ByGuy Martin,
Senior Contributor.
There’s an element of something quite natural that accompanies the jolly outrageousness of a Parisian Haute Couture week, and it’s the convening of the artistic and social side of the old transatlantic alliance. Despite the recent overheated rhetoric and largely fabricated rifts and shifts, the routine decampments and encampments of the fashion makers and their clients from all walks of life exhibit a rock-solid stability. Would that it were ever thus.
For instance: here’s a stylish Asian/French/American lady who directly incorporates all three countries of the WWII alliance in her colorful life history, and who, as an acclaimed middle-aged model in Europe, could be the face of any campaign you care to name, and then some. Pictured above, Suzi de Givenchy — yes, that de Givenchy, but more on her in-laws in a minute — was born in then-British Hong Kong, from which her parents emigrated to the States when she was four. She grew up in New York City, moving to Paris at twenty, where she married Hubert Taffin de Givenchy, the son of Jean-Claude Taffin, the Marquis de Givenchy and the nephew and godson of the famous designer Hubert de Givenchy. Now a widow, Suzi de Givenchy had three boys with Hubert. At a chance dinner with friends when she was 50, she was scouted by Versae Vanni for Next Models, and, boom, the clients lined up: Balenciaga, Vogue France, Vogue Asia, Off-White, and onward. Confident, Asian, American, and oh-so-French, the tenacious de Givenchy gives as good as she gets.
