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Hubert de Givenchy: the man who shaped the Sixties
Author: Armstrong, Lisa
Abstract:
[...]Beyfus's tome is not quite a biography; more a mini-coffee table book, albeit intelligently written and gorgeously illustrated with photographs by Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson and other luminaries.
Links: Obtain full text from Shapiro Library
Full text:
Think of Hubert de Givenchy and, if you know anything about fashion, you think of the little black dress. Or, more specifically, the little black dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Even though he loved monochrome, Givenchy didn't invent the LBD.
Chanel managed to nab that honour - although it's worth noting that black dresses were totally on trend among 17th-century Puritans. Bof, as Coco might have said. She who drones on about originality has a short memory.
The truth is no one can take full credit for the LBD, but Givenchy can take credit for Audrey, and Audrey can take credit for Givenchy. She wore him from the age of 25, when he designed her costumes for the film Sabrina, until she died, aged 64 in 1993.
By contrast, as Drusilla Beyfus's new biography of Hubert de Givenchy (published by Quadrille, Pounds 15) recounts, Jacqueline Kennedy was obliged to abandon him once JFK reached the White House.
Like Audrey, Jackie admired the patrician Frenchman's luxurious brand of dramatic minimalism but, for political expediency, she had to take up with American designers, such as Oleg Cassini, who was given strict instructions to more or less replicate Givenchy's style.
As if that weren't sneaky enough, post-Camelot, Jackie seems to have decided that Givenchy had become old-fashioned. The crisp rolled collars, stiff couture-y fabrics and pillbox hats that were quintessential Givenchy signatures of the Sixties (according to Vogue, Givenchy's ideas on the hat were "a contribution to female happiness") had, as more than one fashion critic sniffily observed at the time, become the accoutrements of air hostesses everywhere.
In fact, Beyfus's tome is not quite a biography; more a mini-coffee table book, albeit intelligently written and gorgeously illustrated with photographs by Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson and other luminaries. Beyfus, who worked on The Daily Telegraph in the Sixties and at British Vogue in the Seventies (her daughter Alexandra Shulman now edits it) met the film-star-handsome, 6ft 6in Givenchy several times. It's that first-hand contact that lends Beyfus's observations a freshness, elevating this book high above the recycled platitudes and stale myths that often populate such efforts.
Hubert de Givenchy, as Beyfus points out with the same precision that the couturier used to sculpt his Sabrina necklines (a boat-neck he designed to conceal the hollows beneath Hepburn's collarbones), is rather an overlooked figure these days.
Saint Laurent, Chanel, Cristobal Balenciaga, Schiaparelli - they're the legends of fashion history now, whereas Hubert... well, that air stewardess jibe contained a germ of truth.
When I was a Vogue rookie I was dispatched to fill a seat at a Givenchy show and was bored to distraction. He was still designing (or at least taking his bow) in those days, still upright and good-looking and wearing the white lab coat he always slipped over his suits. But his best creative days were behind him. Those poor models really did look as though they were wearing flight attendant kit, and not the slick Sixties uniforms, but the awkwardly proportioned Eighties ones.
Yet in his day, Givenchy combined the forward-thinking architectural statements of his beloved Balenciaga with his own easy chic. In the Fifties, American Vogue lauded him for inventing separates. Since doublet and hose had been around for four centuries, what they probably meant was that Givenchy repurposed them, making them seem opulent yet fresh.
Audrey was his perfect mascot.
Intuitively modern and graceful, she could make the stiffest, most classic ballgown look as breezy as the little black Beatnik sweaters and capri pants she wore in Funny Face. She and Hubert, whose equally nonchalant approach to luxury was expressed in his moated manor house outside Paris - which was, he said, "Paradise, but on a scale for living" - hit it off not just as style accomplices but friends.
