Luxury’s guillotine fell again last Friday, making the pre-collection pictured here the last gasp of the twenty-something run (including menswear and pre-) produced under Matthew M. Williams at Givenchy since June 2020. Speaking of the collections, a few days earlier, Williams said: “It’s kind of the same story as always; in menswear making clothes for myself, clothes that I think should exist. I explore the themes of silhouette and materials that I have been following since I arrived at Givenchy: dyeing clothes, treating luxury and non-luxury materials with tailoring techniques.” Strong examples included windbreakers, half-zips and work trousers in garment-dyed, washed silk. These came in a distinctive mix of subtly unfamiliar sartorial archetypes and minimally decorated but materially opulent outerwear trophy pieces.
Another specialty from the Williams period was true technical and functional collaboration. This was evident here in a new collaboration with the German company Bogs, which “allowed us to produce a vulcanized shoe that I had been wanting to make for ten years,” as well as a new hybrid shoe called the Nfnty with a sole in Pebax, a material that is currently not used elsewhere in luxury. Under Williams, he noted as a shoe footnote, the development of Givenchy’s TK 360 shoe meant obtaining the first shoe patent in LVMH history.
Aside from the Voyou bags, there was no overlap between men’s and women’s clothing, the latter of which went a step beyond the spirit of contemporary fashion that Givenchy has honed in recent seasons. Lace, tuxedos, polka dots, Breton stripes, denim, bouclé, cocoon coats and other Parisian mainstays form a nice extensive range for French girls.
Givenchy CEO Renaud de Lesquan characterizes the house’s mission as “redesigning elegance.” This sounds simple, but it isn’t. Because unless you base your idea of elegance on the historical – which defies the idea of meaningful redesign and instead condemns you to endless repetition – it is an extremely elusive and inherently subjective (though unmistakably French) bourgeois quality. That’s the challenge that awaits Givenchy’s next big name — palace intrigue puts many in the frame — while giving Williams the freedom to spend more time with his own baby, Alyx.
