On the very same day as Taylor Swift, Sarah Burton entered her Showgirl era. For her second outing as Givenchy designer, Burton turned up the volume with collars dripping rhinestones over collarbones, luscious peach maribou feathers, a pocket-rocket cocktail dress in lipstick red leather, and Naomi Campbell in a tuxedo jacket worn open over a barely-there lace trim bra.
Burton has been at Givenchy less than a year, but Alexander McQueen’s long-term right-hand woman has already established a new identity for the house and for herself. Givenchy, the spiritual home of Audrey Hepburn and the little black dress, has an immaculate bloodline of glamour that runs from Paris to Hollywood, but it is a relative minnow as a business. Her recent predecessors had mostly leaned into streetwear and utility-coded metallic accents, but Burton is bringing back the glamour.
“I wanted it to be erotic and sensual and to show skin,” Burton said backstage. “When we want to empower women we often reach for masculine codes, but I wanted to look at female emotional intelligence, and dressing and undressing.”
There was covered-up allure, too, in an evening shirt in butter soft white leather. “Every woman is different,” Burton said. “Sometimes when I’m casting, a model puts on an outfit and I can just tell that she doesn’t want to wear a heel. So I change the look.”
Givenchy is re-establishing itself in red carpet dressing. Burton has dressed Timothée Chalamet in a butter yellow tuxedo at the Oscars, and Kaia Gerber in a vintage-feel ballerina gown of black lace at the Venice film festival.
Schiaparelli, fashion’s house of surrealism, has been resurgent under the American designer Daniel Roseberry. Next year, the V&A will host the first major British Schiaparelli exhibition, looking at the work of Elsa Schiaparelli and the house she founded.
Women who wear Schiaparelli don’t need an exhibition to tell them that these clothes are art. “You don’t buy Schiaparelli, you collect Schiaparelli,” Roseberry said backstage.
Art-adjacency is good for the bottom line – clothes come with gallery prices, with jackets starting at about £5,000. And revenue, as well as profile, is on the up. The venue for the show was the Pompidou Centre in Paris, another reminder of how close this house sits with art.
Roseberry revisited one of Elsa’s most famous collaborations with Salvador Dalí, the 1938 “Tears” dress which will be in the V&A show. “This was about going back to the roots of the house,” he said.
The “rips” in the original were painted on, but for the updated version Roseberry tore into the silk crepe itself. In both, the tears are chillingly evocative of flayed flesh.
There is an edge of menace at Schiaparelli – Elsa referred to her mannequins, with their sharp shoulders and nipped-in waists, as her toy soldiers – as well as a gleeful delight in a joke. Buttons in the form of fingernails and gold noses dangling as earrings are the visual grammar of the brand. The punchline of this show: faux fur made from paintbrushes.
Surrealism pops up all over current fashion. Cracked-egg heels – walking on eggshells, geddit? – were a sellout at Loewe. Dali-esque wonky clocks have walked the catwalk at Moschino. But Schiaparelli owns this territory, and Roseberry presides over it.
Schiaparelli clothes have “an extreme drama which sucks the air out of the room”, he said. A red gown was sliced with a triangular panel of flesh-toned mesh that sat roughly where a pair of knickers should, in a head-swivelling illusion of nakedness. The tension between wearability and theatre is all part of the show.
A merry-go-round of designer debuts has brought two darlings of New York to Paris. Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez have left behind the Proenza Schouler brand they founded in 2002 to helm Loewe, the Spanish leather house that grew into a $1.5bn (£1.1bn) alpha name under the tenure of Jonathan Anderson before his departure to Dior.
The Americans looked delighted to be in Paris. Ellsworth Kelly brights brought a joyful pop art sensibility to the in-the-know art smarts for which Loewe now stands. Banana yellow loafers shook their tassels like Josephine Baker’s skirt; a red peplum jacket had the proud shiny curves of a ketchup bottle. And a cocktail dress masquerading as a just-out-of-the-shower towel wrap, fluffy as a freshly laundered bath sheet, captured the sweet spot where clever design meets fashion fun.
