CLARE WAIGHT KELLER
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 93
in men’s you’ll see more like three. Waight
Keller wants to infuse menswear with the
pace and energy that’s endemic to women’s.
“I’m constantly pushing, nonstop, to evolve
the silhouette quickly,” she said. In making
womenswear, she labors over the perfect
pants for the perfect jacket and the right pro-
portion for a trouser to wear with a specific
shirt. “And that is something I wanted to echo
in menswear,” she said, that “I didn’t think
that was there.”
The identity play intrinsic to womenswear
has always been the source of its power—
wear big shoulders, for example, and look
boardroom-ready, even if you don’t feel it.
Waight Keller isn’t the first to inject femininity
into menswear in the current era; Alessandro
Michele found immediate success with his ini-
tial Gucci collection, in 2015, by sending out
pussy-bow blouses whose short sleeves made
them look borrowed-from-the-grandmas, the
Persian lamb coats rich girls wear while taking
smoking breaks at art school, and those pervy-
luxe fur-lined slides. (Incidentally, Michele
and Waight Keller were colleagues at Gucci,
where she oversaw womenswear.) But Waight
Keller’s men’s clothing doesn’t look girlish or
womanly—and “it’s not to do something femi-
nine,” she told me of her womenswear-driven
approach to menswear. Instead her clothes
look louche, luxurious, and even flirtatious.
Unlike other hobbies, clothing—and fashion,
more specifically—doesn’t demand that you
define yourself. The fantasy aspect of fashion,
that foundation Waight Keller is now building
on, celebrates who you could be.
In a pixelated floral frock coat, you’re a
European prince who’s exiled and loving it. In
your oil-slick blue shell coat, worn over your
blue suit and your teal turtleneck, you’re the
kind of guy who can work a turtleneck. Remove
the shirting from beneath your glowing laven-
der suit and suddenly you’re not behind your
desk but behind the bar at the Hôtel du Cap-
Eden-Roc. Leave the jacket unbuttoned and
you’re buying rounds. Just put on a jacket, her
clothing suggests, and play.
FOR THE SHOW the next night, Givenchy lit the
Villa Palmieri with a fashion photographer’s
romantic sensibility. Trees had never looked
better. The estate was almost embarrassingly
resplendent in that classic Italian-countryside
way: The place seemed to be in a perpetual
sigh of lazy opulence.
To the property’s natural beauty, Givenchy
had added Instagram-ready flourishes: a
comically huge chess set, a limousine-length
Foosball table, and an endless supply of
Champagne. By 9 p.m., some 500 guests—
including notable celebrities who wouldn’t
otherwise attend Pitti and who’d flown in just
for the night—were seated alongside the long
runway that looped through the gardens and
terrace. And then the models began clomping
down the runway in Waight Keller’s romantic
mix of tailored sportswear and suiting. Their
hair, mussed in a kind of Brit-pop chop,
accented the clothes—which were the colors
of butter, electrified cornflower blue, and
baby-pig pink—with a requisite bit of Waight
Keller naughtiness.
After the show, the scene melted into a
party, where music blared and people spilled
out onto the balcony and wandered around
the gardens. Nothing gets the people going
like someone else’s property to behave badly
in! Waight Keller circulated in black trousers
and a simple men’s button-up, the sleeves
rolled to her elbows. On her feet were a pair
of the sneakers she’d debuted that evening.
She posed with Victor Cruz, Darren Criss, and
Mena Massoud and hung out with her sta≠,
laid-back and laughing.
It can be hard to square Waight Keller’s
unassuming attitude with the apparatus of
corporatized glamour propagated by the fash-
ion industry. She has no arrogance, no ego;
she really is as organized as she said—nothing
catches her o≠ guard. Even when she should
be exhausted, she’s ready with quick and
gratifying answers. Her exacting, productive
manner inculcates a feeling that everything
around her is e≠ortlessly correct. It is per-
haps a particularly feminine way of moving
through the world; she makes you feel like
your snaps will always be moved one centime-
ter in the right direction. Actors often tell her
that when they wear Givenchy, they “just feel
amazing in your clothes.” They say: “I know
that you know how I feel in these clothes.”AS WAIGHT KELLER herself will tell you, it’s
in couture that she performs her most inno-
vative work. Couture is the great locus of fan-
tasy in fashion: Every piece is made to order.
