Matthew Williams is standing in front of a mirrored wall in Givenchy’s Paris headquarters on Avenue George V, staring intently at his outfit. His eyes are locked on a bag: a black leather crossbody number, its strap adorned with metal rings. Williams turns, then glances over his shoulder back at the mirror. He is, like everyone else in the room, tall, slender, and dressed in black with a protective face mask. The only thing that helps distinguish him on my end of the Zoom window that I’m watching through is his signature tattoo, a giant black cross on the nape of his neck and skull, creeping over the top of his shirt. He gives the bag one last examination.
“Pretty cool,” he says, then takes it off. Unlike his more outspoken counterparts in fashion, Williams is calm, nonchalant, and collaborative. He asks those around him what they think so often that, in a meeting like this, it’s easy to forget that he’s in charge—that he’s the person now responsible for one of the biggest platforms in fashion and that the most important moment of his career is imminent.
After his appointment as creative director of Givenchy last June, Williams gathered up the various tentacles of his life in Italy and New York, moved to Paris, and, given the constraints of the pandemic, did the only thing he was really permitted to do: work. The 35-year-old American launched a first collection just over a hundred days after his arrival at the house, quietly unveiling the clothes with an orchestrated push from dozens of famous friends who shared images of the pieces on social media. But he made clear at the time that his upcoming collection—the one he’s preparing now and plans to unveil to the world digitally, at an arena outside Paris on March 7—would constitute a louder and more official debut into the big leagues. It will be, as he describes it, a spectacle. As a former creative director for Lady Gaga and collaborator of Kanye West’s, Williams has a natural facility with spectacle-making. “I feel really comfortable doing live experience,” he tells me, collected and unfazed.
But first he must produce the clothes. At the Givenchy office, his crew of design employees continue to supply bags for his inspection. They are of varying sizes, styles, and functions, ranging from understated to ostentatious—rucksacks, chest rigs, fanny packs, saddlebags. Like so many of Williams’s signature designs, the bags are not merely functional—they scream functionality, with their elaborate networks of straps, hardware, and compartments. These bags would be appropriate for an elite military squadron or a troop of well-heeled goth Boy Scouts.
Williams takes hold of one and, while studying it, sits down. “That’s crazy, how much workmanship is in here,” he marvels to one of the atelier’s designers. In a manner that might surprise the maison’s founder, Hubert de Givenchy—who was known for making his handiwork virtually invisible—Williams prefers his clothes to broadcast the craft that went into constructing them. He tries on a few more, discussing their merits and weaknesses with the five employees in the room, and he gives a vote of approval. “I like how all these bags are looking today with my outfit,” he tells the group. “I would wear them.”
Like Michelin-starred chefs who arrive home at 2 a.m. and eat bowls of cereal, there’s a brand of fashion designer generally known for their aggressively neutral personal styles. Immersed in the process of creating fantasies for other people, these types tend to have practical and understated closets themselves. Dries Van Noten almost always wears a dress shirt under a crewneck sweater; Kim Jones seems adventurous when he throws a black trench coat over a similar ensemble. And even if designers do take pride in their personal wardrobes, many deliberately shy away from wearing their own pieces. Raf Simons recently told The New York Times that he wore mostly Prada for 15 years while designing for Calvin Klein and Dior because “I always felt it weird to walk around in my own clothes.” But for Williams, designing is a process that can look a lot like shopping—even now, as he’s ensconced atop one of Europe’s most historic fashion houses. If you were to drop in on this meeting without any context, it might actually appear as though Williams is here for a fitting. The model he often seems to be envisioning is himself.
“I’m always saying, ‘I’m designing for me and what I want,’ ” he tells me. Whatever he’s making, he wants to do more than simply see it. “I always try on the clothes myself, and I feel them,” Williams says. “I wear them, I live in them, to understand them.”
