Hubert de
Givenchy obituary
Couturier
to Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy
Veronica
Horwell
Mon 12 Mar
2018 17.44 GMT Last modified on Mon 12 Mar 2018 17.45 GMT
Audrey
Hepburn glides through the credits of the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s in a
black dress that is in no way little. It’s a long, narrow sheath, though she
can still amble down Fifth Avenue unimpeded. The dress is sleeveless – yet
gloves cover her arms far above her elbows – and collarless, with a striking
back strap revealing her shoulder blades. Several generations have worshipped
images of Hepburn in that dress as defining sophistication.
This was
the work of Hubert de Givenchy, who has died aged 91. His clothes for Hepburn
made her feel secure. “I put them on and I feel protected,” she said. He helped
her to downplay the trampiness of Holly Golightly, who trips into Sing Sing
prison in Givenchy’s lampshade hat, and shops at Tiffany’s in his tailored
coat. No wonder Jacqueline Kennedy commanded Givenchy to outfit her state visit
to Paris that year.
Givenchy
had been brought up to enjoy textiles, to regard them as treats. He was the
younger son of the Marquis of Givenchy, who died when the boy was three, and
Béatrice Badin; and the pet of his maternal grandmother, Margaret Badin, widow
of the director of the Beauvais tapestry workshops. That was his happy memory
of childhood, his grandmother rewarding him for good behaviour by opening
cupboards filled with fabric treasures, or allowing him to rummage in trunks
and bundles. “My mother and my cousins played customers, gathered about the
sewing machine.” His mother backed his decision to be a fashion designer,
provided he did it to the highest standards. She introduced him to couture
houses and sent him to study in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
As a
postwar teen he worked briefly for Jacques Fath, Robert Piguet and Lucien
Lelong before joining Elsa Schiaparelli in 1947. She had confidence in him,
despite his youth, and told him to use up 900 metres of prewar,
surrealist-print silks cluttering her stockroom. He did what he always did
thereafter: hung up the cloth until he understood its properties, and then cut
separates from it, amusing enough to sell well despite the stuffs being so out
of date. “Never work against the fabric, it has a life of its own,” he said.
Givenchy
was 24 when he opened his own house with financial backing from his
brother-in-law, Louis Fontaine, who owned the Prisunic chain stores. There was
only money enough to pay his few workhands (many of whom then stayed with him
for life). He showed his clothes on plastic mannequins to save model hire and,
not being able to afford the silks of his competitors, made a collection with
the cotton toile (shirting) traditionally used for couture prototypes. This,
plus the simplicity of his lines, and his philosophy that a dress should defer
to a woman’s shape, not she to it, positioned him closer to American sportswear
than to Paris couture.
His heroes
were the unique dressmaker Madame Grès, who left him her personal collection of
300 gowns, and Cristóbal Balenciaga, who redirected clients to Givenchy when he
closed his own house – despite the fact that Balenciaga was baroque in spirit,
while Givenchy was a neoclassicist.
Givenchy’s
freshness and vivacity were just right for the new world of the Vespa scooter
and the beach bag. And they attracted the ultimate customer in 1953. When he
was told Mademoiselle Hepburn had made an appointment, he assumed that meant
Katharine the great movie star. In walked Audrey, who had just made Roman
Holiday, the definitive Vespa movie, aged 24 but looking a teen in T-shirt,
ballet flats and no make-up. She thought he could supply the believable
sophistication she needed for Sabrina (1954), the Billy Wilder film in which a
below-stairs girl returns from Paris transformed. There wasn’t time to create
to order, so she chose from what was available and stood through three-hour
fittings in service of exactitude. Her boat-necked Cinderella gown won a
deserved Oscar, but not for Givenchy: his work was credited to the studio
designer Edith Head.
Hepburn was
mortified by that, but the episode established the Givenchy-Hepburn
relationship, which lasted to her death in 1993. He made her costumes for the
musical Funny Face (1957) and the thriller Charade (1963). By How to Steal a
Million (1966), the partnership had become an in-joke — when Hepburn’s
character asks why she must be disguised as an aproned charlady during a
robbery, she is told: “It’ll give Givenchy a night off.”
Yet the
next year, the studio dressed Hepburn in ready-to-wear clothes, and not from
Paris, for the comedy Two for the Road. The mood had changed, and the big money
had gone. She demanded Givenchy should design her period costumes for Tennessee
Williams’s Summer and Smoke, then withdrew from the project, and their only
movie together after that was the made-for-television Love Among Thieves
(1987).
Among
Givenchy’s clients were also Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Leslie Caron, Maria
Callas, Grace Kelly and the Duchess of Windsor – he stayed up all night to sew
the black coat she wore to the Duke’s funeral. Although he never lacked wealthy
customers, he was uncomfortable with the extravagant showmanship of couture
from the mid-1970s: the “impossible, crazy clothes” that did not “think about
the life of a woman”, and were careless, almost contemptuous, of textiles. He
remained commercially astute, selling his perfumes to the Veuve Cliquot
champagne brand in 1981, and the couture house in 1988 to the LVMH luxury
conglomerate, which later acquired the perfumes, too.
