From the Ground Up

Sarah Burton's post-McQueen life has taken her to Paris and Givenchy, where she's rebuilding the house to imagine a whole new glorious future.

- Mark Holgate

Resting on a table in the corner of Sarah Burton's Avenue George V office in Paris are the beginnings of her Givenchy. To wit: a series of look books from house founder Hubert de Givenchy's first collection in 1952, which contain black-and-white, frontside-back images of each outfit—rigorously architectural, yet also with a controlled curvaceousness, the rare whimsy coming from a leopard handbag worn in the crook of the arm—shot with the near-forensic directness you associate with Collier Schorr. Beside these books lies a pile of calico patterns from de Givenchy's first and second collections—artifacts which had been, inexplicably, bricked up in a wall at his old atelier and discovered during its renovation.

The symbolism is almost too delicious for words, as it's precisely what Burton, who arrived at Givenchy in September of last year and will make her debut during the Paris fall 2025 shows in March, is doing: unearthing the past to lean into the future. "There have been so many Givenchy narratives," she says of a house that has been led over the last few decades by, among others, John Galliano, Clare Waight Keller, Riccardo Tisci, and her former boss and mentor, Alexander "Lee" McQueen (with Burton, of course, magically leading McQueen's own brand from his passing in 2010 to her departure in 2023). "I always think that to go forward, you have to go back to the beginning to understand what the essence of the house is."