For her first publicly presented Givenchy menswear collection, Sarah Burton worked with Rachel Whiteread, the British artist whose sculptures often take the form of casts from the inside of domestic spaces and objects. Whiteread’s first major cast was Closet, made from the interior of a wardrobe; perhaps her best-known public work, House, made solid the interior volume of an entire Victorian terraced home. For Givenchy, Burton recommissioned various moulds of wardrobe interiors, as well as the colored Essex-found jetsam featured in the campaign released yesterday for the brand.
Whiteread’s practice provides a handy prompt for attempting the equivalent in relation to Burton’s task at hand: sketching a shape from the historical interior of Givenchy menswear, a category with a long but sometimes obscure history.
When Ozwald Boateng was appointed Givenchy’s first creative director for menswear in 2003, the masculine category, then labeled Givenchy Homme, already accounted for 35% of the company’s revenues. This was despite the fact that neither under Alexander McQueen nor John Galliano before him had there ever been, as far as I can tell, any standalone menswear shows or press presentations. Hubert de Givenchy had launched Givenchy Gentleman, a licensed range of shirts, ties, luggage, and cosmetics, in 1969: the label was folded back into the main brand in 2000, but effectively remained a license, also from what I can tell, until Boateng’s often overlooked but highly significant arrival.
Boateng applied his disruptively decorative Savile Row eye to Givenchy Homme until spring 2007, around a year after the appointment of 29-year-old Riccardo Tisci as its womenswear designer, succeeding Julien Macdonald. Tisci’s womenswear debut for spring 2006 was panned, but he persevered, while the menswear remained in a studio-designed limbo. Then for spring 2009, Tisci was entrusted with the menswear design too: boom.
The aesthetic Tisci built both prefigured and fueled the streetwear explosion of the 2010s, and generated some golden years, most especially in menswear, for Givenchy. Later, the house’s menswear pendulum naturally swung under Clare Waight Keller back to tailoring, and then under Matthew M. Williams back to tailored, industrially accented streetwear.
Today, following a bit of a breather, Givenchy presented its first menswear collection since January 2024. This one, of course, was overseen by Burton, who Alexander McQueen hired in 1997, just a year after he began designing Givenchy womenswear.
The only conclusion to draw from that survey is that there have been too many different iterations of menswear at Givenchy for the category to be definable as any one shape. This presents Burton with an opportunity. As she put it at the presentation, “Givenchy menswear has been so many different things to so many different people. So I thought, ‘You know what, let’s just wipe it clean and start again.’”
Thus her starting point was not the house archive, one tulip-pattern tie apart, but personally observed archetypes: the Prince of Wales suit, the pinstripe suit, the white shirt, the coat, the tracksuit, the workwear set, the rugby shirt in leather, some lushly embroidered MA-1s, tapestry jacquard floral knits, and the evening jacket. These were the first building blocks with which to shape the designer’s new outline for Givenchy menswear.
Burtonian gestures previously prefaced in her former parish included the urge to apply radical surgery to conventional facades. “How do you deconstruct a men’s suit?” she pondered. “We sliced it and peeled it and cut the lapel away and tipped it forward.” The effect was to prise the garment away from its default conventionality. Yet despite this instinct to chop and change it, she still remains irresistibly drawn towards tailoring. “Because I always start with a silhouette,” she said. “And you’re given that by your shoulder.”
Another hallmark was the selective use of intense color, typified by the nearly fluoro yellow car coat in silk satin whose pristine finish looked almost like a piece of technical outerwear, dashing when worn unpreciously with a breaky pant and sneaker. That color urge also informed her approach to the one conclusive throughline in Givenchy’s menswear history: its commercial significance to the house. A squad of mannequins were attired in two finishes of striped-sleeve leather tracksuit, all of them in top-to-toe colorways, plus black. These were matched with a new, slightly squidgy, all-color skate sneaker.
Speaking about her own practice in menswear, Burton said: “It’s about human beings, and how they dress.” She has used the breathing space between arriving at Givenchy and presenting this first menswear proposition of her time here to reapply that starting point to her fresh context. Hence the new campaign, released yesterday, comprised three character studies. Discussing its creation alongside the collection, she gave a partial explanation for her customary reclusiveness as a talking head for her collections: “Time and privacy are our last luxuries. I like the fact that I can go and sit with Rachel Whiteread. I like the fact that I can go and sit with Don McCullin. And I like the fact that I can go and fit Don Letts and Danny Fox. To me [the work] happens in that.” She added: “I’m really not good at talking about something that I can’t connect with. I can’t do the spiel. I’m not a car salesman or a politician. I have to be connected.” Our talk was as long as any I can remember having with her.
According to Burton, this was entirely coincidental: but at the same time as our preview yesterday morning, contractors began noisily hand-stripping decades of overlaid paintwork from the heavy double doors of Givenchy’s historic hôtel particulierheadquarters on Avenue George V. Only when stripped back to the grain will they be newly surfaced.