Genius who styled the movie icons
Hubert de Givenchy Fashion designer BORN FEBRUARY 21, 1927 - DIED MARCH 10, 2018, AGED 91
HUBERT DE GIVENCHY will go down in history as the designer of the “little black dress” that became a fashion staple for elegant women everywhere. It was made iconic by the opening scene on the 1961 film Breakfast At Tiffany’s in which Audrey Hepburn appeared as Holly Golightly, resplendent in diamond earrings, pearls, a tiara and a black Givenchy number.
The dress had such an impact that it led to the most glamorous women of the age beating a path to the door of his atelier on Avenue George V in Paris: Jackie Kennedy, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Maria Callas and Grace Kelly all followed in Hepburn’s wake.
And when the Golightly dress was sold at auction by Christie’s in 2006 it fetched $1million.
But it could all have been very different. When Givenchy first met Hepburn in 1953 he was an up-andcoming 26-year-old designer who was hard at work on his next couture collection.
Told to expect a “Miss Hepburn”, his face fell when he was confronted not by Hollywood icon Katharine but a rather younger lady.
However it was not long before he, like millions of cinema-goers, was won over. “We had dinner that night and before it was over I said, ‘I’ll do anything for you’,” he recalled later.
He designed her dresses for the film Sabrina that appeared the following year and it proved to be the start of a 40-year collaboration only ended by her death in 1993.
She called him her “big brother” – while they were only two years apart in age, he was 6ft 6in and she was almost a foot shorter – and when he launched a perfume called L’Interdit, there was only ever one person in the running to be the face of it.
The master of haute couture introduced a ready-to-wear line in 1968 and produced his first collection for men five years later.
An old-fashioned gent to the last, he was at his studio by 7.30am and clients would be offered tea, coffee, water, Coca-Cola or champagne by a white-coated butler.
He retired in 1995 and lived out his days in a manor house two hours south-east of Paris and is survived by partner Philippe Venet, formerly a master tailor at his studio.