Hubert de Givenchy

An Apprenticeship Through the Paris Houses

Givenchy's path to his own house ran through a sequence of other designers' workrooms, and the sequence is a short history of Paris fashion in the 1940s. His first designs were done for Jacques Fath in 1945. He then designed for Lucien Lelong in 1946, working alongside the still-unknown Pierre Balmain and Christian Dior — a detail that captures a generation before it became famous, three future house founders in one workroom. From 1947 to 1951 he worked for Elsa Schiaparelli, described as the famous avant-garde designer, which gave him the opposite pole of experience: not the traditional couture house but the most experimental one in Paris. By the time he opened his own house in 1952 he had spent seven years learning from contrasting establishments, and had also met, at some point in this period, his idol Cristobal Balenciaga, whose influence on him is presented as the deepest of all.

1952: The Youngest Designer in Paris

The house opened at the Plaine Monceau in Paris in 1952, and its first collection was named Bettina Graziani, for Paris's top model at the time — naming a collection for a model rather than for a theme announced that the clothes were about the woman wearing them. At 25, Givenchy was the youngest designer of the progressive Paris fashion scene, and his style was marked by innovativeness, contrary to the more conservative designs by Dior. Two constraints shaped those first collections: they used rather cheaper fabrics for financial reasons, yet they always piqued curiosity through their design. That combination is the useful lesson of the early house. Money limited the materials, so the interest had to come from invention, and the account treats the curiosity the clothes aroused as the direct result. Ready-to-wear came later and formally: the pret-a-porter collection debuted in 1968, and a men's line followed.

Hepburn, and a House That Outlasted Him

His fame rests largely on one client relationship. He met Audrey Hepburn in 1953 during the filming of Sabrina, and went on to design almost all the wardrobe she wore in her movies, as well as her own clothing, and he developed his first perfume collection for her. A film wardrobe is a different kind of design work from a salon collection: the clothes must read on screen, serve a character, and survive being seen by an audience far larger than any couture clientele, which is how a Paris designer's work became familiar worldwide. Grace Kelly and Jacqueline Kennedy were other famous customers, placing his clothes with both a film star who became a princess and an American First Lady. The business then changed shape around him. The house was split in 1981, perfumes going to Veuve Clicquot and fashion to the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy group, and Givenchy retired from fashion design in 1995, forty-three years after founding the house. John Galliano and then Alexander McQueen served brief stints as creative directors after him, with Julien McDonald subsequently in charge of design — the standard pattern of a founder's house continuing under hired hands once the founder has gone.