Hubert de Givenchy Dies at 91, and Postwar Fashion's Golden Generation Thins to Almost Nothing

He gave the world more than the little black dress. He kept elegance alive and made it popular — which his successors did not.

The French designer Hubert de Givenchy died on March 10 local time at the age of 91. A company representative announced the news on March 12 without giving further details.

Even people who have never seen Breakfast at Tiffany's remember one scene from it: Holly Golightly, the gold digger played by Audrey Hepburn, standing on Fifth Avenue early in the morning in dark sunglasses and long gloves, a string of pearls wound four times around her neck, eating a baguette while she stares into a jeweler's window. The Givenchy little black dress makes her look poised and out of place at once, as if to say she longs for the glittering world but has not been let into it.

Hubert de Givenchy, founder of the house of Givenchy, made that piece of classic Hollywood. In 2006 the little black dress sold at Christie's in London for US$920,000. Hepburn was not the only woman to wear his clothes at a moment that ended up in the history books: Jacqueline Kennedy wore them on her first visit to France with Kennedy, and the Duchess of Windsor wore them to the funeral of Edward VIII.

None of this quite explains what Hubert de Givenchy meant to the fashion business. He founded the house in 1952 and showed his first haute couture collection for women that year; he sold the brand to LVMH in 1988; he stepped down as creative director in 1995. Those 43 years read like fashion history in miniature — the golden age of the postwar Paris couture houses, the democratization of luxury in 1960s America, and the opportunities and the risks that corporate money has brought a brand since the 1990s.

He also broke a long list of the industry's rules. He was the first to show separates for women, the first to launch a ready-to-wear line, the first to make a Hollywood star the face of a brand.

Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of LVMH, said Givenchy's clothes "combined two rare qualities: innovation and elegance."

In its obituary of March 12, The New York Times called him a representative of "the generation of gentleman designers who built couture houses from nothing in postwar Paris, who knew how to form a personal bond with a client and how to build an entire collection around one particular woman they had in mind."

Aristocratic Blood and Postwar Paris

"If possible, you had better be born elegant. Elegance has to be part of you, or it has to be you." Hubert de Givenchy said this from a lectern at Oxford in 2010, and it was the only advice he offered the young people in the audience who wanted to become designers.

It cost him no effort. He was born on February 21, 1927, in Beauvais, the capital of the Oise, and his full name was Count Hubert James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy. His father, Lucien, was a hereditary marquis; his mother, Béatrice Badin, came from a family of tapestry workshops.

His father died of influenza when Givenchy was three, and he and his older brother were raised by their mother's family, which shaped him more deeply. At ten he saw work by Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and others at a presentation Jeanne Lanvin organized in Paris, and settled on his profession on the spot. At seventeen he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris to study fashion design. A year later family connections got him an apprenticeship in Jacques Fath's studio, and over six years as an apprentice he also worked under Robert Piguet, Lucien Lelong and Elsa Schiaparelli.

Between 1945 and 1952 the Paris fashion business went from ruin to revival. In her book Deluxe, Dana Thomas records that in the 1920s the French luxury trade employed 300,000 people — cutters, fitters, seamstresses, embroiderers, furriers, shoemakers, weavers, spinners, milliners. In 1940 Nazi Germany took Paris, ransacked the headquarters of the couture association, seized all its records, shut the houses of Madame Grès and Balenciaga, and "made 14 attempts to destroy the French luxury industry, the aim being to move the couture houses to Berlin and Vienna, then the new cultural centers of Europe."

The raid hit Paris hard. Materials ran out, workers disappeared, and Lucien Lelong, at the time the president of the couture association, had to talk designers into staying open: "You can force us to do anything, but the couture houses of Paris will never move, whatever happens. Haute couture outside Paris is no longer haute couture." To survive, houses such as Louis Vuitton sold goods to Nazi officers.

A few new names brought the trade back to life. Pierre Balmain, Christian Dior and Jacques Fath were spoken of together as the three designers who set the postwar direction of couture. Broadly, they returned to feminine charm while cutting away the clutter; the best known of their ideas was Dior's New Look, built around the waist.

