The excitement was palpable on Friday morning, as press, buyers, executives and friends of Givenchy filed into the brand’s headquarters for the hottest ticket during this season’s Paris Fashion Week: Sarah Burton’s highly anticipated debut.

It had been a minute since the brand was last presented during show season. For most of last year it was without a creative lead, after Matthew Williams stepped down in January 2024. It’s also been a minute since the brand, which under its founder Hubert de Givenchy was beloved by Old Hollywood starlets like Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, has truly felt like a part of the zeitgeist. Givenchy's parent company LVMH decided that Burton was the woman to change all that, tasking her with ushering a new chapter to revitalise the storied couture house. No pressure then.

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For Burton, too, it was also a pivotal moment, marking the first time she’d designed for a house other than Alexander McQueen, where she had spent her entire career first as the right hand of founder Lee McQueen and then as creative director following his death in 2010. For her first Givenchy collection, she went right back to the spirit of the brand and reimagined its core codes in a modern day context. For her, the essence of Givenchy is simple: It’s all about the form of the clothes, and the woman who wears them.

"I wanted to strip it all back to silhouette: so start from the very beginning, take everything away and go back to what the backbone of the house is about," she said backstage after the show. "I wanted the collection to encompass everything it is to be a woman today."

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It’s a sentiment that resonates all the more given she is one of the few female creative directors in an industry largely powered by men—and one that clearly shone through: Burton really is a woman's designer. "There’s moments where you want to feel sexy, there’s moments where you want to feel powerful, there’s moments where you want to feel vulnerable, there’s moments where you want to feel fragile," she continued. "I think it’s really great to celebrate the complexity of being a woman, rather than one note."

Her collection had an understated elegance to it, combining clean lines and a largely neutral colour palette (save those pops of yellow), with couture gestures and nods to Hubert de Givenchy's first 1952 collection throughout. And, yes, there was something for every mood, every moment. Hourglass tailoring that accentuated the female form for an empowering confidence; second-skin mesh dresses for a sexier note; and beautifully embroidered high neck duchess satin gowns for when the occasion calls for something more demure. There was take on the little black dress for cocktail hour, a Chantilly lace 1950s silhouette chopped into a mini style; a go-to trench, given a couture twist with a cocoon cape back; and a "white-shirt-tucked-into-a-black-trouser" look imagined in sumptuous leather for a luxe take on everyday.

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But there was also a whimsical playfulness running through the collection, with dresses that evoked a suit jacket worn backwards, sliced to reveal a flash of décolletage; gigantic bow details on gowns, and one dress made of makeup compacts and powder puffs. Accessories were supersized and overly exaggerated, from the gobstopper jewel earrings to gigantic scarves imagined in leather, tied in a bow—a modernised reference to Hubert de Givenchy—tails hovering mid-air. "It’s things that were personal, things that felt treasured, and then exploding them so they felt a different size and proportion," she explained.

You might say with her move to Givenchy, Burton is continuing to follow in McQueen’s footsteps. After all, he started as creative director at Givenchy in 1996, the same year Burton started at McQueen. But like at McQueen—where she continued Lee McQueen's legacy while pushing the brand aesthetic forward with her own signature—she is clearly making Givenchy her own.

"You've always got to tell your own story wherever you are," she said. "I think it's important to establish what the house represents, but then you interpret it for what you want to say today in the world that we live in and how you want people to feel."

"It’s about a feeling," she continued. "It's about the trust and a feeling. And an emotion."

This article was first seen on ELLE UK.