“His are the only clothes in which I am myself. He is far more than a couturier, he is a creator of personality,” Hubert de Givenchy’s muse Audrey Hepburn said of the designer. Loved by some of the most iconic stars of the 20th Century – from Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy and Wallis Simpson, to his most famous muse Audrey Hepburn – Givenchy’s name and legacy have been synonymous with Parisian chic for more than 50 years.

In 1927, he was born Hubert James Taffin de Givenchy. He came from an aristocratic family in the French city of Beauvais. The family’s nobility stemmed from his father’s side from the 18th Century, and artistic professions ran through his mother’s hereditary line.

Givenchy enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He began his career as an apprentice of Jacques Fath in 1945, and continued to learn the art of the couturier over the following years from Robert Piguet, Lucien Lelong and the legendary Italian Continue reading →