Givenchy has a new designer, Matthew Williams, whose aesthetic is more Virgil Abloh than Clare Waight Keller; more hip streetwear than haute couture. That could make for an interesting marriage, but this first collection of outfits includes some REAL swerves. Flipping through this slideshow felt like watching that season of Riverdale where Archie was a boxer in prison, and the kids were hooked on both Jingle Jangle AND Fizzle Rocks, and 16-year old Veronica opened a dry speakeasy that adults attended to watch teenagers sing torch songs and it wasn’t supposed to be creepy, and there were characters named Principal Featherhead and Edgar and Evelyn Evernever and Baby Teeth, and there was a cult, and evil nuns, and grave-robbing, and they all got sucked into a game of Gryphons and Gargoyles, and there was a Gargoyle King who turned up places wearing antlers, and this sentence: “Cheryl waterboarded her mother with maple syrup.” I watched ALL OF THAT, and I’m on the other side and looking back and wondering if I, too, am on the Fizzle Rocks, because it started out as standard Riverdale gibberish and then devolved into a baffling soup that I will both never forget and can’t COMPLETELY remember and WAS IT EVEN REAL and did it snap off part of my brain?

[Photos: Imaxtree]