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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIn late June, Paris is un-air-conditioned and smells the way cities presumably used to smell all the time, which is bad. Givenchy has offices on Rue Montaigne, in a third- floor space accessible by an elevator scaled to fit one woman   and a coin purse. I arrive to find four models watching a tray of damp croissants.\n\nRiccardo Tisci is at work nearby in a   dove gray showroom lined with clothing   racks. It is a Wednesday morning, and   the designer has fifty-five hours to finish the forthcoming menswear show, his ninth for the label, and expectations are high. Givenchy (the name is pronounced zhiv-on-shee, though it's more fun to   say it the way Lil' Kim does in \"M.A.F.I.A. Land,\" which is phonetically) is a storied fashion house founded in 1952 by a French aristocrat who lives in an actual castle.   For decades the house staked its reputation upon all things tasteful\u2014a word which, over the years, has been applied to it as both a virtue and a euphemism for \"boring.\" When Tisci came to the label in 2005, there was almost no menswear line to speak   of; today the segment accounts for about   30 percent of its business, and \"boring\" is not a word that comes to mind. Tisci almost instantly brought to Givenchy what Tom Ford once brought to Gucci and Hedi Slimane to Dior: a money-minting black box of creative energy and social capital that's as enigmatic as it is lucrative, and built in part on his personal reputation. In eight years, he's elevated Givenchy from unprofitable couturier to prestige label of choice for everyone from Rooney Mara to Frank Ocean (see pages 58 and 293, for instance) to the Twitter commentariat. (Currently trending: #UpgradedRapperNames Givenchy Mane.) He's probably the only fashion designer who could persuade Kanye West to wear a leather skirt onstage, as he did for his Watch the Throne tour, which Tisci art-directed.*\n\nIn person, Tisci is swarthily handsome but untidily groomed, with a little paunch. If you've seen Tisci's somberly erotic runway output, you might picture some kind of holy weirdo sketching by oil lamp behind the scenes. But in person the designer is a sweetheart. He mentions his eight elder sisters constantly, and no wonder: Tisci's primary trait is what can only be described as \"younger-brother-ness\"\u2014coddled sweetness plus warmth plus the boyish quality of being excitable, which all makes a great antivenom for pretentiousness. Once, when the iPhone recording of our conversation accidentally plays back in my pocket, he points to my pants and says, \"That's me!\"\n\n\"When people meet me,\" he says, \"they say, &amp;amp;#x2018;Oh, my God, you're very funny. You're such a happy person.' For me, darkness is something very beautiful.\"\n\nToday in Paris, though, he is intense. He stands at the far end of his showroom, palpating his chin to a house-music soundtrack. A model tromps across the room in a papal bib and quilted sarong, absorbing the designer's scrutiny in the way that a wall might absorb scrutiny. Tisci plucks a piece, shakes his head, swaps a white trouser for the sarong, adds a nose ring, nods. An assistant takes the approved outfit and packs it into a plastic bag with styling instructions for the runway show. Tuck shirt into trousers. Please ensure shoulder zip is flat and straight. The routine repeats. And repeats again. Over the two days that follow, Tisci will spend almost every minute locked Rapunzel-like in this room, fretting and noodling with ensembles and generating new wrinkles for his face. I receive ardent updates from handlers saying things like \"Dear Molly, Riccardo has been locked in the showroom\" and \"Unfortunately, I hear the level of stress is high. Therefore, he stays locked in.\"\n\nAs much time as he spends in creative isolation, Tisci does, in some savant-like way, have his ear to the street. \"It's not that   I invented hot water,\" he later tells me, when I ask him how he's able to translate pop culture into couture and vice versa.   \"It's just, I'm very honest with my style and with what people want in the street.\"\n\nWe pick up the conversation the next time I see him, on a summer Monday that's hot enough to feel like the inside of a mouth. Tisci sits in a high-ceilinged salon, dressed in lime Nikes and sipping warm carrot juice. Instantly he delves into a quasi-monologue that bounces from Kanye to growing up with an octet of sisters (imagine the shower drains in that house!) to Catholicism and, finally, to the topic of his ability to influence both runway and street. \"My DNA, roots, is southern,\" he says. \"I'm South Italian.\" In the era of the designer's youth, this meant living in the Mediterranean version of the American inner city. In a country beset with corruption scandals, unemployment, Mafia, a malfunctioning infrastructure, and a batshit deficit, the southern half of Italy was blamed\u2014still is, somewhat\u2014for pretty much everything. This is where the brashness comes from. \"I'm South Italian,\" Tisci says, \"but I wanted to keep the elegance. The couture feeling. What I built at Givenchy is this new gentleman.\"\n\nAnd the new gentleman? He's \"a boy that's confident in his own sexuality. A boy that is not scared to play with his own wardrobe. It doesn't matter if he's aristocratic or comes from the street\u2014he's got an elegance inside himself.