First Day Syndrome. Every employed person experiences it at least once. Yet few can imagine what it’s like for the new boss to show up at the workplace knowing — not fearing or wondering but knowing — that all of your reports know more about the job than you do. Such is the plight of the first-time couturier charged with the leadership of long-tenured, highly skilled, highly specialized craftspeople, many artists in their own right.
If Clare Waight Keller harbored any apprehensions as she took charge of Givenchy’s haute ateliers, she worked through them efficiently, in time to deliver a confident, bold debut couture collection on Tuesday evening. Backstage after the show, she said of her approach, “I like to think of it as old soul in a new reincarnation.”
That meant a sharply rendered men’s wear derivation cross-referenced with the traditional, feminine trappings of couture. While the show notes cited the lunar cycle (and one gown bore its black-and-white spheres as decoration), that thematic musing in fact took a back seat to Waight Keller’s modernist mission, which, despite the importance of tailoring, focused on eveningwear that rejected more likely romance in favor of a darker take often suggestive of prettied-up, sophisticated Goth.
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