This must certainly be part of the reason that Williams—a self-taught designer whose application to Parsons School of Design was rejected—has climbed the ranks of fashion in such an unlikely and rapid manner. Roughly a decade ago, Williams leveraged his time in the Los Angeles party scene into doing design work for Lady Gaga and Kanye West. A soft-spoken but naturally social guy, he was recognized early on for his work with Virgil Abloh and Heron Preston as the streetwear collective Been Trill—a casual experiment formed loosely around DJ’ing and designing T-shirts that eventually became a critical touchstone in streetwear’s trajectory. By 2015, Williams had opened up a studio on St. Marks Place in New York City and launched his own label, Alyx, named after one of his daughters. Williams quickly earned a list of impressive accolades and space on the racks at many high-end retailers. He built a production studio in Italy and snagged the approval of a gaggle of influential admirers. Kim Jones called upon him to contribute hardware—most famously, his Six Flags buckle—for Dior Men. Nike and Moncler tapped him for collaborations as well. Then, last June, his outsider-turned-insider transformation was made complete when Givenchy announced that Williams would replace Clare Waight Keller as the house’s creative director, a job that has previously been held by heavyweights like John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, and Riccardo Tisci.
There are, of course, many factors that contribute to an ascent like this. Williams is industrious, scrappy, and passionate; he’s obsessively focused on innovating with fabric and construction. “The reason Alyx became successful and the reason [his work at] Givenchy will hopefully become successful is because he cares,” says Nick Knight, a visual artist and photographer who began working with Williams during the Gaga era and recently shot a campaign for Givenchy. “He cares about the materials he’s using and where they’re sourced from. He’s interested in all the sciences. He’s a Renaissance man in the way that he’s very excited by science as much as art and fashion.” This seems evident in the design meetings I witness, where the language used to describe fabrication—3D-printed prototypes, foam molds, silkworm-spun jewelry—gets technical and science-lab-y.
Willo Perron, a creative director and designer who's collaborated with West and Gaga, among others, noticed Williams’s unusual affinity for research when they worked together over a decade ago. He says Williams stands out among his contemporaries because his focus extends beyond merely the topical or referential. “The interesting thing about that generation is they can be very focused on the visual bit,” Perron says. “But he’s very passionate about the source material and the ideas and where they come from.”
Of course, it also helps that he’s well-connected in the zeitgeistiest of social universes and counts Kanye West, Playboi Carti, and Bella Hadid among his closest friends. (“I love him,” Carti told me by email. “He’s the greatest, end of discussion!”)
Williams is also a perfect avatar for a demographic that carries more significance with each passing year. The most passionate fashion consumer of today, in fact, looks a lot like Williams. He represents a menswear audience with highly specific tastes and a pop-culture literacy, with an emphasis on hip-hop. Men (many of them straight) who proudly keep up with the latest runway collections and who are willing to dabble in flamboyance, men who are not jocks but who are probably quite interested in the idea of sport. Men with the desire to spend $800 on a hooded sweatshirt or $1,500 on a pair of outlandish sneakers. These men used to account for 30 percent of Givenchy’s sales, but now they make up at least half. Williams has demonstrated that if he likes an object he has designed—if he would wear it—that means many other discerning men with disposable income are probably going to like it too.
At least, this is the bet that Givenchy’s parent company, LVMH, has made on the young American. But it’s also a return to form for the house. After all, it was Riccardo Tisci’s 12-year tenure (2005 to 2017) that imbued Givenchy with a reputation for viral iconography and demonstrated that there was luxury-label money to be made with the most basic of garments. (Long live the Rottweiler T-shirt.) Like Williams, Tisci was one of Kanye West’s strongest creative allies, and the rapport supercharged Givenchy’s connection to the hip-hop world. Tisci’s success helped forge a path for LVMH’s current stars—designers like Kim Jones, now running Dior Men and designing womenswear at Fendi, who was responsible for bringing Supreme to the Louis Vuitton runway. There’s also, of course, Jones’s replacement at Vuitton, Virgil Abloh—a friend of Williams’s and another key figure in the greater Kanye ecosystem who charted a course from music to streetwear to European fashion. If Abloh’s appointment in 2018 marked a sea change in fashion, a sign that legacy houses were ready to shake things up, Williams’s hiring showed that they’re doubling down, continuing to draw on a young, hyper-relevant talent pool that understands a newly viral, highly online, image-forward fashion universe.
