The first look situated us distinctly in the here-and-now of 2025. It was a peekaboo stretch knit catsuit, bare enough to reveal the bra and briefs beneath it and stamped with the original Givenchy marque across the chest. Givenchy’s aesthetic has grown fuzzy after the brief designer tenures of the last six years, but in a matter of a few sharply tailored pieces, Burton swiftly established a definitive look: It involves a strong but soft shoulder, a curved arm with a twisting “couture seam,” and a well-defined, shaped waist. Trousers were generously cut through the legs, with an elasticized waistband for comfort.

Because she noticed that many of Givenchy’s circa ’52 designs were just as compelling from the back as the front, and because she has prodigious pattern-making skills from her McQueen days and this was the moment to show them off, sometimes Burton reversed a jacket or a coat dress so that the lapels dipped low between the shoulder blades, a sensuous gesture. Pants, too, revealed flashes of skin via deep cuts along the back seams. It’s a shame not to see those details in these pictures—they’re proof of her claim that “it has to be 360 for me.”

That goes for her dresses as well, the best of which swooped and draped from the waist, exposing the contrast of their unfinished linings. A modified version of the lace gown Elle Fanning wore to the Oscars less than a week ago was shown in a youthful short-in-front, long-in-back silhouette, and there were other micro-length options for the celebrity ingenues in the room.

If there was a wrong move at all, it was the makeup compact dress, which looked like a gambit for social media virality, an online talking point. Burton doesn’t need that kind of thing. The elegant confidence of her tailoring and dressmaking are enough; what she believes in a lot of other women are going to believe in too. You can count on seeing her hourglass gray peacoat and hourglass black leather moto on the streets of Paris this time next year.