Once upon a time the world’s great fashion designers formed an extremely closed circle of nimble fingered, white-coated craftsmen. Season after season in their tailor’s workshops they redefined Parisian fashion and worldwide trends. Hubert de Givenchy was one of them.Born in 1927, at the age of seventeen Hubert James Taffin de Givenchy left his birthplace in Beauvais for Paris, at a time when the couturier business was still passed on from master to apprentice. He learned from Jacques Fath, Robert Piguet, Lucien Lelong (recommended by Christian Dior) and in Elsa Schiaparelli’s famous salons on Place Vendôme.

Foreseeing relaxed chic and the democratisation of luxury, which together marked the end of the century, in 1952 Givenchy launched “separates”, light skirts and puff-sleeved blouses made from raw cotton – previously reserved for fittings only. Two years later Hubert de Givenchy was the first major fashion designer to present a luxury ready-to-wear line, “Givenchy Université”. More than any other, this was a designer who maintained close relations with his famous clients. No surprise there, he wanted to dress women. All women. From Paris to New York, Hubert de Givenchy’s fashions came out of the salons and down into the street. In 1953 one of Hubert de Givenchy’s designs was featured on the cover of Life magazine.
The best dressed women in the world were keen to be part of it – Lauren Bacall, Babe Paley, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlène Dietrich, Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis, Princess Grace of Monaco and Wallis Simpson, for whom the designer created special covers, to preserve the Duchess’s envied orders from prying eyes. They were made in Windsor blue.