\"\n\nThe dietary staples of Tisci's new gentleman are these: one part Southern Italian bedazzlement, one part Parisian restraint. Since arriving at Givenchy, he's produced seductive and sharply tailored clothes. Clothes that presume extreme sexual confidence on the part of the wearer: tight lace-up biker pants, black wool capes, leather shorts, vinyl waistcoats, collarless shearling coats. These are pieces that communicate wealth (by looking expensive) and intelligence (because it's hard to imagine a stupid person carrying them off). It's about looking cool without sacrificing sex appeal, which is one key difference between Tisci and, say, Rick Owens. Tisci's clothes are sexy in the way that an iPad is sexy, but they are also sexy in the way that sex is sexy.\n\n\n\n *Specifically, a black leather knee-length kilt. When Kanye was asked for a comment, he replied through a rep: \"Kanye wants to help Riccardo but doesn't want to answer any questions about the kilt.\"\n\n\"Men want to be sexy now,\" Tisci says. \"Before it was only gay people going around like that. Today it's mostly straight people.\"\n\n\n\nWhen English is spoken as a second language, it tends to come out surreally literal (see \"half-cooked chocolate cake\" on bougie Paris restaurant menus) or kaleidoscopically abstract, and both are true of Tisci's speech. \"When I started at Givenchy, I was bored with fashion for men,\" Tisci says. \"Street culture? They don't care. They don't give a shit. They wear what they want. Bermuda, big and small. T-shirt oversize or T-shirt tiny. Prints. Bombers.\" Street culture, he points out, does not recognize the usual boundaries of male dress. Why should Givenchy?\n\nIf one wants to understand the essential street/couture mystery of Riccardo Tisci, the best place to start would probably be his Rottweiler T-shirt. The Rottweiler debuted in January 2011 as part of the Givenchy autumn menswear collection. It is a black jersey garment printed with a large image of a Rottweiler, which happens to be America's tenth-most-popular pet dog, just above the Shih Tzu. You've probably seen the shirt before, on either Kanye West or Liv Tyler, or on Rihanna or Swizz Beatz or Usher, or on a street-style blog, or on a local high school senior who reads street-style blogs, or on Rick Ross. It is everywhere, the Rottweiler shirt, and it has been everywhere for well over a year. At $265, every edition sold out.\n\nIt's not immediately obvious why. Actual Rottweilers have glossy coats, enjoy retrieving balls, and tend to snore. Some overeat. Made over in boxy cotton, however, the Rottweiler has captured demographic slices that tend to be mutually exclusive: fashion-world in fluencers, mainstream celebrities, and the \"streetwear\" community, which is what the fashion industry calls young black people. (Every sector has its own evasive racial code. In Hollywood, young black people are the \"urban audience.\") More interesting than the shirt itself is where it puts Riccardo Tisci, which is at the overlapping center of the Liv Tyler, hip-hop-enthusiasts-in-Atlanta, and herding-dog Venn circles. For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure he's the only one there.\n\nIn Paris, Tisci told me I should browse Twitter for stylish Givenchy-wearing youth, especially in America's South. I did\u2014God, you should, too\u2014and found a world of Twitpic'd Givenchy hats and club photos and \"Fake Givenchy is the new fake BAPE\" and students tweeting about taking the quarter off from school and using the tuition money to buy Givenchy. After messaging with him, I wound up speaking to a 21-year-old student from New Orleans named Johnathan Watson. He had first seen the label at a boutique in the form of a pair of white shorts with a purple-and-green design on them. \"I was like, &amp;amp;#x2018;I gotta have 'em.' Ever since then, I've been having to have something.\" Watson wears his shorts with Vivienne Westwood loafers \"in a loud color\u2014preferably purple\u2014and probably a sheer button-down, a couple of gold chains, and a belt.\" Would he, I asked, wear the Rottweiler shirt? Sure, Watson said. He'd pair it with a vintage piece around the neck. \"Something big, and probably gold.\"\n\nWhat Watson likes about Givenchy\u2014the craftsmanship, the luxury, the uncompromising vision\u2014is probably why it works so well as streetwear. Streetwear, after all, is all about the notion of style as a value independent of occasion. There's no such thing as \"formal streetwear\" or \"resort streetwear\"; the whole premise of a term like ghetto fabulous is that true style transcends context. Weirdly enough, it was Tom Kalenderian of Barneys who best summarized the broad-spectrum appeal of Givenchy for me. Tisci, he said, \"has an iconic look and an iconic concept which is immediately recognizable. The collection fills such a distinct niche\u2014there isn't really a direct competitor.\"\n\nBy this Kalenderian meant two things. One, Tisci's Givenchy is omnipresent. Two, Tisci's Givenchy is literally iconic, in that Tisci puts a lot of icons in his clothing: stars, flowers, animals, Jesus. He designs menswear that is both conspicuously luxurious (couture fabrics) and eminently recognizable (like clip art). This particular formula\u2014luxury plus familiarity\u2014is catnip for humans, and you need look no further than Tisci's $270 jesus is lord T-shirt to understand why. It may be high fashion, but it's also comprehensible. Everyone knows Jesus.