Williams’s post at Givenchy is not just another design job. The role itself is a kind of megaphone that will enable him to share his boldest ideas with a massive audience. But in another sense, the position could ultimately become an audition for even grander things: It’s a chance to determine whether Williams can become one of The Greats. Given how quickly these houses can switch up leadership—Keller lasted three years in the job—anything can happen.
A critical component in Williams’s quick rise has been his talent for understanding accessories—namely hardware and bags for men. When Jones wanted to revitalize John Galliano’s trademark Saddle bag and transform it into a menswear item at Dior, he called upon Williams to collaborate on it, making it, as Jones said, “even more masculine.” The items that Williams is examining with his design team today—the bags—are essentially his bread and butter. Everyone here, it seems, is still getting a feel for Williams’s creative vision, and they’re all eager to please, eager to hear what he thinks.
At one point a Givenchy employee models a piece. The man tugs hard on the straps. “These things are working, I think,” he tells Williams, who studies what he sees. Williams claims that he’s not a savvy businessman—he will happily leave the global matrix of consumer demographics and merchandising strategies to his colleagues. (“Sometimes it’s not about selling things. It’s about it existing for the mood,” he explains.) Still, his focus is naturally trained on the characteristics that make an item sellable. At the design meeting, he is quick to invoke the context of the store, how a certain piece will be presented to the consumer (should a piece be sold separately or as a set?), or how something is going to come across in an image. Fashion is increasingly a market where pieces go viral just like hit singles or memes; they live and die by their shareability.
Williams gestures toward his colleague, who is sagging under the weight of that rucksack, and it becomes clear that the designer’s mind has moved beyond straps and buckles, beyond notions of craftsmanship and fit. He’s working ahead of all that, thinking now about how he can lodge the product into the consumer’s brain. Calling it the “Givenchy backpack,” he seems to realize, simply won’t do. “Can we give that thing a name?” he asks.
There’s a photograph of Williams and Kanye West from Alyx’s debut runway show that still floats around the internet. It’s a generic image taken during Fashion Week a few years ago and not particularly remarkable unless you look closely at Williams’s hands, which are gripping, inconspicuously, a pair of forearm crutches. The crutches are pretty chic, as far as medical equipment goes: Jet-black and minimalistic, with an air of absurdity, they almost enhance Williams’s outfit. In fact, when he sported these crutches on the runway following his first Alyx show, some spectators thought that they were a design object—yet another document of his obsession with the space where high function intersects with fantasy. They were of a piece with the teched-out, accessory-minded sphere of his aesthetic vision. One can imagine them styled in a glass display case at Barneys (R.I.P.) next to elaborate water bottles and leather fanny packs, with a retail price of $1,295.
But in fact, Williams had an urgent, real-life need for the crutches. In 2018, as he was working in Milan and growing Alyx, he played in a charity soccer match. During the game, he remembers, “my mind thought I was still 18 years old. I was running really fast, and I changed direction in a quick way.” His femur slammed into his tibial plateau, and his leg shattered in five places. He had two metal plates and a handful of screws put into his leg and was rendered immobile for three months. “I had to learn to walk again,” Williams says. “It was a really difficult experience.” When I suggest that perhaps this ordeal may have inspired some of the hyper-functional Alyx ethos that generated items such as a chest pack, Williams demurs. “No,” he says, “but the chest rig was a helpful accessory during the time of my crutches, though. Definitely.”
If a soccer injury defined the time leading up to Williams’s first major runway show, the sport was also his entrée to fashion to begin with. As a teenager growing up in Pismo Beach, California, Williams was an accomplished soccer player. When he was 16, he spent the summer in Europe, training with professional teams in Vienna and Oslo and touring various major cities. It was his first visit to the Continent, and the trip exposed him to the kinds of cultural wonders that existed outside California. He heard techno music for the first time and, more importantly, witnessed his peers dancing to it. He saw them wearing what he describes as “crazy jeans,” rather than the typical skate gear he was accustomed to back home. “It was really eye-opening,” he says.