Yet arguably, Audrey inadvertently harmed Givenchy's legacy almost as much as she adorned it. That rare creature, a genuinely stylish actress, she made everything look so good that there were plenty who later dismissed Givenchy as an average designer who got lucky.It's true that he was blessed to have met her (although costume designer Edith Head omitted to mention his contribution when she won her Oscar for Sabrina). He was supremely lucky to be working in an era when fashion shows were expected to provide real clothes, rather than unleashing provocative images for the next ad campaign. But he also helped shape the look of the early Sixties, without which Mad Men, J Crew and all who sail with them, would be sunk.
Follow Lisa at @LisaDoesFashion
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For the latest tips on trends fashion.telegraph.co.uk
Credit: Lisa Armstrong
Illustration
Caption: Audrey Hepburn in a Givenchy turban, 1964, above. Model photographed by Irving Penn, 1967, right. Givenchy and Hepburn in Paris in 1982, left; Deborah Kerr and David Niven in 1958; CECIL BEATON; IRVING PENN/CONDE NAST INC; STEPHEN HIRD; GETTY
Subject: Clothing; Fashion; Biographies
Company / organization: Name: LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton; NAICS: 325620, 312130, 315210, 316998, 339910
Publication title: The Daily Telegraph
First page: 33
Publication year: 2013
Publication date: Oct 11, 2013
Year: 2013
Section: Features; Opinion, Column
Publisher: Daily Telegraph
Place of publication: London (UK)
Country of publication: United Kingdom
Publication subject: General Interest Periodicals--Great Britain
Source type: Newspapers
Language of publication: English
Document type: Feature
ProQuest document ID: 1441172343
Document URL: http://ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1441172343?accountid=3783
Copyright: Copyright (c) Telegraph Group Limited 2013
Last updated: 2013-10-11
Database: ProQuest Central
Citation style: APA6
Armstrong, L. (2013, Oct 11). Hubert de givenchy: The man who shaped the sixties. The Daily Telegraph Retrieved from http://ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1441172343?accountid=3783
Document 1 of 1
Hubert De Givenchy Remembers Mellon
Author: Socha, Miles
Abstract: None available.
Links: Obtain full text from Shapiro Library
Full text:
Hubert de Givenchy Remembers Mellon
By MILES SOCHA
PARIS
-- When Cristobal Balenciaga closed his Paris fashion house in 1968, he and jewelry designer Jean Michel Schlumberger marched American society icon Bunny Mellon across the Avenue George V, delivering a crucial client to the house of Givenchy -- and sparking what would become a lifelong friendship with its founding couturier.
Hubert de Givenchy remembers exactly how Mellon looked that day.
"She was wearing a navy blue T-shirt and a cotton skirt," he recalled during an interview on Wednesday, noting he spoke to Mellon by telephone virtually every week, right up until her death on Monday at age 103. "She had a lot of taste and a lot of ideas."
The designer would go on to dress Mellon, a garden designer, philanthropist and WASP society icon, until his own retirement from fashion in 1995, turning out everything from gardening hats to evening gowns galore for her "because she had a lot of functions at the National Gallery of Art and other important dinners in Washington."
Given her broad interests, charitable works, travels and homes stretching from Virginia and New York to Antigua and Paris, "she needed a big wardrobe," de Givenchy said.
"Not only was she an important client, she quickly became a true friend, full of talent and with so many interests," de Givenchy said. "She taught me a lot in the garden."
The designer accompanied Mellon on chartered boat trips through Greece and Turkey, and they also explored France together, a country she loved and appreciated greatly.
While she supported a lot of restoration works in France and particularly at Versailles, including Louis XIV's fabled Potager du Roi, whose 17th-century splendor was a benchmark in her gardening career, Mellon never sought recognition for her generosity.
Her understated nature was reflected in her clothes and her meticulously decorated homes. "There was never a sense of too much," de Givenchy marveled.
Mellon had a fun-loving side, and he once took her dancing at Studio 54 in Manhattan. "She found it very amusing," he recalled. "She loved music."