The young Givenchy crossed paths with the last two. In 1946, while Givenchy worked for Lucien Lelong, Christian Dior had just left to start the house that bore his name. Jacques Fath mattered more: he was Givenchy's first employer in Paris, and he also invented the woman who became Givenchy's first muse, Bettina Graziani.

Two Muses

In design and in publicity alike, Givenchy owed his success to two muses. Hepburn gave him his classic image and his reach in America; Bettina Graziani opened the American market for him in the first place.

Bettina Graziani was born Simone Micheline Bodin, two years before Givenchy, into a poor family, and she arrived in Paris the same year he did, in 1944. She showed her sketches to the designer Jacques Costet, hoping for a job in design. He told her she was better suited to modeling.

He was right. She became one of the favorite models of all three of the great postwar couturiers — Balmain, Jacques Fath and Christian Dior — and "the most photographed woman in France." It was Fath who gave her the name Bettina Graziani and cut her red hair short, the look she is still remembered for.

"I wore no makeup then, I had red hair, I was young and lively, not really pretty, but I looked different from the other models. Fath wanted to send the press an image with an American spirit, a new and modern attitude... He told me, 'We already have a Simone; you look more like a Bettina'... and then I became Fath's spokeswoman," she recalled in a 1980 interview with Interview Magazine.

One reporter wrote in 1947 that "Dior has the New Look, but Fath has Bettina Graziani." Until Fath died of leukemia in 1954, his house sold more than any other except Dior.

In 1950 Graziani signed with the American agency Eileen Ford and moved to the United States. A week after she landed in New York, Vogue offered her an exclusive. She was among the first French models to make it in America — she could work a showroom and she photographed well, at a time when the "cover girl" was still a new idea in France.

Bettina Ballard, a former fashion editor at Vogue, wrote in her 1960 memoir In My Fashion: "Photographers liked to book her because she knew how to listen, never lost her temper, never made trouble, and could strike poses that were distinctive without being strange." In its issue of July 24, 1950, Life ran a feature called "French Models Thrive in US." Bettina Graziani was one of the two models photographed, and the magazine said they had "quickly become the most sought-after models in New York."

In March 1952, at 25, Givenchy left Elsa Schiaparelli and opened his own house. He showed his first collection in a small salon on Rue Alfred de Vigny in the 8th arrondissement, named the collection after Bettina, and talked her into working as head of press as well as model.

Bettina is probably the reason Life, an ocean away, gave the show four pages under the headline "De Givenchy, a New Name in Paris." Describing the scramble backstage and out front, Life wrote: "She [Bettina] rounded up America's most important fashion editors, posed for the photographers, set out chairs for the guests, tidied the clothes backstage, walked the runway, and came back out afterward to sell the clothes."

The show was a hit. Everything sold out on the spot, and one piece, a blouse named Bettina, became Givenchy's first signature: light and thin, with wide cuffs of ruffles embroidered in black. For the photograph Bettina raised both arms and held her hands beside her head so the ruffles fanned out, which showed off the blouse's romance exactly. As she explained it: "A model is not passive. She can give the designer ideas with a gesture, a movement, the way she stands — sometimes it changes a detail, sometimes it makes a new garment."

The Audrey Hepburn story is the better known of the two.

In the 1950s, Paris couture kept Hollywood at arm's length. The biographer Marie-France Pochna wrote in Christian Dior: The Man Who Made the World Look New that "Dior would not have his clothes shown off crudely on a big screen, which would offend his most elegant clients; he would never run that risk... He thought a living aristocrat was, aesthetically, far above a clumsy imitation on stage or screen."

Givenchy disagreed. In 1953, the year after his first collection, Paramount asked him to pick out several outfits for Hepburn's new film, Sabrina. Roman Holiday had not yet opened, so Givenchy assumed the studio meant Katharine Hepburn and happily said yes. When he met Audrey he was plainly let down — "I had no time for her, I was designing my second collection" — and left her to choose for herself. One dinner changed his mind about the newcomer: "Before dinner was over I told her I would do anything for her."