\n\n\n\nLa Halle Freyssinet, where the Givenchy menswear show will take place, is an industrial space in the Thirteenth Arrondissement. When I show up four hours early, neither the designer nor his clothes have arrived, but there is something almost as good in their place: models. A medley of models. A model monsoon. The models are lined up cafeteria-style in front of mirrors, undergoing transformation into Tisci Men. In an industry known to favor Eastern Bloc models with unnervingly milky skin, Tisci prefers his men brawny, multicolored, and a little bit rough, like Easter Island statues. The Tisci model is not a man who could be dominated in any fight or sex act; rather than \"beauty,\" his primary trait is \"power.\" (Guess which one gets Kanye in a skirt.) As casting agent Daniel Peddle put it, \"They're what most men aspire to be like.\"\n\n At 5 p.m. the clothes arrive in Givenchy trucks, and I can finally see them up close. All of it is indisputably opulent, and here is the thing about opulent clothing: Even if it is technically unwearable, it looks magnificent. Viewed at this range, the difference between a Givenchy trouser and a pair of Topshop pants is like the difference between I, Claudius and YouTube's comment section. Opulence has mood-elevating powers. That's the whole point and promise of luxury: It makes you want to stare at it, and then it makes you want to touch it, and then, by extension, it makes you want to own it. I watch an assistant unpack a pair of white rubber-soled Jesus sandals with a glittery chain embellishment (retail price: $400), lube up a model's ogre-like feet, and ease them into the sandals. I am gored with longing. The fact that one might never wear such an item coexists in perfect harmony with the wanting of it, and it is the first time that I really, truly get it through my head that high fashion has nothing to do with utility. The combination of the churchly refinement of the clothes and the brutish, emphatically virile models is pleasantly jarring in the way that drug hallucinations can be. Once your brain stops trying to correct for its confusion, the whole experience becomes weirdly enjoyable.\n\nI am shuttled to the front of the house, where the air is smoky with Damascus-rose incense (the international smell of Catholic churches) and scored by a hymnal dirge. Across from me a nucleus of attendants has formed around Amar'e Stoudemire, thanks less to his fame (there are better celebrities here) than to his height, which gives him a reassuring lighthouse quality. The show is delayed forty minutes, then fifty. Although Paris audiences are notoriously prickly when faced with tardiness, no one seems to care. At six fifty a house beat replaces the dirge, and everyone sits down and pricks to attention. Out come the Tisci Men in duchesse satin vests, bomber jackets printed with the Virgin Mary's face, and sheer bubble-gum blouses. Tisci darts out for a split-second bow and then retreats backstage. The whole thing lasts ten minutes, and Amar'e Stoudemire looks like he enjoyed himself.\n\n\n\nThe last time I meet with Tisci is a few months later, in New York City, on a Sunday morning at church time. Cigarette smoke seeps from beneath the door of his suite at the Mercer Hotel, which has been personalized with red roses and bos of Emergen-C and candles brought from home. His apartment in Paris contains a single artificial light, in the kitchen\u2014the rest is just candles. \"Very clean and minimal,\" he says. \"Wood floors. A lot of stuffed animals.\"\n\nStuffed animals?\n\n\"Skulls and bones and stuffed animals. Cats and wolves. I love felines.\"\n\nThe renunciatory tendencies extend to the Internet (Tisci doesn't believe in it) and to friends (he keeps them few and close) and to the media (\"I literally don't look at any magazine\"). The more time we spend together, the more I understand that this asceticism is as much a form of self-protection as it is a creative policy. \"When you are a public person,\" he says, \"it's very easy for manipulative people to cross into your life.... I don't like to be manipulated.\"\n\nWhen asked about the provenance of the Rottweiler shirt, Tisci says he got the idea from a boy-scout book. \"It's not a violent picture,\" he says. \"For me, it's a sweet dog. It represents power and sweetness.\" The dog, he points out, isn't biting.\n\nWell, no. But there must be a reason he chose a creature with black lips and a German name with the word rot in it for his shirt, right? A reason he did not choose a picture of a wiener dog instead?\n\n\"A dog is much better than a human being,\" Tisci insists. \"I think humans, in the society we live in today, are a little bit unfaithful. So many people are insecure about love. Dogs are the only creature that still has a heart and a brain and is still your best friend.\"\n\nIn the end, it doesn't matter what Tisci thinks his shirt is about. A meme's creator is never the author of its meaning. And meme, I think, is more accurate a term than trend when we're talking about something like the Rottweiler. The difference is important. Trends are about an aesthetic, memes about a concept. I suspect Tisci understood, laboring in his candlelit cave, exactly what sort of allure the image would hold\u2014both as an emblem of savagery and as a ridiculously expensive T-shirt.\n\n\"Funny thing,\" Tisci says. \"Sometimes people call me\u2014how do you call it in English?\u2014naive. I think I'm the most natural person.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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