Fashion Icons Encyclopedia. Hubert de Givenchy.

Audrey Hepburn, the firm's founder Hubert de Givenchy's great muse and friend, used to claim that Givenchy garments were shields against evil. Hubert Taffin de Givenchy grew up in a Protestant household. His grandfather had a tapestry factory in Beauvais, where he also gathered fabrics, furniture, and other traditional artifacts of the time. later we will investigate more about the relationship of Audrey Hepburn with the French atelier. According to him, he had always wanted to work in the fashion industry, but it was a taboo career at the time. He chose to break free from his family's influence at the end of the war and relocated to Paris with the goal of becoming a seamstress.

And he succeeds. He launched his own workshop shortly after arriving in Paris, and three or four years later he met Cristóbal Balenciaga, a great friend of whom he declares himself an absolute admirer, whom he recognizes as a source of inspiration, and from whom he inherited a way of doing and understanding sewing in some way.

Hubert - who would die years later, in 2018 - departs his role as creative director and is replaced by John Galliano somewhere at end of the 1980s when the brand was acquired by LVMH. The luxury conglomerate, on the other hand, had different intentions for him, and because to his innovation, it was a recent Alexander McQueen graduate -a year later- who was in charge of renewing.

McQueen departed the maison a few seasons later, already consecrated, to focus on his own enterprise. Riccardo Tisci, an Italian graduate of Central Saint Martins in London who knew how to modernize and obscure Hubert's legacy without losing an iota of the charge magical to which Hepburn alluded, was in charge of replacing him - first at the head of the women's lines and then with the men's seasons as well.

Givenchy became dark, seductive, and magical under Tisci's direction. It supported the reintroduction of the sweatshirt as a desirable item, as well as baroque prints and a fusion of civilizations and urban trends.

Tisci announced his resignation from the creative direction in 2017 after more than a decade at the leadership of the company. Clare Waight Keller, who was previously in charge of Chloé and is the first woman to lead the company in its 65-year existence, is in charge of replacing him.

The British designer takes Tisci's history and adds a bohemian, more feminine, more radiant spin to it.