Because of his affiliations with Kanye, Been Trill, and Virgil Abloh, and his tendency to release items in hotly anticipated drops, Williams is often thought of as a child of streetwear. His business partner at Alyx, Luca Benini, is frequently credited with bringing streetwear to Europe in the ’90s, but he says Williams was always interested in more. “I felt that fashion, luxury, and streetwear—even if looking distant from each other—had many interesting points of contact to build something great on,” Benini explains. “Matthew to me embodied and embodies the link among these souls, coexisting with no conflict as part of his background and life.”
Truthfully, Williams’s more recent solo work has little connection to the streetwear universe as it’s commonly understood; he is not known for his T-shirts or hoodies and rarely uses graphics. In fact, the work he’s done with Alyx and Givenchy is a kind of repudiation of California skate casual and an embrace of gothic European urbanism—an ethos seeded during that first summer he spent overseas as a teenager. “He’s not the same figure as a Virgil or a Ye,” says Don C, a designer and longtime member of West’s and Abloh’s inner circles. “He’s not a streetwear guy. He’s more of an artist. He’s connected to that, and he can apply that, but he’s an artist.”
As a teenager newly enamored with Europe, Williams thought that soccer was his future. He played Division I at UC Santa Barbara. “That’s what I thought I was going to do with my life,” he says, laughing. “I’d play and then just be a coach or something when I got older.”
Around this time, Williams started interning for a former soccer coach who also ran a clothing brand. He was allowed to take part in the nitty-gritty of actually making the clothes and, crucially, talking out creative ideas with like-minded people. “I think, more than anything, the dialogue with other creatives is the thing that I’ve been maybe most addicted to,” he says. “There’s a creative discourse about things that are sometimes kind of abstract or emotional.” For Williams, fashion became another team sport. It’s an approach he’s carried along to Givenchy, a company with around 1,000 employees. It’s the first time Williams has had access to the services of an atelier and its legions of specialized production experts, which has been a long-held fantasy. On day one, Williams asked to be taken to each floor of the company and personally introduced to everybody there.
During the pandemic, fashion’s stage has shrunk dramatically. Opportunities to generate a splash have grown scarce. This makes the handful of grand-scale events that are still taking place even more momentous for a designer. Williams has dominated these events: At the Super Bowl, The Weeknd sported a crystal-embroidered red Givenchy suit jacket that he later claimed weighed “44 pounds,” custom-designed by Williams. Three weeks prior, Williams also made his mark during the presidential-inauguration festivities in Washington.
On the same day that Williams and his team were reviewing bags, Lady Gaga arrived at the Capitol to rehearse for her role in the ceremony, singing the national anthem. At the run-through, she wore a custom outfit by Williams: a pristine white cashmere sheath coat with arm openings, a specifically requested twist on a look he’d shown in his prefall collection. With his womenswear designs, Williams has been able to play more with softness and romanticism, and underneath Gaga’s cape was a white knit turtleneck, also custom. Around her neck rested a chunky padlock necklace, a creation of Williams’s that has already become his Givenchy signature. (He developed the padlock in his earliest days at the maison, inspired by the tradition of attaching a lock to the fence on the Pont des Arts and throwing its key into the Seine.) Gaga’s platinum-blond hair was braided into a halo crown. On Instagram, where she has 46 million followers, Gaga captioned a photo of herself posed under the Capitol rotunda’s fresco painting with a message of hope and high drama: “I pray tomorrow will be a day of peace for all Americans…. A day for dreaming of our future joy as a country.”
For Williams, the occasion wasn’t just a chance to show off his new work; it was a moment that neatly tied off a decade of his professional and personal life. Ten years or so ago, Gaga and Williams used to date, around the period he was working with her creatively. They haven’t had much contact since. But enough time has gone by, and Williams has achieved enough in the past few years, that when he collaborates with Gaga as the head of a legacy fashion house, that’s the headline. Not that the pop star is working with her ex-boyfriend.
Later that week, Williams and I connect again over Zoom, and I ask him if this feels like a full-circle moment. He seems a bit bashful, and he deflects. “Yeah,” he says. “There’s been a lot of those recently. There’s a lot of synchronicity.” I ask him to elaborate.
