Last season, he used Rihanna and Kanye West to grab attention. This season, he exploded a plane. Givenchy’s rebel designer Riccardo Tisci certainly knows how to grab the limelight at Paris Fashion Week.
Decked out in head-to-toe Givenchy, the American football player Victor Cruz and the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball player Russell Westbrook looked in awe at the spectacle before them.
A huge French plane from 1964, exploded into bits and painted in black, was suspended by steel cables across the circular catwalk. Deconstructed engineering parts hung in the air.
Givenchy commissioned the arresting work from the Dutch artist Paul Veroude. The piece took over a month to make.
Who needs A-list pop stars when you can blow up a near-one ton machine? If the plane represented deconstruction, the collection didn’t take heed. Instead, Tisci’s rather aggressive show sent out a series of rather conventional sartorial styles that went back in time to his earlier sharp Givenchy menswear.
The sharp-suitedness mixed with the more street black-and-white looks: models sporting skull caps, dark earrings and sometimes knee-length boots with thick white lacing.
The looks were contrasting, but perhaps lacked the subtlety with which one of Paris’ most lauded designers is associated.