His appetite for publicity may also have come from his first employer, Jacques Fath. If Dior and Balenciaga built clothes like architects, Fath was known for flamboyance and energy. He loved company, threw one society party after another, and sent his wife through them wearing his designs. He liked to say: "Publicity is the foundation of haute couture. If you don't see that, you can't understand how haute couture works."

Out of that first meeting with Hepburn came the "décolleté Sabrina," a black gown with a square neckline that covered the collarbone. Edith Head, the costume designer on Sabrina, insisted to the end of her life that the design was hers. According to The New York Times, this made Hepburn angry enough to demand that Givenchy dress her in every film she made afterward. She also shot advertisements free of charge for L'Interdit, the perfume Givenchy later launched, and let him use her name — the first time a luxury house had put a film star's face behind a fragrance.

Television spread through American homes in the 1950s and carried the Givenchy name with it. The civil rights movement and the social changes of the 1960s then broke down the barriers around luxury spending. As Deluxe puts it, "the middle class worked at copying the rich, including going to the places the rich went, without fearing a word of warning or a laugh at their expense."

Holly, the gold digger eating bread on Fifth Avenue at dawn in a Givenchy little black dress and admiring Tiffany's jewels through the glass, is that 1960s middle-class state of mind in one shot. Hubert de Givenchy and Hepburn, between them, built an image that caught the spirit of the age.

It took his contemporaries another 30 years, until Hollywood's golden period, to work out that they needed Hollywood.

Two Changes

The house of Givenchy ran for 36 years and paid its own way before it was sold to LVMH, and marketing alone cannot account for that. It all came back to design in the end.

Over those 36 years, Givenchy's designs changed the industry twice.

Postwar Paris was an unfriendly place to run a couture house. Everything was pared back, fine fabric had become expensive, and people looked at extravagant clothes with suspicion or anger. The row over Christian Dior's New Look in 1947 is the obvious example. The designers Edward Molyneux and Robert Piguet closed their doors over it.

Givenchy had all this in mind when he designed his first collection in 1952. He showed several outfits in which top and bottom came apart — until then couture had been made in one piece. There was a white knit with coral-red buttons over a short black skirt, an organza blouse with a long black skirt, and a black lace sweater with a black striped straight skirt. Three tops and three bottoms made nine looks. He chose practical fabrics too, at two-thirds of what his rivals charged.

The American market of the 1950s was not the European one; it wanted casual ready-to-wear. Retailers usually bought the rights to a European designer's work and then copied it down a production line. Givenchy noticed, and sold the rights to his first signature piece, the Bettina blouse, to the New York retailer Russeks. The copy cost $10.95; the original cost $2,800. That decision widened his reach in America further.

In the 1960s a youth culture began rising all over the world, and Givenchy proved alert to it.

In 1957 he and his idol, Cristóbal Balenciaga, worked out a new shape called the Sack and showed it in their new collections at the same time. It grew out of the shirt dress of the 1950s: it hung loose, like a bag, with no waist, but the hem came up to below the knee and pulled in. It still looked elegant and was far easier to wear.

Everything he designed after that was shorter and made less of the body's lines. In 1968, seeing what ready-to-wear could be worth, he opened a ready-to-wear boutique, then added menswear and childrenswear during the 1970s, becoming one of the few designers praised in couture and ready-to-wear alike.

"He made traditional couture relevant to modern life," a 1971 article in The New York Times said.

After LVMH: A House That Kept Losing Its Way

In 1988, after 36 years on his own, Givenchy sold the Givenchy Couture Group to LVMH for $45 million, stayed on as creative director for seven more years, and left in 1995. The brand then spent a decade in disarray.

Three British designers ran it over those ten years, each with a loud style of his own and none of them alike. The first was John Galliano. When the appointment was announced after Givenchy's own last show in 1995, everyone was stunned: Galliano's lavish, theatrical clothes had little to do with the house's composed elegance, and he was only the second British designer in history, after Charles Frederick Worth, to run a French couture house.

