A French count who rose from the fashion ranks to become an haute couture superhero, Hubert de Givenchy died on Saturday at the age of 91, at his country residence, Manoir du Jonchet, in France’s Eure-et-Loir region. The fashions that this most courtly of men designed for the world’s most elegant women—most famously, his close friend Audrey Hepburn, who wore his clothes on-screen and in life better than anyone else—grace museums and are dissected with reverence. Givenchy’s private world, though, will be as much a legacy as his expert tailoring and the clarity and comfort embodied by the creations of his couture house, which he founded in 1952 and from which he retired in 1995.
As AD observed in 2002, “His houses in Paris, Hôtel de Cavoie and Hôtel Orrouer, his country house, Le Jonchet, and his villa at St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat have all reflected a personal style that was alert to architectural proportions and harmonious mixtures of objects and works of art, while retaining a zest for comfort and a simple delight in life.”
It was an enviable existence, with interiors (one designed with the assistance of the American Charles Sévigny) where modern art mingled with 17th-century Boulle cabinets, Diego Giacometti furnishings (some of which were auctioned off at Christie’s last year), rugged stone floors, and rigorous gardens in which another client and friend, Bunny Mellon, had a guiding hand. (The elaborate vegetable garden that she conceived for Le Jonchet, inspired by George Washington’s at Mount Vernon, became too difficult to maintain and so was torn out some years ago.) Givenchy inhabited this suave universe for decades with his life partner Philippe Venet, who had worked with Givenchy as master tailor until 1962, when he opened his own maison de couture. Venet survives him, as do nieces and nephews, among them the Manhattan-based jewelry designer James de Givenchy.
Aesthetically speaking, Givenchy—who stood six-foot-six tall, one reason he was nicknamed le grand Hubert, and was as handsome as a matinee idol—lived and worked with singular panache (see The Givenchy Style, published by Vendome in 1998). More than any other couturier, a Paris newspaper once observed, he was “to fashion what Françoise Sagan was to literature and Bernard Buffet to painting: successful, glamorous, gorgeous, and very, very French.” His taste was artistically aristocratic, a perfect blend of the disparate halves of his ancestry, his paternal side being a long line of marquises while his maternal side ran the Beauvais and Gobelins tapestry workshops.
Some Givenchy homes expressed what AD called a “grand seigneur approach to interior decoration,” rich with Renaissance bronzes, 18th-century French furniture, and a William Kent chandelier owned by England’s George II. Others juggled modesty with magnificence, influenced by a late 1960s visit to Marella Agnelli’s Rome apartment. Renzo Mongiardino had decorated it with, as Givenchy recalled, “rope, cotton, gilt bronzes, garden furniture, a Régence cabinet, and modern art by Marino Marini, Manzù, and Modigliani.” Returning to Paris to work on his own apartment at 4 rue Fabert, down the street from the Invalides, and still under the Agnelli spell, he told himself “there would be no damask with the Boulle cabinet.” Instead he, with the help of architect Pierre Barbe and expat American decorator Charles Sévigny, stripped away the Napoléon III apartment’s architectural details and mixed regal antiques with art by Rothko, Miró, de Staël, Picasso, and others, dead-plain neutral upholstery, mirrored accent walls, and potted white orchids; in his bedroom, a chair by Swedish modernist Poul Kjaerholm faced an extravagant Boulle commode.
Monumental simplicity reigned at Le Jonchet, an early-17th-century manor house on 95 acres southwest of Paris, in Romilly-sur-Aigre. At this “maison de week-end,” Régence chairs were dressed in desert-tone neutrals, modern sofas slipcovered in linen white, and walls painted soft white, relieved only by limestone architectural details, a resplendent 19th-century Chinese wallpaper in the dining room, and a floral pattern that completely covered one guest room. Stone stags’ heads by sculptor Alban Reybaz, copied from examples at Versailles—Givenchy restored a courtyard there and championed, as president of World Monuments Fund France, the rebirth of the king’s potager—were affixed to the house’s entrance façade, and tiny Giacometti hounds were commissioned to mark the graves of his dogs.
The designer’s small dining room in Paris, published in AD in 1978 and arguably my favorite Givenchy space, was a tour de force of modern opulence. Dark sheets of mirrored glass (hiding storage) sheathed the walls, reflecting a round table draped with checked fabric and Louis XV side chairs by Jacob clad in chestnut leather. The fireplace’s flames were reflected ad infinitum, too, its golden glow joined by plain white candles in sober silver candlesticks and discreet uplights set inside parchment cylinders. In one corner stood a simple but finely woven wicker basket piled with pine cones, which Givenchy used as kindling.
That humble bit of wicker, so unexpected, brought a whiff of the countryside into a sensationally urbane interior. Yet instead of seeming out of place, its earthy character enhanced it. One is reminded of the gentle upbraiding that Cristóbal Balenciaga gave Givenchy in his youth, as recounted in Mary Blume’s 2013 biography of the Spanish-born king of fashion. “You have an upbringing that says you must be this, you must do that,” Givenchy recalled Balenciaga saying. “No, be natural, be simple, be honest, don’t make complications.” Those words aptly describe not only Givenchy’s exquisite, inspirational oeuvre but also his discreet demise: Le grand Hubert died in his sleep.
