These days, designers stand or fall as much by their conviction as by their talent. And when it comes to Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, conviction is something he has never lacked. In our digital era, the designers who stand for something, aesthetically, culturally, and politically, are most often the ones who people develop the strongest affinity with. The global fashion-obsessed can spot a phony at 20 paces—or, perhaps more accurately, a single swipe. Rousteing has always been a proud and vocal, not to mention a long-standing, advocate for diversity on the runways. Sometimes it has been in terms of shape (to him, curves have never been anything but good) or age (he created a whole campaign that revolved around Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, and Claudia Schiffer, who are still very much in their prime, thank you very much). Yet mostly, Rousteing’s push for diversity has been dedicated to celebrating all sorts of ethnicities. It’s a laudable move in an industry that’s still all too often sadly, lamentably, shockingly, Caucasian-centric in its representations of beauty. Balmain, despite the hyper glamour, is, at its heart, all about inclusivity.
Yet there’s another kind of diversity Rousteing has started to explore, sparked by the burgeoning success of his menswear collections: a wider range of dressing than the super-tight, super-short, super-constructed look he made his name with. (If you’re a fan of that, though, fear not; there’s still plenty of it for Fall.) What dressing men has taught Rousteing is to loosen up, if not exactly lighten up: These were clothes embellished and embroidered to within an inch of their lives. Echoing the gods of rock theme of his menswear show this past January, Rousteing’s new idea was to take the humble tee and turn it into a thing of extravagance; garnished with gold chains, strewn with garnet beading or matte gold sequins, gleaming in tortoiseshell-print velvet, and oftentimes emblazoned with a wolf-pack motif—and that was just one dress.
Elsewhere, Rousteing layered up, in shades of black, brown, and gold, with filmy panels of mohair knit, grommet-decorated suede miniskirts, supersize sleeveless shearling vest coats, looooong suede or snakeskin legging boots, and tie-dye tees and dresses (the latter coming from the notion of ’90s grunge). Designers have been revisiting the sonic landscape of Seattle in their collections soon after Pearl Jam picked up their first guitars, but Rousteing intuited that grunge was also about gender fluidity; who better defied rigid definitions of masculinity and femininity than Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain? Cobain might not have recognized Rousteing’s version of the musical movement that promoted him to eternal idol status, but he would have been open-minded about it. He was never anything but inclusive, too.
