Women’s Wear Daily announced the death of fashion designer and art collector, Hubert de Givenchy. A member of Christie’s board, Givenchy sold €32m of Diego Giacometti’s design objects and furniture last year:
Count Hubert James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy, the 6’6” French aristocrat who founded the house of Givenchy in 1952, died on Saturday at the age of 91, his family said on Monday. […] With his perfect manners and old-school discipline, Givenchy had a distinguished presence that colored the fashion industry for over fifty years. A consummate collector with an impeccable eye for objects as well as the interior decoration of houses, he leaves behind a fashion house that defined the very notions of refinement and elegance.
Here’s Nick Foulkes in the Financial Times’s How to Spend It magazine describing him:
Givenchy is a survivor of the golden age of haute couture. He clothed the most beautiful women of an elegant time: Gloria Guinness, Babe Paley, Daisy Fellowes and Mona von Bismarck among them. Nicknamed the Tarzan of fashion because of his towering frame, he worked for Jacques Fath, Lucien Lelong and Schiaparelli, before founding his couture house in 1952, aged just 25. A couple of years later, the newspaper L’Express told its readers that he was to haute couture what Françoise Sagan was to literature and Bernard Buffet to painting: successful, glamorous, gorgeous and very, very French. Givenchy famously dressed Audrey Hepburn on and off screen and lived up to the image of the dashing French aristocrat that he was, never less than impeccable in a Huntsman or Cifonelli suit and sky-blue shirt with white collar and cuffs from Charvet. He was such a shoo-in for the Vanity Fair Best Dressed List that he was kicked upstairs into the Hall of Fame to give others a chance. He travelled the world surrounded by beautiful women, promoting an empire of fashion, fragrances and accessories – and by the time he sold his business to LVMH, he was richer and more famous than those who had been his customers.
Hubert de Givenchy Dies at 91 (WWD)
An exclusive interview with Hubert de Givenchy (How To Spend It)
