafers with extended toes based on vintage shoes he’d picked up in Japan. “They’re called ‘Cockroach Killers’” said Williams: “because the toe really slopes super low to the ground so you can kick the bugs out of your path.” Williams marches on.
