ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories: Tough-Soft Urban Edge by GIVENCHY F/W 2013/14

Riccardo Tisci’s sublime Givenchy collection saw him return to the chic street sensibility that characterized his reinvention of the house, as he morphed inspirations taken from Gypsy culture with the classics that he has so suavely appropriated as his own sweatshirts, biker jackets, and duffle coats among them.

Other designers have been inspired by the spirit and historic clothing of the gitanes before, notably Yves Saint Laurent, John Galliano, Dries Van Noten, and Jean Paul Gaultier, but Tisci has the courage of his convictions and such a powerful aesthetic that he made such overt references as patchworks and tiered and ruffled skirts in make-do-and-mend prints of moody florals and spice-colored paisleys entirely fresh and contemporary by marrying them to menswear elements and investing them with the tough-soft urban edge of which he is now such a proven master.

Tisci opened the show with long sweatshirts with designs that ran the gamut from a saccharine Bambi-esque cartoon deer to thirties portraits of Romany beauties to a menacing shark’s jaw, cinched at the waist over a tube skirt of spangled dark mesh. For romantic modern evenings, those sweatshirts in lace or sheer black chiffon, veiling an image of massed rosebuds beneath, could be worn with insouciant elegance over a pale net skirt appliquéd with cutouts from prints of pansies or blooms. Ruffled skirts and dresses had what resembled chopped-up black leather biker jackets shrugged over the hips to create inventive peplum effects. There was some sleek tailoring amongst the flounces too lean black pantsuits and dresses fastened with a duffle-coat toggles and killer black velvet pants worn with a nylon bomber. There was a punk edge to the anarchic mix of a man’s lumberjack plaid with fragile and pretty rose motifs and the way the lean biker jackets were over printed with lush florals.

Taking his cue from those vintage portraits of beauties, hairdresser Luigi Murenu turned the models’ heads into caps of tight kiss-curls, like the antique statues of patrician Roman women, in brilliant Bakst colors that were reflected in the ankle boot of the season, with a comma-shaped heel, crafted from horizontal bands of colored snakeskin.

The show (with a front-row lineup that included Jessica Chastain, Ciara, Amanda Seyfried, and Frank Ocean) was set to music provided by Tisci’s great friend Antony Hegarty who, dressed in a black spiral-flounced Givenchy robe, performed several of his chillingly beautiful classics (“You Are My Sister” and “Cripple and the Starfish” among them) to the accompaniment of a full orchestra, enhancing the emotion of a magical and outstandingly beautiful fashion moment.