Fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy made the little black dress fashionable.
Hubert de Givenchy, the French couturier and nobleman who upheld a standard of quintessentially romantic elegance in fashion for more than four decades, dressing the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Grace Kelly and memorably Audrey Hepburn, in a little black dress, in the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” died Saturday. He was 91.
A representative of his company on Monday confirmed the death. No other details were immediately available.
Givenchy was well regarded as emblematic of a generation of gentlemanly designers who established their couture houses in postwar Paris, nurturing personal relationships with customers and creating entire collections with specific women in mind.
His very first show, a smash hit with retailers and the press when it was seen in February 1952, when Givenchy was just 24, included the “Bettina blouse,” a tribute to his original muse, Bettina Graziani, the leading model of Paris of the day who had joined his fledgling company as the director of public relations, saleswoman and fit model.
Shortly thereafter, Givenchy came to the attention of the young Hepburn, a rising star who was so charmed by his youthful designs that she insisted that he make her clothes for nearly all of her movies and help mold her sylphlike image in the process.
In 1961, Hepburn and Givenchy created one of the most indelible cinematic fashion moments of the 20th century in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” when her character Holly Golightly approaches the titular Fifth Avenue jeweler wearing oversize sunglasses, four strands of sparkling pearls, long evening gloves and a black Givenchy dress — a slender, shoulder-baring column — that looks startlingly out of place for the early morning hour.
For generations of young women dreaming of a glamorous life in the big city, the image of Hepburn as Golightly came to represent a certain ideal, that of the rich bohemian throwing wild parties while wearing magnificently gorgeous gowns. In 2006, the dress was sold at a charity auction at Christie’s in London for $923,187.
Although claim to the invention of the little black dress is more often attributed to Coco Chanel, who had already popularized the look, or to the many designers who had made black dresses before her, the style instantly became associated with Givenchy.
“The little black dress is the hardest thing to realize,” he said, “because you must keep it simple.”
Since his retirement from fashion in 1995, Givenchy, who remained active in the arts as an antiques expert for Christie’s, the Château de Versailles and the Louvre museum, and managed the French branch of the World Monuments Fund for several years, maintained several residences.
These included a hôtel particulier decorated with paintings by Matisse and Picasso in Paris and an exceedingly grand chateau in France, the 16th-century Manoir du Jonchet. Its gardens were designed “as a delicate piece of embroidery,” he once said, describing a collaboration with one of his many longtime friends and clients, the American philanthropist Rachel Mellon, who was known as Bunny.