BRIT DESIGNERS TAKE HELM AT GIVENCHY, DIOR.

Byline: Amy M. Spindler The New York Times

In what some here are bemoaning as a blow to French cultural pride, it was announced Monday that creative control of two venerable Paris couture houses, Christian Dior and Givenchy, will now be in the hands of British designers.

And not just any British designers. Alexander McQueen, 27, stepping in at Givenchy, and John Galliano, 36, moving from a short stint at Givenchy to Dior, are famously working class, wild and drawn to such provocative gestures as buttocks-baring trousers and spray-painted leather suits.

The change is one more risky maneuver by Bernard Arnault, 46, chairman of Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), the biggest luxury-goods house in the world, which owns Givenchy and Dior and which had sales last year of $5.9 billion. At stake, far more than the fashion itself, is the image of the products that carry the Dior and Givenchy labels - perfumes, sunglasses, wallets, neckties, hosiery.

Since taking over Christian Dior in 1984, Arnault has assembled a group of famous if sometimes dusty names under LVMH. Thousands of American closets and dressers contain at least one product connected to Arnault's empire, mostly because of licensing, the practice of charging manufacturers a fee for use of a brand name.

Arnault's strategy is geared toward licensing a house profitably in the age of publicity: garnering attention by pairing the most subversive designers he could find with two of the stodgiest labels in fashion.

If there was an extraordinary amount of hype surrounding the search for designers at Christian Dior and Givenchy, much of it was generated by the fact that notoriously chatty members of the fashion press were consulted. Arnault used the same tactic when deciding to back the designer Christian Lacroix in 1987.

``The man is most concerned about the media attention,'' Andre Leon Talley, an editor at Vanity Fair, said of Arnault. Talley is a close friend and adviser to Galliano.

``It's the perfume bottle and the handbag, and how to keep the attention there,'' he continued. ``It's about a marketing strategy, making young people who are so radical the couture choices. It's all about the media hype. He could have taken the Princess of Wales as the designer, and he would have been very happy.''

Galliano and McQueen do the Princess of Wales one better with their rags-to-riches-in-the-rag-trade stories. Galliano is the son of a plumber, known in equal parts for his fluid romantic clothes, for his club crawling, for his tangled dreadlocks and for standing up Queen Elizabeth II and President Jacques Chirac of France at a recent dinner at Buckingham Palace.

McQueen, the son of a taxi driver, is known for his mean, linear tailoring, for decorating with fake blood, and for dedicating collections to Jack the Ripper and Alfred Hitchcock's lethal birds.

While it is not unprecedented for a British designer to run a French couture house (the first couture house in Paris was founded by an Englishman, Charles Fredrick Worth, in 1857), there is no doubt that this change comes at a time of crisis for French designers and French houses. As styles have changed, the frilly French fashion aesthetic has been outdated by designer brands like Gucci and Prada, which make streamlined clothes for affluent women who work.

Joyce Ma, the leading fashion retailer in Hong Kong, was recently asked by the French Consulate there to hold a special show of the French designers she carries. There was one small problem.

``I would love to, but I don't have French designers now,'' she said. ``In Paris, I buy Belgians, Japanese and the British. All the interesting ones are not French.''

Which explains why, when Arnault was looking for a replacement for Hubert de Givenchy, who retired in 1995, he hired Galliano. And when Arnault decided in July to replace the Italian designer Gianfranco Ferre at Dior, Galliano, over a casual dinner, said that it had always been his dream to design for the house.