These are garments created for occasions that
you can only dream of, worn by people you
can only really imagine. And it’s her couture
designs that have won Waight Keller the most
industry praise. As critic Tim Blanks recently
wrote, hers are “clothes for alt-Hollywood.”
“I felt that was missing: that approach of
doing really extraordinary, fabulous clothes
for men to dress up in too,” Waight Keller said.
“The couture customer is really looking for
that extraordinary piece.”
It was a few weeks after the Florence event,
and we were having tea in a Paris hotel, just 12
hours after she’d presented her fall 2019 cou-
ture show. Bespoke clothing has been a partof menswear since luxury tailoring took hold
on Savile Row. But haute couture is not your
grandfather’s made-to-measure tweed. After
tea I went to the atelier to see the fall 2019 cou-
ture pieces, like a silver sequined frock coat, up
close. Waight Keller had imagined a group of
aristocratic ne’er-do-wells invading a château,
and this coat was meant to reflect the madden-
ingly fine silverware in the house’s collection.
(Waight Keller seems particularly energized by
the idea of breaking into rich people’s homes.)
But even without the fantasy origin myth,
a coat like this is a technical triumph. Heavy
embroidery will always make fabric col-
lapse, so first the artisans in the atelier had
to find exactly the right fabric to support the
embroidery and hold the sharp, round shape
for which Waight Keller’s men’s couture is
known. The specialists in the atelier—some
gifted in the application of sequins, others in
the arrangement of beads—covered the coat in
a mirrorlike parquetry of overlapping square
sequins, considered more modern, more mas-
culine, than traditional round ones.
And on top of that, Waight Keller wanted
to integrate the motif running through the
rest of the collection: Braquenié’s celebrated
“Tree of Life” pattern, a favorite of Hubert de
Givenchy’s. The entire coat was embroidered
with this design, in breathtakingly ornate com-
binations of pale silver pewter and deep gray
tendrils of bullion chain and even thinner sil-
ver threads, all choreographed to create leaves,
fruits, branches, insects, and blossoms climb-
ing up and outward in a seductive sprawl.
The whole thing weighs about as much as
a shrug and is lined with silk, so it’s unex-
pectedly breezy on the body. Light bounces
o≠ the sequins and onto the wearer’s face.
The model in the show, with that Brit-pop
crop and snobby moue, looked like a night-
clubbing Narcissus, disco-dappled with his
own reflection.
When it comes to couture, the haters always
ask: Who actually wears this stu≠? Well! For
one, Jordan Roth—the president of Jujamcyn
Theaters, the company behind hits like Kinky
Boots and The Book of Mormon—has been a
Givenchy Couture customer since Waight
Keller started. (He’s a self-described “couture
devotee,” having also worked with Iris van
Herpen and Maison Margiela Artisanal.) “For
me, what I wear is a kind of performance in
the most rigorous sense of the word, the most
meaningful sense of the word,” Roth said. “It is
a bringing to life, bringing out what is inside.
The process of conceiving that—manifesting
those ideas into a design, crafting it and then
wearing it—is the performance of couture.”
These kinds of performances often occur
in private; a house’s clientele is highly secre-
tive, along with almost every other element
of the business. Roth is one of the rare
well-known-but-noncelebrity couture clients,
and when I asked if he could give me a sense,
in whatever way he felt most comfortable, of
how much these garments cost, he demurred:
“I don’t think I can.”
And then there’s the red carpet. Over the
past decade, the red carpet has increasingly
become the spot where the conceptual fanta-
sies of Paris have the attention of the entire
world. Female actors from Lupita Nyong’o
to Kristen Stewart have demonstrated how aNOVEMBER 2019 GQ.COM 125
Unlike other hobbies,
clothing—and fashion
specifically—doesn’t
demand that you define
yourself. The fantasy
aspect of fashion celebrates
who you could be.