Givenchy Beneath the Layers
To understand this collection by Sarah Burton, one must also look at the history of Givenchy menswear. For this house has never moved forward on a single definition of masculinity. The men’s wardrobe, whose foundations were laid with the licensed Givenchy Gentleman line launched by Hubert de Givenchy in 1969, has constantly changed over the years. Ozwald Boateng brought Savile Row tailoring to the house; Riccardo Tisci, melding gothic romanticism, couture craftsmanship and street culture, changed the direction not only of Givenchy but of 2010s menswear. Clare Waight Keller put tailoring back at the centre, while Matthew M. Williams proposed a technical, industrial aesthetic. Givenchy menswear has never belonged to a single silhouette; each creative director has redefined the house’s identity through their own lens. This is precisely the legacy Sarah Burton inherited: not a single aesthetic to be preserved, but a rich history made of very different layers.
In one of the interviews I read the day before the presentation, Burton said: “Let’s wipe everything clean and start again.” Radical as it seemed at first glance, the sentence took on an entirely different meaning once I had seen the collection. For Burton does not reject the past. On the contrary, she tries to reach its essence by removing the layers that cover it. Curiously, on the morning of the presentation, workers were scraping away, one by one, the years of paint layered on the heavy wooden doors of the Givenchy building. Burton said it was pure coincidence. Yet that image became the collection’s most powerful metaphor. The past was not being erased; only the layers that had made it invisible were being removed.
The figure who best completed this idea was Rachel Whiteread. For years, Whiteread has made visible not objects themselves, but the space they leave behind. She casts the inner volume of a wardrobe, the memory of a room, the unseen side of a house. The new language Burton has built for Givenchy seemed to me to draw from the same source. From the archive she takes only a tulip-patterned tie; everything else, she chooses to rethink. Rather than repeating the house’s past word for word, she tries to reread the traces it has left behind through today’s eyes.
That is why the collection’s starting point is not the archive, but the most fundamental archetypes of the male wardrobe. The white shirt, the Prince of Wales check suit, the double-breasted jacket, the rugby shirt, the perfecto, the bomber, the boiler suit, denim and the tracksuit… Burton does not accept these pieces as they are. She lowers the lapels of the suits, rebuilds the shoulder lines, narrows the waist. At first glance the clothes look familiar; but up close, an entirely different proportion and an entirely different stance emerge. The approach to tailoring she developed during her Alexander McQueen years can still be felt here, but it has turned from showy deconstruction into a far more refined and mature intervention.
Among the pieces that moved me most were the leather tracksuits in vivid colours. As Burton herself said, the tracksuit — one of the most ordinary garments of daily life — became, through extraordinary leather craftsmanship, an almost couture-level piece. The coats and bomber jackets densely embroidered with flowers, inspired by the “Old Masters” paintings in the same room, showed that craft stood at the heart of the collection. For Burton, luxury is not a showy logo or an attention-grabbing silhouette; it is the precision of the cut, the patience of hand embroidery and the perfection of tailoring.
To me, the collection’s greatest strength was that it did not propose a single type of man. In the campaign, the ninety-year-old war photographer Don McCullin and the painter Danny Fox exist within the same world; and among those who inspired Burton is Timothée Chalamet. Different ages, different professions and different characters come together as natural parts of the same wardrobe. Burton’s words — “You dress not only for different moments of your life, but for different periods of it” — were perhaps the sentence that best captured the collection’s spirit. This was not a wardrobe of youth or of maturity, but the proposal of a wardrobe that spans an entire life.
As I left the presentation, no single look stayed with me. What stayed was the new relationship a fashion house had formed with its own history. Sarah Burton is not trying to invent a new aesthetic for Givenchy. First she carefully removes the layers of the past, then she reshapes the essence that remains according to the needs of today. That is why her first menswear collection is not just a successful beginning; it reads as a considered, patient and deeply self-assured manifesto for Givenchy’s future. Fashion is so often defined by the pursuit of novelty. Burton reminds us that sometimes what is truly new begins with the ability to look carefully at the past.