GIVENCHY : Is it luxury?

A close friend of mine recently purchased a Givenchy coat from their Pre-Fall collection, and as you can guess it, the design and the colours used for the coat is wonderful.  However, in order to find out cleaning direction for the coat (the sleeves are made of natural cowhide), we were looking at the tag and we found something we could never expect from Givenchy, a luxury French fashion house.

You don't have to look too closely here.

Besides the size tag that is poorly attached, we found out this Givenchy coat was made in Ukraine.  Now, don't get me wrong, I am not making a judgement on Ukrainians' skills in sewing and garment constructing but the fact that Givenchy, a luxury French fashion brand outsources to a company that is in another country other than Italy, well, shocked me.  You may argue that many luxury brands nowadays manufacture their products from their own oversea production sites for cheaper labour or outsource to a manufacturers in overseas but it is usually done in the lower, consumer, diffusion lines.  Burberry for example, you can easily spot some rubber sandals and boots that are made from China but I don't think I will ever see a Burberry Prorsum coat that will be made from China.


Also what shocked us more was the location that Givenchy decided to display the Country of Origin (COO).  Do we think that the COO just happens to be written at the top border, half of the text chewed up by the sewing machine, making it very difficult to read?  Hiding underneath the size tag??  NOT.  I think this awkward space to print the COO was done deliberately, so that it doesn't shout out the phrase, MADE IN UKRAINE.


This was when we decided to turn the coat inside out and check the quality standard of this Givenchy coat made in Ukraine.

We could spot many parts of the coat stitched very poorly and this is one of them.  Not straight.

Can you see the centre stitching of the lining, the coat and the plane tail piece not being centred?  The stitching for the coat is not straight, again as you can see.  PLUS, the stitching on the edges of the coat was done so poorly, you can see how irregular the distance between the edge of the coat and stitching lines are.

Bonded shoulder to the sleeve pipe (Did not expect to see a stitched shoulder).  But more importantly, see how the bonding was done without any efforts to match the both centre stitching lines.  These are all basic stuff you learn when you sign up for a sewing & garment construction class.

They decided to sew right over the fluffy lining.  Moreover, look at the right side of the photograph and how poorly the lining has been done.  We thought Givenchy could cut, trim and organise the remaining lining fabric to make it neat, instead of just sewing it up.

Another uneven stitching done for the edge of the coat.

When we go shop in Givenchy, we don't look for the signs of quality because we can do that in Hermes or  on Savile Row.  However, the workmanship on this coat is totally wrong on the basic stuff like, sewing straight & even.  You may argue that we are paying for the design, not necessarily the quality, but we think with that price tag and from Givenchy, we can and we should expect both, design and quality.

Just realised even the label itself is poor in quality, looks as if it had been washed/dry cleaned for the 10th time.  AND it is stitched unevenly, the label cannot be flattened.