Following fall 2024 shows for men (in January) and women (in March) that were both presented inside Givenchy’s home on Avenue George V, this 2025 pre-co lookbook saw the design studios join forces to shoot their respective collections on the sidewalk outside it. Over a Zoom Susanna Venegas (who design-directs the womenswear) and Josh Bullen (ditto menswear-wise) explained their rationale.
Said Venegas: “We work separately, but also have a pretty constant conversation. And while we both have our own inspirations, there is also that language that we share. So when it came to shooting this lookbook it was about exploring a narrative between the two collections.” Added Bullen: “We both work to very different timings, so it’s hard to do something that is fully linked… so here we wanted to introduce some looks as couples because it’s not something that we’ve been able to do before. And when it came to styling and looking at both collections, there were some particular combinations that looked really good together.”
Venegas said her cipher for this collection was Stella Tennant (with a touch of Paula Yates). Bullen meanwhile leaned towards John Lydon via Julan Schnabel. These differing directions in part reflected their different design backgrounds, respectively in couture (at Dior, before a stint at Margiela), and in technically advanced utilitarian menswear (Stone Island). When the collections were shot together, the intersections thrown up by this adjacency were fun and convincing. A white womenswear double satin, buttoned funnel-neck shirt worn above a black marabou pompom lined skater skirt epitomized Venegas’s apparently (but not) thrown together racy insouciance. Alongside it Bullen’s cashmere catprint ringer sweater and slouchily worn tuxedo pants and open-heel loafers was more dressed-up grunge.
Looked at in isolation, the Venegas-overseen womenswear leant into Givenchy’s late ’60s and ’70s archive while working to reconfigure its attitude in order to serve contemporary context. This was achieved through adjustments in proportion and materiality that refocused the house’s genteel source code to signal something bolder and more self-determined. In menswear, meanwhile, Bullen channeled Hubert’s peerless midcentury patrician grandeur towards a 21st century masculine equivalent by applying twin tailoring silhouettes both designed to be worn irreverently, sometimes expressed in a blue patterned double-faced nylon inspired by Hubert’s own loungewear. There was also a base of upgraded but vintage-inspired military dress and some of the more whimsical details, cat-pattern included, carried over from fall.
Quite what the future will bring at Givenchy still remains murky: in the meantime Venegas and Bullen are leaning into that limbo to produce fun and attractive collections whose common denominators are clarity and panache.