Givenchy: A fashion legend and symbol of elegance

It was an iconic fashion moment in Hollywood movies of all time when Audrey Hepburn appeared in front of the window at Tiffany & Co. on the fifth Avenue in long evening gloves and a black shoulder-baring dress, accompanied by the music of “Moon River”.

In the 1961 movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, the pixie-like actress and her couturier and friend Hubert de Givenchy were jointly creating a timeless style that would be repeatedly imitated and represented by the later generations.

The “little black dress” by Givenchy thus became one the most classic one of its kind, despite Coco Chanel is credited with inventing the garment.

As the French fashion legend died in his sleep at the age of 91 last Saturday, many could not help recalling his 40-year friendship with Audrey Hepburn, whom he called as his muse. 

A lifelong friendship

Hepburn once said, “each time I’m in a film, Givenchy dresses me.” And the two of them did created quite a number of indelible classics in the movies such as “Sabrina”, “Love in the Afternoon” and “Charade” among others.

File of French designer Hubert de Givenchy (L) and American actress Audrey Hepburn taken in 1991.

The actress also wore a Givenchy dress while accepting her best actress Oscar for “Roman Holiday” in 1954. Jointly, they have created the “Hepburn Style” and Givenchy also became a leading figure of the ladylike chic in 1950s and 1960s.

But the friendship began with a little bit bumpy episode, when the two nearly missed each other. While recalling his first meeting with Hepburn in 1953, the designer said he refused to dress her citing the excuse that he didn’t have enough “petite mains” seamstresses in his studio.

“She wore very tiny trousers, ballerina shoes and a little T-shirt,” recalled Givenchy of his first meeting with the then rising star, adding that he was disappointed that she was not Katherine Hepburn, whom he originally though he was to meet.

Hepburn did not give up, but invited him for dinner. “Before dinner was over, I told her, ‘I’ll do anything for you’,” said Givenchy.

“Audrey’s style came with a really different silhouette, really of the moment,” Givenchy said of his muse, who he dressed right up to her death in 1993. 

However, their friendship was based on much more than clothes. Givenchy said he never tried persuade her to wear anything other than “what she liked and what she could wear.”

“His are the only clothes in which I am myself. He is far more than a couturier, he is a creator of personality,” Hepburn once said of her friend.

A creator of personality

Givenchy’s name was also connected with many socialites of that time, such as Jacqueline Kennedy, Grace Kelly and Jane Fonda.

But for the couturier, he never puts the importance solely on the dresses he designed. He once said that “the dress must follow the body of the woman, not the body following the shape of the dress.”

“To dress a woman is to make her beautiful,” Givenchy once said. “In haute couture, we are cosmetic surgeons, erasing imperfections and refining the silhouette for isn’t a couturier a magician of sorts, who creates illusion and perhaps beauty itself?”

Givenchy’s current designer Clare Waight Keller called its founder “the definition of a true gentleman”, saying that he is one of the most influential fashion figures of the time, and was one of the “chicest, most charming men” she ever met.

The designer’s final couture show was staged in July 1995, when his fellow couturiers Yves Saint Laurent, Paco Rabanne, Christian Lacroix and Valentino taking front-row seats in a packed salon in the opulent Grand Hotel at the Paris Opera.

Givenchy was forced to retire in October, when his contract was not renewed by the giant LVMH group, to which he sold the fashion house in 1988. With typical discretion, Givenchy made no comment, only that he had not been consulted about the appointments.

During the opening of an exhibition in his honor at the Museum for Lace and Fashion in Calais in 2017, the couturier was quoted as saying “Today, I find there’s a kind of anything goes. It seems to me that fashion has become something else and I cannot say I’m enthusiastic. There’s fashion and there are fashions.”

It seems that with his death, an era is coming to a close in the fashion circle, as well as the classic style of the 20th-century elegance.