Sarah Burton, who received the WWD Honor for Womenswear Designer of the Year, stepped into the role as creative director of Givenchy in September 2024 after 26 years at Alexander McQueen, 13 of which as creative director.
In a conversation with Miles Socha, international editor of WWD, Burton was asked about her design process, and what is her happy place? Is it the conception of the collection, sketching, patternmaking, doing the fittings or all of it?
“When I start a collection I start with a story and a feeling of the women we’re trying to portray at that time,” said the British-born Burton. “But really it comes alive in the fitting. I love to drape, I love to make clothes for women that are not too two-dimensional. So it comes alive when it’s on the human body. I ask the model to walk. I cut the fabric, I drape, and only then can you experiment in proportion and shape. It’s about how the woman feels in the clothes.”
For a fashion show, Burton takes extra care to make sure the clothes are right for each particular model.
“When I design a collection, I design it very much look by look. So it’s almost like I am doing a couture collection. But I quite often have the woman in mind for each garment that I put in the show,” she said.
She said when the model comes in, they’re all individual women. “So when they put a jacket on, I can tell if they feel amazing in the suit. Quite often it’s very much an emotional process in the room with the model. I want them to feel very Givenchy, but I also want them to feel like themselves so they’re not overpowered by the clothes. It’s almost like a conversation between the two.”
Burton said that when she dresses women for the red carpet or big moments in their lives, it’s a very intimate moment, and she learns about them and how they want to feel in the clothes. “Fashion is the biggest form of self-expression. It’s a form of armor that the women are putting on,” she explained.
Having worked most of her career with Lee Alexander McQueen, the British designer who died in 2010 at the age of 40, Socha imagined that “it must have been exhilarating and perhaps, occasionally terrifying experience.”
He asked how much did working with him shape her global view on fashion and the making of the collections?
“I mean, my whole career was at McQueen until a couple of years ago,” Burton said. “I started in the basement in Hoxton Square, and I remember my first day, Lee had draped a dress on the stand for a wedding the next day, and he said, ‘Do you mind staying tonight and finishing that?’ I was too scared to put it on the sewing machine, so I hand-stitched it all on the mannequin. And the next morning it was ready.
“But you know, I learned everything with him. I learned how to pattern cut and learned how to sew. I learned how to think out of the box, be creative. What was amazing is because it was such a small company, and I encourage students to do this, because there’s not really a very clear career path in fashion, and I feel very much that you make the job your own.
“And what was amazing about McQueen is that Lee was so creative, and he had all these amazing ideas. But each season, I then challenged myself to go and find out how to bring those to life. So one season, I would go to the tailors, one season I would go to the printing companies, and it was all about lace. So it was always this self-training to bring the dream alive, and it was an amazing education I had,” Burton said.
She recalled the day after she arrived at McQueen, Lee had just done David Bowie’s coat for the “Union Jack” album cover, and the floor was covered in wax. “And the thing about it was the pieces that he made were as beautiful when there was no money as when there was money.”
He taught her to go to fabric shops in Brick Lane. “We bought fabric when it was two pounds a meter. We tea dyed it, we cut it up. There was this energy of creating often out of nothing.…It also taught me it was never ‘no.’”
One season McQueen wanted to make a beautiful, kind of caged dress for his iconic 13th show, which would become famed for its use of a robot on the runway. “I found a man who made beds in London, and he made it [the cage for the skirt] out of wire for me. We [once] had a dress made out of bathroom tiling in silver,” she recalled.
While at McQueen, she brought more of herself into the role. She was asked how she balances that with her own creative vision and now with Hubert de Givenchy’s, the Parisian house’s late founder?
“I mean, at McQueen, you can’t pretend to be somebody you’re not. So if the founder is not there, you have to talk to the woman that you’re designing for today. Time shifts. You know, it’s not the 1950s anymore. It’s not the 1990s anymore. So you have to adapt to what you want to say to women today, and how you want to feel, but at the same time, it’s important to go back to the DNA of the house.
“At Givenchy, there is the tailoring, there is the dress, the silhouettes, all the things that I love about what I do in the house already. And also there is his love of the clients and the women that he [Hubert de Givenchy] dressed. He had a real relationship with Audrey Hepburn or Bunny Mellon. So for me, there’s a parallel there. I love being a dressmaker.…I really love dressing women,” Burton said.
Burton studied fine art and then transitioned to print fashion at Central Saint Martins in London. “I used to spend a lot of time in overalls in the print room, which I love. But I was very fortunate because Lee’s best friend, who was my print tutor, said you should go and work for my friend Lee.”
Burton recalled the day that McQueen was asked to design Givenchy in the 1990s, and what he loved was the ateliers. He learned so much about couture technique. He could cut a jacket, he could draw a trouser out, cut it out and sew it together. He was trained on Savile Row. He knew how to tailor clothes. But what he really learned at Givenchy was a lot of technique, how to work with lace and use leather, she said. He brought that back to McQueen and “we did it in our slightly London way, but we used these couture techniques completely in a different way. It was very inspiring,” she said.
So far, Burton has designed two ready-to-wear collections for Givenchy, and she was asked when she might have her first couture collection or a men’s show.
“I have a men’s campaign coming soon, and we are doing men’s collections and hopefully a couture show soon.”
Discussing how she’s adapted to working in Paris for a new group, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton instead of McQueen’s parent Kering, and a house that has a very rich history, she said, “It’s a beautiful house. They have these incredible in-house ateliers, so you can do a sketch and take it downstairs to the atelier and have it made. So it’s almost like you can see the clothes growing as you’re creating them, which is an amazing thing,” she said.
For her first collection, she said there was a return to the essentials of cut and silhouette.
“I actually feel very strongly, that when you put something on, it’s about how you feel as a woman. It should have an identity to it, that when it’s on a hanger you know it’s a Givenchy jacket, or you know it’s a Givenchy dress. I think it’s important to establish the sort of clothes and things that are authentic to who you are. To me, it’s silhouette, it’s feminine, it has to have a beauty to it. And to me, the cut is the most important thing.”
