Riccardo Tisci has been revolutionary for Givenchy since his appointment as creative director. He has created new, exciting collections every season, even introducing menswear at Givenchy, but he has also been on the forefront of bringing diversity to the runway since day one at the storied French fashion house. He recently spoke with Style.com about injecting a diverse range of women into his shows.
"I opened my second couture show with nine black girls; some of them I’d discovered, some of them were established like Naomi [Campbell] or Liya Kebede," he told Style.com. "I did it in a very naive way and, in retrospect, a very honest way. I remember all the magazines talking about the casting, and that surprised me. People make such a big deal about using black girls in your casts, but it shouldn’t be a big deal—it should be normal."
Tisci goes on to voice more sentiments that we wish were echoed by the rest of the industry. "I think we’re all the same, and beauty is something that doesn’t have culture, religion, or color," he says. "It doesn’t matter what [your cast's] race is, what their gender or sexuality is, you should represent beauty—beauty is beauty."
Tisci is part of a new crop of designers who have a much less constrained standard of beauty. Just yesterday, Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing talked about how fashion doesn't belong to white people. Tisci, much like Rousteing has used Kim Kardashian in his campaigns, has also worked with the reality TV star and other pop culture figures, like Beyoncé, who don't have the same bodies traditional models have.
Tisci also touches on the difficulty of finding male models who weren't "skinny, white, pale skin" to match his streetwear aesthetic. Tisci recalls taking his search to the streets "to find boys and teach them to walk... Basically 90 percent of the show was street boys."
You can read the whole story, in which Tisci also talks about his favorite models to work, over on Style.com.
[via Style.com]
