It’s only been a year since Sarah Burton made her debut as creative director of Givenchy, yet her vision is clear. Under Burton, the Givenchy woman successfully balances elegance with comfort; opulence with reliability. Most importantly, she has trust in her clothes. As one of the few female designers at the head of a global luxury brand, Burton has an almost unique perspective. What her male counterparts often overlook is how a woman feels in their designs – do the clothes support and reassure the wearer, or do models have to yank down their dresses mid-runway because they keep rising up? Some people believe fashion is pain, but Sarah Burton is not one of them.
Last night (March 6), the English designer presented her AW26 collection in Paris. Since her first show for the French brand, she has consistently given us her own twist on tailoring, whether it was suit jackets worn backwards during her debut, or a simple white shirt deconstructed and worn as a dress during her second collection – if you put a classic suit in a blender, you’d get something that looks like Burton’s Givenchy. This time around, stiff collars were popped upwards and faced the wrong way entirely, in some cases like a very glamorous cone collar that your cat might be given at the vets.
One notable addition this season was the headpieces designed by Stephen Jones, which, upon closer inspection, were actually t-shirts. Remarkably, something as plain as a white t-shirt managed to look like a Dutch Renaissance painting – “Girl with a Pearl T-shirt” perhaps? The floral embroidery looked equally like something you’d find in the Rijksmuseum. Elsewhere, Burton threw in a few classic suits, tailored to perfection (just to prove that she can). Occasionally, we got lesbian chic at its finest; double-breasted suits with overcoats resting nonchalantly over the shoulders. Think Radclyffe Hall meets Patrick Bateman.
Like any work of art, the collection’s colour palette rested on a foundation of blue, red and yellow – the primary colours – which sometimes softened into pink, or blended together to become bottle green. Former Dazed cover star Alex Consani wore a sweeping green cape over one shoulder, joined on the runway by familiar faces Mona Tougaard, Vittoria Ceretti and Eva Herzigová.
If we know anything about the Givenchy woman, it’s that she is complex, versatile and always on the go. She is well equipped for both the boardroom and the opera, but as colourful as her life is, she still has to do the washing up sometimes. Luckily, Burton now has some marigolds for her, too – a bunched-up pair of daffodil-yellow washing-up gloves (although we wouldn’t recommend getting them wet).
Scroll through the gallery at the top of the page for the entire AW26 collection
