Paris When It Sizzles

Sarah Burton made her debut as creative director of Givenchy last week, nearly a quarter century after she left the house with Alexander McQueen. It was pitch-perfect.

New Givenchy designer Sarah Burton.

Also in this issue:

• Haider Ackermann’s first Tom Ford show

• Demna’s latest Balenciaga collection

• Some fashion psychoanalysis

“Like in great painting and architecture, in couture to make clothes, you must eliminate, eliminate, eliminate to obtain the true sense of a line,” Hubert de Givenchy told me in his Avenue George V studio, the day after his final couture show in 1995, for a story I wrote for The Washington Post. “You see, the more you add, the more you load on, the more it’s mad. You must try to have just the silhouette, which is an intelligence in clothes.”

British designer Sarah Burton followed that wisdom for her debut on Friday as creative director of house that Hubert de Givenchy founded in 1952. For the fall-winter women’s wear show, which Burton presented in the former Givenchy atelier on Avenue George V, she sent out a collection of pared-down sculpted looks, primarily in black and white, and with little embellishment, like Givenchy did 73 years ago.

There were nods, too, to Alexander McQueen, the British designer Burton assisted from the time she was a student at St. Martin’s Schoo of Art in the early 1990s until his death by suicide in 2010. She took over as the brand’s chief designer then, and there she stayed until 2023, when she decided was time to leave. In all, she had been working for the McQueen brand for more than a quarter century.

Burton’s silhouettes at Givenchy, like on every other runway this season, were heavy on line-backer-like shoulders for suits and coats, asymmetrical hemlines for dresses and skirts, and enormous scarf bows. But Burton’s were expertly executed, and followed, as Givenchy said, “the true sense of the line.” They were intelligent, sophisticated clothes, for intelligent, sophisticated women.

Sarah Burton for Givenchy, Fall-Winter 2025-2026.

The show followed Burton’s a strong red carpet start for the house at the Academy Awards last week: Timothy Chalamet wore a lemon yellow Givenchy suit—yellow was one of the few colors Burton dropped in her fall-winter collection; another was a cherry-blossom pink—and Elle Fanning donned a retro-looking couture gown in white lace with a sweetheart neckline and skinny black belt. It had been inspired by a dress in Givenchy’s first collection in 1952.

Elle Fanning and Timothée Chalamet in Givenchy by Sarah Burton.

Two days after the Burton’s show, Cate Blanchett work a leather suit from the runway to the New York premiere of her latest film, Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. She looked ace in it.

Cate Blanchett in Givenchy by Sarah Burton.

What a graceful, triumphant way go close a story that had, at turns, been exciting, chaotic, vengeful, and horribly sad. As I recount in my book, Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, Burton first arrived at Givenchy in late 1996, with 27-year-old McQueen, who had been hired by the brand’s owner, Bernard Arnault, to take over from John Galliano, after he had been moved to Christian Dior, also owned by Arnault.