At Givenchy, a Slithery Rock Look

PARIS — Morning in the Givenchy couture salons on Avenue George V. The herringbone floors have been laid with enough baby’s breath to fill out all the bouquets in Manhattan, though the sprays have been liberally spritzed with Givenchy fragrance; baby’s breath itself doesn’t smell of much.

Clare Waight Keller, Givenchy’s artistic director, has haute couture to consider next week. But she invited small groups to see her men’s wear first. “Quite often,” she said, “I find myself dragging things across both areas” — from couture to ready-to-wear, from women’s wear to men’s.

Givenchy men’s under her predecessor, Riccardo Tisci, had a hard, snarling edge: His were the famous Rottweilers gnashing from T-shirts and leather goods. Ms. Waight Keller, who has been showing men’s wear on the same runway as her women’s designs since she arrived at the French heritage house in 2017, has gone softer, a whisper of baby’s breath to his roar. She spoke of wanting what she called “perverse posh.”

“There’s something that feels very Parisian about that to me,” she said. “A sense of polish but not in a way that you’d ever feel is very refined and elegant.”

Her muse was Alain Pacadis, who in the 1970s was journalist by day, Le Palace nightclubber by night, a beacon of rumpled chic. One for the mood boards of the world. But in practice, the look was slithery rock: nipped waists and belling bottoms, sharp shoulders and kicky boots, a sequin-crusted dinner jacket to end. There’s always a danger that those who don’t look like Henry Kitcher, the model-artist who wore it in the show, will wind up looking like Liberace.

No fault to Ms. Waight Keller for that. Customer, know thyself, as the dressing-room commandment goes. In an ever more casual era, there is a refreshing perversity to the posh — and a poshness to the perverse.