givenchy.f11

Givenchy / Fall 2011 / Paris Fashion Week

Riccardo Tisci’s Givenchy has always been influenced heavily by symbolism, love, religion, music, and animals. This collection boasted pieces of it all – both in literal and conceptual depictions – to foster what could be his most marketable season to date. And to think it may be his last at the legacy-laden house: he’s been buzzed about leaving Givenchy for Dior since the Galliano controversy erupted before Paris Fashion Week.

For Fall 2011, Tisci took Givenchy to the streets of East Los Angeles, where Cholo (and Chola) street gangs hold fort. Influenced heavily by hip hop (Tisci was just recently commissioned to design Kanye West and Jay-Z’s collaborative album cover, which looks strikingly similar to the collection at hand), this season was a beautifully executed, at times quirky, take on street aesthetics gone luxurious. See, for example, the gaudy symmetrical silk-print baseball jackets (to which he’s been developing for seasons now – see his Pre-Fall collection) that looked straight from Gianni Versace’s 1990s baroque print archive, to which The Notorious B.I.G. wore famously.

[Read the rest of my review at TheFashionSpot here.]

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