The Snatch arrived in January with a name that asks you to look twice. Sarah Burton’s first handbag for Givenchy is small and curved, built like a piece of tailoring folded in on itself. After a year of clothes, she has given the house an object to hold.
Burton took the creative director role at Givenchy in September 2024. She came from Alexander McQueen, where she spent more than two decades and ran the house for fourteen years. Her first Givenchy seasons read as a study of the body. Sheer panels, necklines that stand away from the skin, skirts cut high on the leg. She built a vocabulary before she reached for a logo.
The first bag
The Snatch is her first major handbag for the house. It launched in late January with a campaign fronted by Emeline Hoareau and photographed by David Sims. The shape comes straight out of her clothes. A curve that reads as a cinched jacket, a waistline, the line of a bra. Givenchy frames it as a study in intimacy, a balance of strength and softness.
The name carries the rest. Burton has spoken about wanting something that feels held against the body rather than carried beside it. The bag comes in smooth leather, structured at the frame and soft enough to fall against the hip. It enters a house already known for the Antigona and the Nightingale, without leaning on either.
A year of clothes
Before the bag there was a wardrobe. Her spring 2026 collection worked sheer fabric and stand-away necklines, short hems and slit skirts, the bra treated as structure rather than underthing. The summer 2026 campaign, titled The Portrait Series III, was photographed by Collier Schorr and gathered an unusual cast: the artist Isabelle Albuquerque, the model Kaia Gerber, and the photographer Annie Leibovitz, this time in front of the lens.
Givenchy by Sarah Burton. Courtesy of Givenchy
Her fall 2026 show moved indoors to Les Invalides. Burton looked to the Old Masters and pulled a palette of velvety black, ultramarine, garnet, emerald and burnished gold. Velvet, animal print, kimono silk, lace, silver bullion. Menswear fabrics cut for women. She described the collection as the work of putting yourself back together while the world comes apart.
A house is remade in the things you can hold. The clothes get photographed. The bag gets lived with.
The Splendid EditWhat comes next
Menswear is the next front. The resort 2026 campaign, with Rooney Mara and Paul Simonon, gave the first read on where Burton might take the men’s line. The men’s shows return to Paris at the end of June, and Givenchy will be among them.
For now the house is selling something you can hold. The Snatch is the commercial test of everything Burton has put into fabric so far. A bag is where a creative director meets the cash register, and Givenchy is betting that intimacy sells.
Burton has never worked loudly. Her McQueen years were about craft kept quiet. At Givenchy she is doing the same in slow motion: a wardrobe first, then a bag, then a men’s line. The Snatch is the moment the house becomes portable.