Mellon's appreciation for her wardrobe extended to every member of the Givenchy atelier, whom she kept busy throughout the year. De Givenchy said every Christmas, she would dispatch a basket of small pouches, one for each of the 40 or 50 women and men in the atelier. Each contained a bundle of U.S. dollars.Bunny Mellon in 1965.
Publication title: WWD
Volume: 207
Issue: 56
First page: 6
Publication year: 2014
Publication date: Mar 20, 2014
Section: 1
Publisher: Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
Place of publication: New York
Country of publication: United States
Publication subject: Clothing Trade
ISSN: 01495380
Source type: Trade Journals
Language of publication: English
Document type: News
ProQuest document ID: 1509496906
Document URL: http://ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1509496906?accountid=3783
Copyright: COPYRIGHT (c)2014 FAIRCHILD FASHION GROUP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Last updated: 2014-04-12
Database: ProQuest Central
Bibliography
Citation style: APA6
SOCHA, M. (2014). Hubert de givenchy remembers mellon. WWD, 207(56), 6. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1509496906?accountid=3783
In an Influential Fashion : An Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-and Twentieth-century Fashion Designers and Retailers Who Transformed Dress
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By: Kellogg, Ann T. Westport, Conn : Greenwood Press. 2002. eBook. , Database: eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost)
Subjects: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General; HEALTH & FITNESS / Beauty & Grooming; Fashion designers--Biography--Encyclopedias; Clothing trade--Encyclopedias; Fashion--History--19th century--Encyclopedias; Fashion--History--20th century--Encyclopedias
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Hubert de Givenchy: Can Teach You About Fashion
Harper's Bazaar 3523 (Jun 2005): 168.
Ten years after stepping down from the house he founded and on the eve of another designer's ascension to the label that bears his name, Hubert de Givenchy talks to Dana Thomas about his successors, his dear friend Cristóbal Balenciaga's influence and the current state of design
Hubert de Givenchy opens the door himself. A regal man of imposing stature -- he stands six feet six -- he kindly ushers you into the soaring salon of his stately 18th-century home in Paris. As his Labrador Junior comes loping in, Givenchy invites you to take a seat on the sofa. Behind him on the oak-paneled walls hang a large Picasso called Le Grand Pan, a collage by Braque and paintings by Léger and Matisse. Outside the double glass doors of the adjoining dining room is the manicured jardin à la française, with its emerald-green lawn as neat as a carpet and box trees trimmed into cones and spheres. Despite being in the heart of Paris, all you hear in his two-story apartment in this hôtel particulier is birds singing. It's a peaceful place, calm in the way you imagine your life will be once you are retired, too.
But peaceful is the last thing the 78-year-old couturier, who helped Audrey Hepburn shape her flawless style and who was Cristóbal Balenciaga's friend and confidant, is these days. In the 10 years since he retired from his house, which he helmed for 43 years, Givenchy has watched quietly as three designers and two presidents have come and gone. As the house of Givenchy embarks on a new chapter, with a new president (former Moschino head Marco Gobbetti, who took over last year) and a new designer (30-year-old Italian Riccardo Tisci, who will present his first Givenchy collection during the haute couture shows in Paris in July), Givenchy the man has decided to remain silent no longer. On this warm spring day -- dressed in a crisp blue shirt with a small monogram, brown wide-wale corduroy trousers and a navy sweater tied jauntily around his shoulders, his snow-white hair combed smartly back, turquoise eyes clear and focused -- Givenchy settles into a straw-weave-covered Billy Baldwin chair and, in his always polite, even-timbred French, opens up.
