Will Matthew Williams save Givenchy? A new kind of designer for a new kind of luxury

On Monday, LVMH officially announced the appointment of Matthew Williams, founder of 1017 Alyx 9SM, as Givenchy's new creative director. Williams is the third creative director of the brand in less than four years and the comparison between him and the designer who preceded him, Clare Waigth Keller, gives the measure of how much LVMH wanted to change its aesthetics and narrative. Williams, unlike Keller, whose career had developed between Ralph Lauren and Tom Ford's studios, comes from the same creative horizon, mixed with product design and music, from which Virgil Abloh, Heron Preston and Kanye West come. His represents the figure of a new type of designer, devoid of formal pedigree, who is not only the creator of a collection of clothes but the main catalyst of a cultural buzz that takes place around the brand – with a shift of focus from design products in itself to the values, identity and aesthetics of those who make them. But to understand how Williams has become the ideal figure to relaunch Givenchy by developing and perfecting this new role of the luxury designer it is necessary to retrace his career and look at his idea of fashion.

In short, Williams' appointment from Givenchy responds to the needs of a brand that has slowly slipped into the background in an era when the top players in the industry found a strong and distinctive voice and that today needs a voice and a precise identity that can accompany it towards the next chapter of its history just as Riccardo Tisci in his twelve years of creative direction transported it from the world of traditional fashion to that of luxury streetwear. What we'll probably see from Givenchy is a shift of aesthetic codes in which some already read watermarked the change in the world of luxury. As Vanessa Friedman said while commenting on the nomination in The New York Times:

«The future of luxury will have less to do with a designer’s ability to cut a pattern than their ability to amalgamatethe broader cultural moment.».

It will therefore be the cultural relevance that Williams will be able to acquire and his ability to mix traditional luxury with aesthetic universes far away from it the real keystone of the new Givenchy that we will see next October – a Givenchy of which soon, for better or worse, we will finally return to talk.