Galliano lasted less than a year. His replacement was another British designer known for wild talent, Alexander McQueen.

McQueen was 27 when he took the job, on a four-year contract worth £1 million a year. His strangeness never did remake Givenchy, and at the end of 2000 he infuriated his employer by selling 51% of his own label to Gucci, which belonged to LVMH's rival Kering. McQueen's last collection for Givenchy had no runway show at all; two quiet static presentations took its place, with fewer than 90 guests invited.

The third Briton, Julien MacDonald, also stayed two years. He was 28 when he was hired, and the trade still could not see why a designer nicknamed "the Welsh Donatella Versace," fond of sequins and short skirts, had been put in charge of the house whose face was Hepburn in a little black dress.

The other candidates looked like better fits: Stella McCartney, who went on to run Chloé; Alber Elbaz, who had just left Yves Saint Laurent; and Nicolas Ghesquière of Balenciaga, now creative director of womenswear at Louis Vuitton.

MacDonald's final show for Givenchy was bleaker still — no press invited, and a cramped room that held only 80 guests.

Not until Riccardo Tisci arrived in 2005 did the house have a second great run. His trick was to drop the opulence and bring in street prints.

The fall/winter 2012 collection carried a dark gothic mood drawn from the Chola dynasty; at the fall/winter 2015 show the models were styled to resemble the British singer FKA Twigs (real name Tahliah Barnett), known for her singularity. That may be the new definition of cool Tisci found for a new era: set against Holly, the gold digger daydreaming her way into the American middle class in Breakfast at Tiffany's, FKA Twigs fits a public conversation now preoccupied with plural values and the right to choose.

Menswear was Tisci's other success. After he took over the men's line in 2008, motifs still rare in luxury — basketball, the American flag, street graffiti — drew attention. The Rottweiler T-shirt of fall/winter 2012 finally gave Givenchy a new hit.

In leather goods he produced handbags that caught on slowly and lasted: the Nightingale, the Pandora, the Antigona.

Tisci is now creative director at Burberry, and the mark he left on Givenchy will not rub off — to younger shoppers at least, Givenchy is a luxury brand with a street edge. Elegance? Barely there.

Givenchy the Brand, and Givenchy the Aristocrat

According to WWD, Givenchy's market value grew sixfold between 2005 and 2017, its staff went from 290 to 930, and revenue reached $540 million. That let the brand lean less on wholesalers: its own stores grew from seven to 72, and it recently won back direct control of two important luxury markets, Dubai and Singapore.

The part of the business the public knows best today is beauty. BoF reports annual sales of about $400 million, of which the beauty line alone accounts for $350 million.

After all those rough years, Givenchy's biggest problem is still that its style does not hold from one season to the next and that nobody is sure where it sits in the market.

Mario Ortelli, a senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, told BoF: "Today, when people think about luxury, few of them think of Givenchy first. Fashionable people watch Gucci, Balenciaga and Dior, while traditional customers stay loyal to Louis Vuitton and Fendi."

Philippe Fortunato, the current chief executive, told BoF he plans to take the design back to the elegance of the founding years and to put the weight on leather goods. The GV3, priced between $790 and $1,790, is about to reach stores to take on Gucci's Dionysus and Saint Laurent's Sac de Jour.

The designer charged with doing it is Clare Waight Keller. Her first collection drew a flat response, but her second, shown during Paris Fashion Week this year, drew a crowd for its faux fur and for reviving the elegance of the founder's era, and became the most talked-about luxury brand on Instagram and Twitter.

Hubert de Givenchy himself said little about his brand after he left in 1995. He made one remark, to WWD in 2007: "I am sad. What has happened is not very pleasant. After all, one wants to be proud of one's own name."

Most of the time he wore an identity with little to do with fashion: antiquities expert for Christie's and for the Louvre.

But Eric Wilson of The New York Times thinks people will always picture the designer in one particular way.

"Two meters tall, with a thick head of fair hair, courteous to the point of discomfort, strongly built and handsome — the very image of the French aristocracy."

Cover image: madrideasy