“Where my office is, I can look into the first apartment that I ever stayed in when I came to Paris 15 years ago. Right here,” he says, walking over to the window. “It’s funny in life, the choices you make and the experiences you have. A negative thing becomes a positive thing in the future, or vice versa. When I met Gaga, I would never have guessed that I’d make something for the 2021 inauguration.”
More than with any other house, the power of celebrity is baked into Givenchy’s DNA, dating back to Hubert de Givenchy’s storybook friendship with Audrey Hepburn. It’s been argued that their partnership laid the groundwork for the now intractable relationship fashion has with Hollywood. It’s another reason why Williams is a fitting choice for the house. “Not only does he put forward a modern, sleek, characterful vision of beauty for both genders,” Givenchy president and CEO Renaud de Lesquen says of Williams, “he also, just like our founder did, comes with a community that supports him and embodies his work in the most authentic way.”
And yet Williams seems conflicted about being known as the guy who hangs out with celebrities. When he debuted his first looks for Givenchy in October, he hand-selected a group of 54 influential people, sent them pieces, and invited them to interpret and photograph the items as they pleased. Because Givenchy does not, as a rule, pay for this kind of marketing, the subsequent Instagram blitz was a labor of love. It was also a testament to the star power that can result when an iconic brand joins forces with a designer who happens to be well liked in the greater Calabasas region.
That week on Instagram, images of Williams’s new designs were hard to avoid: Julianne Moore, Maria Sharapova, Kylie Jenner, and many others shared photos. But it was Kim Kardashian who posed in the wow piece of the women’s line: a black gown scooped so perilously low in the back that it exposed a jeweled G-string. This first collection was filled with winking fashion references (devil horns harking back to McQueen, mesh overlays that nodded to peak Margiela) as well as Williams’s penchant for fabric innovation. But the sheer magnitude of the celebrities in the campaign seemed to overwhelm the actual clothes: Look at these famous people wearing Matthew Williams’s new line, the headlines screamed.
I ask Williams what it means to have someone like Kim Kardashian display one of his Givenchy designs so prominently to 200 million followers. “I’m a little bit nervous of that being the focus of it,” he admits. “It was a huge group, a family, a community that I’ve built relationships with.”
The story line can frustrate him. “If you know me, it’s funny,” he says. “Everybody is always like, ‘You know so many celebrities. You’re connected to so many celebrities.’ But like, I hang out with my kids, or I work. When do I ever talk about celebrities? Never.
“I guess maybe I’m friends with so many celebrities because I treat them normal,” he says.
Williams developed such nonchalance about fame in his teens and early 20s, when he was couch surfing in Los Angeles, picking up random creative gigs. This was before the specter of cell phone cameras had put a damper on nightlife. Williams was partying every night, which meant he witnessed a lot. “People were getting so loose. It would be like celebrities with musicians and artists and cool kids,” he remembers. “I would go out every single night, and I was friends with a few promoters.” The nightclub floor was a great equalizer. “That was my first time when I was actually meeting celebrities and hanging out and dancing with them,” he says. “It felt more normal.” Williams recalls crashing with one of Janet Jackson’s choreographers and the experience of just bumming around town and linking up with whoever happened to be there.
“I would just…be around,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t know what that is saying about me or my life path.” Nick Knight sees it a bit differently: Williams wasn’t just “hanging around.” He was sponging up ideas and then cycling them back to the celebrities he worked with.
“Matt was introducing a lot of art to Gaga and pushing her to explore the things that she was interested in. He was a very strong influence in Gaga’s life,” Knight says. “When they parted company, I became friends with Matt because he’s a very nice young man.” Knight was so impressed with Williams, in fact, that he invited the designer to serve as the art director of SHOWstudio, his forward-thinking online art-and-fashion platform.
“It’s interesting,” says Williams, “that it’s shaken out like this. I’m known as this celebrity-connected designer, but I don’t really hang out with celebrities that much in my daily life now. And then I’m also kind of categorized as a streetwear designer, but I don’t do graphics in my collections at all.” He smiles with exasperation. “Where did this stuff come from, you know?”