In the decade since he stepped down, Givenchy has been far from idle. He led the restoration of the King's Kitchen Garden at Versailles, served four years as president of Christie's France and is now honorary president of the Vionnet Foundation. ("I admire the work of Madame Vionnet immensely. Who wasn't influenced by her?") But his biggest project by far is the Cristóbal Balenciaga Foundation in Getaria, Spain, the small Basque village where Balenciaga was born. "The Balenciaga Foundation is a great occupation and for me a great passion," Givenchy says. "We had an extraordinary friendship. I listened to him. I listened to him speak about fashion, construction, all that he knew." Soon all of that information will be on offer to the public when the foundation's museum, an ambitious undertaking 12 years in the making, officially opens in two years. The archives will be stored in a former home of the family of Queen Fabiola of Belgium, and the exhibitions will be staged in a large glass addition designed by the architect Julián Argilagos.
Givenchy also proudly announces there will be retrospectives honoring Balenciaga at the Musée de la Mode et du Textile in Paris next year and at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2007. He's not surprised by the sudden interest in his friend. "Balenciaga represented perfection in creation and balance. He worked on the silhouette of a garment. There was a refinement that doesn't exist anymore." Givenchy himself is helping put together two shows at the Mona Bismarck Foundation in Paris: one of Balenciaga's creations for the American-born Countess Bismarck and a second of Balenciaga's wedding gowns for Queen Fabiola and other aristocrats. "Balenciaga didn't just make dresses; it was true architecture," Givenchy recalls. "At the same time, he was so avant-garde. He was the first to do tweed as a fabric for cocktails. He understood that women could take what they wore during the day and just add a hat or a piece of jewelry to dress it up -- that was truly a revolutionary idea then. But times and fashion were changing. And they have changed even more today."
Indeed they have, and in Givenchy's view, not necessarily for the better. In fact, Givenchy finds the direction in which fashion is going "distressing." Other than two or three houses that continue to address customers' desires and a handful of designers -- such as Loulou de la Falaise, Azzedine Alaîa and Hervé Leroux, who designs Guy Laroche -- there are few, in Givenchy's opinion, who are contemporary and experts in design; he believes there is little to admire about modern fashion. "Sure, it is head-turning," Givenchy says, "but one could not step out of the house like that. It's a false image. Balenciaga always told me, 'Hubert, the most important thing when dressing your clients is to be honest.' He was a man with total integrity. We made dresses that women could wear. Today we make dresses to sell handbags, shoes, accessories. When you go down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, you see only store windows filled with sacks and shoes. What does that mean? I'll tell you what it means: There is no fashion."
It's a harsh assessment, to be sure. But it comes from perhaps the one person in fashion today who has both the vast experience and the distance to see things clearly. Marquis Hubert James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy began his career at 17 as an assistant to Jacques Fath and later worked for Robert Piguet, Lucien Lelong and Elsa Schiaparelli. In February 1952, Givenchy launched his own house, with Fath's star models, Bettina Graziani and Suzy Parker, as his muses. When Hollywood ingenue Audrey Hepburn asked Givenchy to provide her wardrobe for Billy Wilder's Sabrina, he became the first French couturier to successfully cross over into American cinema and forge the link between the two worlds that still thrives today. In 1957, he asked Hepburn to be the image of one of his first perfumes, L'Interdit, beginning the trend of celebrity endorsement of cosmetics. He dressed First Lady Jackie Kennedy for a state visit to Paris in 1961 and Grace Kelly when she was princess of Monaco, in addition to socialites Babe Paley, Marella Agnelli and Gloria Guinness when they were the highest of high society. He embraced licensing when it became the new business model and was one of the first, in 1988, to sell his company to a corporation -- LVMH, which was run by Vuitton heir Henry Recamier.
