October 4, 2025 |
“I was actually looking at female power and how to empower women through the architecture and the iconography of the feminine,” said Sarah Burton of her masterful Givenchy show, full of clothes that traced the curve of the female form. Burton is interested in power-dressing, but not in the conventional sense.
“How often you go to the masculine to empower women? When actually I wanted to go to the female to empower women” said the designer. “I think that often, there’s a belief that you have to be like a man to be powerful and there’s a lot of noise in the world at the moment, and I think maybe those skills that are not so obvious are the ones that we need to be using – embracing a femininity, embracing of the woman, embracing of an emotional intelligence that I think women possess.”
Her clothes thrill with that emotional intelligence. Her masterful skill as a tailor allow her to reveal and conceal. Jackets were cut away behind to reveal the small of the back, or cropped to frame the waist, the clavicle was beautifully framed by lapels cascading from the shoulder of little coat dresses and jackets – with just a hint of lingerie strap. “I like the idea of like, intimacy and eroticism,” she explained, “that if you slice the back of a jacket and just tip it forward, it gives you this kind of very sort of important collar, but then you reveals the skin at the back of your neck. So there was a sort of sense of how much skin you show, how much do you not show a sense of intimacy, a sense of beauty.”
Leather wiggle dresses, were slashed to the hip and came with built in bras. The spirit of Monroe was evoked, not overtly but in a shadow print on a coat. Speaking of which, Burton’s is some of the best tailoring you can buy. For summer, she removed all the inner structure to give each piece a lightness and suppleness. “I took everything away. The woman’s curves that give you the silhouette.”
The body is the star and there was plenty of skin on show. One mini dress, made from strands of large crystals was akin to wearing nothing but a necklace. The mesh pieces which went viral last season are back a red maxi version came with an architectural mesh ruff around the shoulders or festooned with frills.
From the sophistication of her grown-up tailoring and grand gowns, to girlier lace mini dresses and the overt sexuality of her body suits and mesh pieces, there’s a breadth to Burton’s Givenchy, which her all-ages casting reflects. “I learnt so much from dressing so many women over so many years,” she said. “I don’t design for one woman, I design for women.”
Photography courtesy of Givenchy.
