The collection proposed a new elegance
Three years into his Givenchy tenure, Matthew M Williams is distilling and refining his ethos for the house. Following a men’s show in January that clarified his intentions, his women’s proposal followed suit. Drawing on Williams’s own experience as a millennial designer and dresses and the wardrobes of the peers that make up his community, the collection studied how we imbue the clothes people actually wear – workwear, casualwear, and yes, tailoring – with elegance. “The classic idea of elegance was informed by the virtues of the mid-century – something Hubert de Givenchy very much owned – but in a new world, how do we convey a sense of elegance?” he said before the show.
It celebrated how we actually wear clothes
The show opened with a series of tailoring looks that reflected the hallowed silhouette of our time: big bolstering shoulders and a lightly sculpted waist. Developed in Givenchy’s haute couture ateliers and structured in satin, Williams’s coats were cut with a precision that suspended them between the casual and the formal. In their hyper-luxurious simplicity, they did what he set out to do: drape one of these pieces over your shoulder and elegance is instant. The silhouette reverberated in blazers worn as minidresses – a look favoured by many a female show-goer around the fashion week landscape – as an authentic image of a contemporary view of elegance.
It formalised the casual wardrobe
“I looked at the women who surround me and the silhouettes that empower them; that make them stand a little taller and feel confident,” Williams said. “Today, those silhouettes are made up of everything from tailoring to workwear. My approach was to elevate those pieces and enhance the elegance they reflect.” He did so in looks that echoed the multi-layered silhouettes of his men’s show, composed from sweats and bondage trousers and cargo garments, but layered as a proposal for how to make that category of clothing elegant. “Today, we are looking for authenticity in what we wear: expert draping, intricate fashion treatments, the trace of the hand; elements that make the ordinary extraordinary. Those components are amplified in this collection.”
It made a case for comfort in elegance
At the heart of Williams’s interpretation of modern elegance was a message of comfort. “One of the reasons for the rise of sportswear and workwear in fashion over the past two decades is the denunciation of dress codes that compromise your comfort,” he argued. “It’s important to me to make fashion that make people feel good, which also doesn’t exclude anyone from achieving the look they want.” As a result, he researched an idea of elegant silhouettes without constricting the body. “From tailoring to separates and dresses, nearly everything is sculpted around the physique rather than on it, or imbued with stretch mechanisms, or crafted in really soft, comfortable fabrications,” Williams explained.
It had plenty of haute couture
As the show progressed, a more classic idea of elegance unfolded in cocktail and ballroom dresses created Givenchy’s haute couture ateliers. They incorporated naïve, kind of subversive prints that had already intercepted Williams’s workwear looks. “Researching the archives, I discovered floral and fish prints from the 1970s and ’80s, which somehow conveyed that feeling of glamour to me: something that draws you in, entices the eye, triggers associations and transports you,” he explained. The graphics represented the taste for high-octane, old-school glamour that still exists in Williams’s generations – the twisted kind of glamour, anyway. The gowns made for fitting conclusion to a terrific collection that demonstrated the designer’s evolution at Givenchy and his future trajectory.
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