![]() ![]() ![]() I wanted to sort of embrace the female form to sort of slice away in a very kind of dissected way.” “It’s how would you adjust the proportion of a woman's body? I feel like it’s always about a woman dressing for a woman,” she added. But the red-hot relevance of torso-exposure, and clothes designed to expose slices of naked flesh needs no explanation to new eyes. There are generations that have never heard of bumsters-Alexander McQueen invented that explosive downward shift of pant design in the 1990s. Look two: a revival of McQueen’s bumsters, with a cropped tuxedo jacket cut into sharp points at the front and the rest of it balanced to swing at the back. Besides the decorative narratives, out came clean, sharp tailoring. “That played into it as well: how do you find human contact in the world we live in, in the world of technology?”īut we’re getting away from how her collection looked. Caring about each other.” But against that, she also meant that having open eyes on the world means taking on terrors. Just seeing each other, recognizing each others’ humanity. “Not walking around with your eyes shut, your eyes down. ![]() ![]() “It’s sort of about seeing things again,” she said. That thought gave her the impetus to begin to grapple with layers of themes that the house of McQueen has always been concerned with: nature and technology, deep history and present fears. “The eye is the most unique symbol of humanity-each one is like a fingerprint each one is completely individual,” she said, explaining the enlarged prints and raffia-fringed images of irises, pupils, and eyelashes embedded in dresses and spilling over a trouser suit. It seemed a symbolic irony that the mechanical eye-in-the-sky-a standard device these days for recording fashion spectacles-must have been surveilling the focus of Sarah Burton’s collection hundreds of feet below. Breakfast at Tiffany’s this was not.On a sparkling October day in London, a drone was hovering over the splendid Greenwich Naval College, recording the goings-on in a transparent bubble that had landed in the middle of Sir Christopher Wren’s 17th century landmark. The simple elegance of a “Maria Callas” dress or a ruffled cape with a Renaissance madonna and child on the back was undercut by accessories such as sheep horns (at least one pair came from Isabella Blow’s herd) and cattle-like nose rings. It seems fair to say that in this case the designer was not able to reconcile the opposing forces he set loose. Many pieces had gold stump work with a militaristic or czarist feeling, and there was a filmy blouse that might (or might not) have been a nod to Givenchy’s first hit, the Bettina blouse. His debut collection was executed in gold and white, a palette taken from a Givenchy label, and featured strict tailoring for femme fatales as well as corsetry for bombshell types. Shock was a tactic McQueen had already employed in his own shows and he seemed to have no problem translating that into épater les bourgeois. Both Galliano and McQueen were proudly working class. The appointments of these renegade Brits to the head of French heritage houses marked another kind of clash, as well-a culture clash. Vogue titled its analysis of the goings-on “Couture Clash,” and divided the métier into camps: old guard against the avant-garde agents provocateurs versus the éminences grises. Two years after John Galliano succeeded Hubert de Givenchy, he had shuffled over to Christian Dior (replacing Gianfranco Ferré), and Alexander McQueen had been slotted into Galliano’s place on Avenue George V. The spring 1997 season marked a turning point for the couture. This one was presented on January 19, 1997, in Paris. We are celebrating the house and the métier by posting archival Givenchy collections. Editor’s note: Matthew Williams’s appointment as the new creative director of Givenchy comes in the lead-up to the fall 2020 couture season. ![]()
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