At the time, it seemed the wise thing to do. "Monsieur Recamier was a very elegant and charming man who could give the company a second wind," Givenchy says. Less than two years later, Bernard Arnault wrested control of LVMH from Recamier. Givenchy describes the next five years as "continually changing," and by the end of his contract, which was up in 1995, both he and Arnault had had enough. Givenchy was replaced on the womenswear side first by John Galliano, for less than a year, followed by Alexander McQueen for five, Julien Macdonald for three and now Tisci. Givenchy has never met or spoken with any of them -- "It would serve nothing" -- though he did exchange letters with Macdonald. "He wrote very kind things, and I found him to be a very gracious young man -- better than Mr. McQueen, who immediately started to say mean things about me when I had never said or done anything against him," Givenchy remembers. "To say disagreeable things about me and Audrey -- that wounded me." (Says McQueen in response: "It was never a personal attack on either Hubert or Audrey. They had a relationship, and it worked for them and the house during that period. But a house needs to constantly renew itself and appeal to the world today. LVMH based the house's reputation on a long-lost ideal. I thought it deserved a modern identity.")
Of course, Givenchy still has a soft spot for Audrey Hepburn. She was more than a muse; she was one of his best friends. Often he would answer the phone in his atelier and, he recalls, "She'd say, 'I know you are busy, but I want to send you a big kiss,' and she'd hang up." Hepburn is still a presence in Givenchy's home and life. Though most of his archives are at the Avenue George V headquarters -- they were included in the sale of the company -- Givenchy has a few of Hepburn's dresses upstairs in his closet, pieces she gave him, including the sculptural long black sheath she wore in Breakfast at Tiffany's. In his opinion, there are very few actresses today who could fill her slippers. French actress Carole Bouquet "has a face, and she knows how to dress," he says. And he has always believed Julia Roberts would have been a terrific image for Givenchy perfumes. "She has an extraordinary smile," he muses. "If she dressed in a more precise style, then we would truly remember her." What made Hepburn special, he says, was a certain "elegance about her. She knew how to walk. She knew what she wanted. She knew the faults in her face; she knew herself perfectly. She was true, honest." A trait, obviously, that Givenchy admires.
Hubert de Givenchy stands in front of Louis XIV's garden gate, La Grille du Roi, at Versailles. Givenchy was instrumental in restoring the original vegetable garden and its gate through his involvement in the World Monuments Fund
[Photograph]: OBERTO GILI FOR BAZAAR
AUDREY YEARS
Clockwise from top left: A still from the 1954 classic Sabrina, with its Givenchy-clad star; a mod look in 1966 from How to Steal a Million; the moment from Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1961; the actress lounging in a more casual look from the designer in 1957; Hepburn modeling an organza gown during a fitting in 1958
FASHION LEGACY
Clockwise from top left: Model and muse Bettina Graziani in a Givenchy outfit shot for L'Officiel in 1954 (in 1952 he named a blouse for her); a big-sleeved coat from 1952; a deep-back evening dress from 1968; a petal-tiered gown with scallops photographed by Bill King for the November 1966 Bazaar
STUDIO WORKS
Clockwise from left: Givenchy poses with a model in his lilac fringe-sleeved dress in 1983; standing with dolled-up mannequins in 1952, in his unfinished Paris shop; a detailed sketch of an intricate gown from his last couture collection in 1995; styling a red kimono-sleeved dress on a mannequin in 1991
Word count: 1792
LEC
LEC
2004 by Hearst Communications Inc
Subject Clothing; Fashion designers; Fashion Company / organization
Name:LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton
NAICS: 312130, 315212, 316991, 325620, 339911
Title :Hubert de Givenchy: Can Teach You About Fashion
Publication title Harper's Bazaar
Issue 3523
First page 168
Publication year 2005
Publication date Jun 2005 Year 2005
Publisher Hearst Magazines, a Division of Hearst Communications, Inc.
Place of publication New York
Country of publication United States
Publication subject General Interest Periodicals--United States, Women's Interests, Clothing Trade—Fashions ISSN 00177873
Source type Magazines
Language of publication English
Document type Feature
ProQuest document ID 221413478
Document URLhttp://ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/docview/221413478?accountid=3783
Copyright 2004 by Hearst Communications Inc
Last updated 2014-05-22