Sarah Burton Builds Givenchy From the Bare Bones

For Spring/Summer 2027, Sarah Burton moves Givenchy beyond a single archetype, building a wardrobe around shirts, suits and dresses designed for many different kinds of women

Backstage after her Spring/Summer 2027 show, Sarah Burton was talking not about a Givenchy woman, but Givenchy women. That plurality is key to what she’s doing at the French house, which for most of its 54 years has been very much centred around a singular archetype. Actually, it’s been centred around a single woman: Audrey Hepburn as avatar of Givenchy style, soignée and chignoned and dressed in the precisely tailored black. It’s a great image, of course, and one that still resonates as an expression of a brittle, mid-century couture breed of chic. The problem is that it’s one you’ve seen endlessly on stuff like mouse mats and dishcloths and mass-market printed canvases. In short, its ubiquity has rendered it meaningless. So Burton needs to build something else.

“Multiple perspectives” was her take – on Givenchy, and on those women. Which meant the collection could open with a sculpted, bombastic black leather dress with the slipped shoulder of a Singer Sargent portrait, but oscillate a few looks later to a butched-up tailored trouser suit with flat brogues. Those customers are different, as is the customer who would want the slender, high-rise jeans with gently curved hips, cinched with a belt buckled with the top of an archival Givenchy mirrored compact, in gold guilloche. That is, of course, the reality of a 21st-century fashion house – Givenchy’s make-up and perfume business is huge. Indeed, that’s the sole reason the house continued after the retirement of Hubert de Givenchy 30 years ago. By now, it means much more, of course.

Burton’s archival referencing is clever – mostly because Givenchy’s big claim to fame, bar the black Breakfast at Tiffany’s dress, is a fussy frilled blouse he made in 1952 that’s tricky to imagine gaining traction in wardrobes today. But that blouse was revolutionary: part of a new idea of separates in haute couture that signified freedom and reflected the realities of women’s lives. That’s an idea knotted up intrinsically to Burton’s approach to dressing. Instead of the blouse, Burton is using the shirt, buttoned down, buttoned up with bowing-out sleeves, as her own Givenchy wardrobe building block. It came here in sculptural white cotton, leather and a couture-level satin doublé in fraise pink.

She obviously didn’t do the Audrey dress. But little black dresses were a big part of the collection, and among its best pieces. Within them was a vocabulary of Givenchy. One looped under a shirt, lean and rangy against the body; another was a tarred second skin of bugle beads dissolving into fringe at the hem. A sculpted style in satin crested into a sharp fin at the neck, framing the face of Eva Herzigova. She is, maybe, Burton’s counterpart to Audrey, her handsome glamour a cipher for a label engaged with the reality of women beyond the neophyte models that so often define our vision of fashion.

The suit proved the other building block, some versions sliced and wrapped around the body – sleeves shifted to the front, waistbands pulled out and displaced. Because Burton can cut the straightforward ones almost better than anyone, she had licence to toy with them, too. Others were just straight, double-breasted with swaggering overcoats, plainly cut and plainly gorgeous. It’s rare to find those for women – Burton offered a selection last season that slid, basically unaltered, between her women’s and men’s offerings, worn by figures ranging from the shaven-headed French lawyer and writer Constance Debré to the octogenarian Sir Don McCullin. Wisely, she built on them this time – it’s a womenswear niche she’s got indubitably nailed.

Burton also talked about clarity – which is apt. She offered choice across her catwalk, but the fact you can boil the essence of her Givenchy to the beautifully bare bones of a shirt, a suit and a dress bodes well. No one else is doing that.