Givenchy Spring 2010: Les Cités

Ricardo Tisci’s hard edged, flagrant, and often questionable in taste collections have been given a lot of flak, his latest menswear presentation for Givenchy is no exception. For spring 2010 he reprised his Latino hero, this time with souvenirs from a trip to North Africa. In the context of European fashion, where Milan and Paris reign and where it’s a predominately Caucasian audience with “Europeo” tastes, his collections are indeed tacky, vulgar, and what some may consider tedious. But you move to the Latin or even the Urban world and its meaning changes from that of vapid flash and charmless bling to a harmonious mix of cultural expression, as relevant and potent as the lives beyond white Europe and North America that they are inspired by.

The look is completely urban and the references speak more to Hip Hop culture and Rap than the more acceptable Rock N’Roll allusions that dominate men’s high fashion. But Tisci is genius not in creating clothes that caters to this culture; rather he appropriates it and distills from them their innate elegance, their aggressive expressions of masculinity, and their contradictory life affirming nihilism. He’s using a language unknown to us, although it’s the native tongue in the ghettos of Paris (Les cités) and streets of the Bronx. He’s showing us, all of us who despite firm claims of progress have not opened our minds to these alternatives, all possible worlds.

That all said, I can’t but feel that the boys on the runway are there very ones Tisci lusted after in his youth.

More trivia then a genuine side note for comprehension is the fact that Tisci was asked to design costumes for Michael Jackson’s “This Is It” tour. I imagine he is a designer with enough integrity to not allow a side project change the course of his collection but surely some of those ideas bubbled to the surface here.

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