Givenchy is applauded by his models after
presenting his final High Fashion collection in 1995. Photograph: Reuters
Givenchy
kept his patience, just, with LVMH’s head, Bernard Arnault, until his formal
retirement in 1995, and thereafter spoke of Arnault’s designer appointments
(including John Galliano and Alexander McQueen) with distant politeness. “C’est
la vie,” he told commiserators. “Happily, for many years we had a wonderful
time, beautiful fabric, beautiful people.”
He had long
since set up an alternative life as an “amateur d’art”, buying from artists he
had met, Miró, Picasso and the sculptor Diego Giacometti. His real passion,
though, was for the very best French furniture of the late 17th and early 18th
centuries, and over the decades his Paris apartment became a miniature
Versailles. But he sold his collection in 1993 – too museum-like – and lived
mostly in Le Jonchet, his manor house near Tours, with its gardens edged by
36,000 box bushes and its white roses in memory of Hepburn.
Givenchy
was awarded Paris couture’s Golden Thimbles in 1978 and 1982, and there were
major exhibitions at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, in 1982,
and the Musée de la Mode in Paris, in 1991.
He is
survived by his partner, and fellow couturier, Philippe Venet.
• Hubert
James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy, couturier, born 21 February 1927; died 10
March 2018
Hubert de
Givenchy: an elegant master of devastating chic
He dressed
Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy and forged a timeless style for a golden age
Jess
Cartner-Morley
@JessC_M
Mon 12 Mar
2018 15.40 GMT Last modified on Mon 12 Mar 2018 22.00 GMT
The first
and last time I met Hubert de Givenchy, who has died at the age of 91, was at
the opening of his eponymous exhibition at the Calais Museum for Lace and
Fashion in June. His elegant 6ft 6in frame was even more imposing for the
stately pace at which he moved, supported by a wooden cane. He had an
impressive head of snow-white hair, and wore a simple dark suit and tie with a
white shirt.
Hubert de
Givenchy, maker of style icons, dies aged 91
The
reporters who had assembled for the opening asked reverent questions about the
iconic dresses he made, but he was much more interested in talking about the
women he made them for. He told a funny story about his first meeting with Miss
Hepburn, and how taken aback he was to be presented with the pixie-like Audrey
instead of the other, at that point more famous, Katharine. Givenchy recalled
Audrey as “this very thin person with beautiful eyes, short hair, thick
eyebrows, very tiny trousers, ballerina shoes and a little T-shirt. On her head
was a straw gondolier’s hat with a red ribbon around it.” The two became close,
collaborating on a wardrobe for the film Sabrina and every subsequent role.
The
designer’s elegant tailoring and eye for a perfect line, combined with the
unusually spare taste of Hepburn, created style magic. Together they forged a
refined image of pared-to-the-bone glamour that still looks chic more than half
a century later. “She was not like other movie stars, because she loved
simplicity,” Givenchy once said. Black dresses, ballerina pumps, sunglasses and
pearls still conjure up the image of Hepburn. That their partnership grew into
“a great friendship”, as Givenchy said at the opening of the exhibition, is
reflected in his appointment as the mediator of her will towards the end of her
life.
Givenchy’s
death comes as the house he founded enjoys a renewed lease of life under , the British
designer appointed as its creative director last year. Many celebrated
designers, including Alexander McQueen, have been at the helm in the years
since Givenchy sold his company, but Waight Keller is the first to have met the
founder in person. When she joined the house she paid homage to his “confident
style”. Backstage after her fashion shows, Waight Keller often mentions the
designer she calls “Hubert”.
He was the
unrivalled master of the devastatingly chic, all-black look. One of the first
telephone calls made by Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, after the death
of her husband Edward, the Duke of Windsor, in 1972 was to the Givenchy
atelier. Photographs of that black wool coat with cigaline veil, produced
within one day in time for the duchess to travel to the funeral, were
reproduced all over the world.
The
iconography of first lady style owes a debt – largely unacknowledged – to the
Givenchy atelier. At the Calais exhibition opening, the designer recalled being
charmed by the beauty and youthful energy of Jackie Kennedy, whom he first met
while her husband was running for president. For the first Kennedy official
visit to France, Givenchy “made 10 or 15 pieces … but her secretary told me
that we could not tell the press”, he remembered – the need for the first lady
to be seen to support American fashion meant Givenchy’s contribution to
Kennedy’s image was downplayed. After the trip, Kennedy wrote a card to
Givenchy relaying a compliment given to her by Charles de Gaulle at an event at
Versailles, for which she had worn a Givenchy gown: “Madame, this evening you
look like a Parisienne.”
The French
news magazine L’Express once described Givenchy as being “to fashion what
Françoise Sagan was to literature and Bernard Buffet to painting: successful,
glamorous, gorgeous, and very, very French”. His death breaks a link to a
golden age of 20th-century elegance, in the clothes he created for Audrey
Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy and their chic contemporaries.
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