YOUR LIFE IS one long red carpet, lived in
the same suit night after night, with just a
few tweaks (midnight blue on Wednesday,
Prince of Wales checks on Thursday). And at
the end of it all: a tuxedo!
But maybe you’re feeling bolder. Maybe
you feel your clothing should say something
truer about you. Men aren’t just pieces of
roasted asparagus tailored into inky worsted
wool. Men are creative. They are sensual. The
sands of masculinity are shifting—shouldn’t
the way men look say as much?
So you wear a frock coat instead of a
peak-lapel tuxedo jacket in snooze black.
You wear an oil-blue suit covered in islands
of sequins, or a gingham dinner jacket like
you’re an English professor who’s pivoted
to a new life at the Grand Ole Opry. Maybe
a ru±ed micro-dot blouse under a black
tuxedo—the tailoring not too skinny, the look
sensuous as a pinprick.
Or maybe you’re not famous. Maybe you’re
merely fabulously rich. (Isn’t this fun?)
Everything else in your life is just the way you
want it, just the way you dreamed it—why not
your clothes as well? After all, your clothing
needs to say something grander than just
“expensive.” What if someone could put your
passion into a garment and you could wear it?
Your heart on your actual sleeve—now we’re
talking! What if a jacket covered entirely in
sequins hung on you light as the burden of
being born rich and your pants fit so perfectly
that your self-esteem improved?
Congratulations: This is life wearing
Givenchy.
THE WOMAN BEHIND this fantasy is the
English designer Clare Waight Keller, who
has been Givenchy’s artistic director since
2017, overseeing both menswear and wom-
enswear for the venerable French fashion
house. It was her vision for a new, more
holistic version of the brand that helped her
land the job. “My initial process going in,
and actually even in the talks of looking to
join Givenchy, was about the fact that I very
much saw the house as a very strong vision
of a couple,” Waight Keller told me when we
first met, in Florence, Italy, this past June.
She explained that she drew inspiration
from the relationship between the house’s
namesake and founder, Hubert de Givenchy,
and the actress Audrey Hepburn, who began
working together early in the 1950s. “You
kind of always saw them as this fashion
couple,” Waight Keller said.
She had arrived in Florence just 90 min-
utes before we sat down to chat, having
come to present a menswear collection as
the special guest designer at Pitti Uomo, the
Italian trade-show leg of the Men’s Fashion
Week circuit. The show was about 48 hours
away. We were seated in a sort of meeting
room on the ground floor of the boutique
hotel where she was staying—a place that
had been designed to feel like a private
home. There was no lobby, really, which
meant that Italian “zaddies” with miracu-
lously groomed chest hair wandered in and
out as we spoke, glancing curiously at the
fresh-faced British woman at the head of
a dining room table covered in an orderly
array of documents.
She was, she told me, essentially finished
with the clothes she’d be showing: “Last
weekend, basically in three days, I put the
collection together in terms of the styling,
and the mood, and the attitude. And tomor-
row, really, I’ve got some final fittings.” Still,
Waight Keller’s work never seems to be com-
pletely done. During the two months that
I followed her, she presented three collections
composed of 157 total looks. I asked her at
one point, late in the summer, whether she
ever got tired. She laughed and said, “Yeah,sometimes!” quickly adding, “I get a lot of
energy from my work. I really love it. I do.”
And then she extolled to me the virtues of
the European holiday. The secret to her
success, she seemed to suggest, is that she
knows how to relax. So chic.
In person Waight Keller seems like an
American’s fantasy of a British person:
incredibly warm, with a look best described
as “lovely”; her hair is just a bit blonde and
wavy, and her cheeks always have a peachy
glow. Often she looks as if she’s spent the
past three days in the country, riding a horse
named Passport or something. But in fact she
typically spends half the week in London—
where her husband, architect Philip Keller,
and their three children live—and the other
half in Paris. She’s a low-key dresser, favor-
ing things like army green capri pants, linen
shirts, and simple leather sandals—a bit like
Gwyneth Paltrow, with a Malibu-by-way-of-
London stylishness. Her sense of humor is
just a little naughty. She’ll describe her work
with words like “anarchist” and “sleazy” and
“perverse posh.”
When she first arrived at Givenchy, almost
three years ago, the priority that she set for
herself, she told me, was to reanimate the ele-
gance of the iconic French couture house. For
the previous 12 years, under Riccardo Tisci,
Givenchy had been defined as a baroquely
brash fusion of streetwear and aggressive
tailoring. Waight Keller was interested in
something more feminine. For actresses
like Rachel Weisz, Rosamund Pike, and Cate
Blanchett, Givenchy became the go-to brand