Although I already know the answer, I ask Williams if he was able to catch any of the inauguration ceremony: “I wasn’t,” he says. “I was doing fittings and work during that time.” If Williams is not a celebrity-minded designer—and he is not technically a streetwear designer—he is certainly one thing: saddled (or blessed) with an extraordinary amount of creative responsibility during a very strange and anxious moment in fashion history. With retail sales waning and legacy department stores shutting down around the world, fashion has been left wondering whether to scale back or continue to churn forward. In May, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele chose the former, announcing he’d pare down Gucci’s annual calendar from five shows to two. Others are pondering the same prospect. But Williams is becoming even more prolific, forging on with his work at Alyx, where he just debuted a fall 2021 show that included both menswear and womenswear. His portfolio at Givenchy is also more complex than it seems. In addition to heading up the men’s and women’s lines, each of which requires seasonal, pre-seasonal, and capsule-collection looks multiple times a year, he also oversees plenty of commercial aspects of the business, like kidswear and perfume, all of which demand Williams’s input, if not his hands-on attention.
So much fuss has been made about how COVID-19 has transformed our approach to dressing, robbing us of our desire to indulge in acts of peacocking. But I wanted to know how the pandemic had shifted Williams’s approach to designing. Straddling the line between a suffocating present moment and an unknown future is tricky, to say nothing of planning a fashion show when mass gatherings are expressly forbidden. Williams is looking ahead, but he’s also trying to honor our collective yearning for comfort. “I like this idea that fashion can give us some kind of escape, and beauty, and imagination for the future that we’ll have,” he explains, “but still have moments of reality that ground us, in terms of clothing we want to wear and use today.” To serve these needs, he’s been designing knit silk bottoms and cozy slip-on shoes made of foams and shearlings. Some of his bags also feature an attached roll blanket. “You know, I think maybe subconsciously I’m just wanting security and comfort, knowing that there’s so much chaos all around. Warmth, comfort, ease.”
It’s not hard to understand why Williams is longing for comfort and safety after a year that was particularly turbulent. When he was hired by Givenchy last spring, he moved to an alien version of Paris rather than the dreamy fashion landing pad he’d imagined since high school. He was fresh off a divorce from his wife, Jennifer Murray, who now lives in London with their two daughters. (Williams’s eldest child, a son named Cairo, lives with his mother in America.) Quarantine restrictions and border lockdowns have disrupted his visitation schedule. “I’ve been alone for the longest amounts of time in my life. For weeks and months at a time without seeing my family, which has never happened before,” he says. As evidenced by the videos he’s posted online, his new apartment, in the 7th arrondissement, is still cavernously empty; he eats most of his meals at the office and considers the Givenchy team a new kind of family. He FaceTimes with his children daily.
His three kids—11, 8, and 5—are old enough to formulate real opinions about clothes. In conversation, as in designing, Williams can be restrained, timid even. It’s easy to imagine how such an unassuming and gentle-mannered guy managed to blend in behind the scenes with A-list pop stars and models for so long. When he speaks about his kids, though, he grows enthusiastic and talkative. “My son really likes skateboarding clothes the most. His friends wear Alyx and Nike, and they’re into it,” he explains. “His favorite rapper is Playboi Carti. It’s weird that my favorite rapper and my 11-year-old’s favorite rapper are the same person,” he says self-effacingly. “And then my daughters, they’re still into princess-dress mode. Everything has to be a princess dress, or pink. The fact that at Givenchy, we actually really do make dresses for princesses… I am in a really good place in their eyes.”
There’s a lot of discussion about the way that Williams and his peers are shaking things up and taking a new approach, but Williams himself seems more intent on honoring tradition. When most people talk about their idea of success, they imagine getting bigger, getting better, doing different things, constantly moving on to the next stage of domination. Williams, with his rosy vision of the European houses, has a simpler goal. “For me, just being able to be here for years,” he says, “that would be a success.” It’s a humble notion, but it sounds like a revelation.
Carrie Battan is a writer living in New York City.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2021 issue with the title "The Very Tactical Ascent of Givenchy Designer Matthew Williams."
