Balmain then, Balmain now, Balmain next—Olivier Rousteing has taken the storied house through a radical transformation, to put it mildly, in his six years of being in charge, making changes that seem to have flashed by as fast as a kid scrolling through Instagram and tapping to like every third post. It had gotten to the point where Rousteing’s shows felt like a virtual orchestration of every pop cultural, zeigeist-y, This-Is-How-We’ll-All-Remember-This-Era facet of life today. There were Kim and Kanye and Kendall and Kris, rubbing up to a runway casting that was rare in the fashion world for its progressiveness and plurality—and all of ’em, even Mr. West, in unapologetically glamazon ensembles that felt larger than life, or at least any life that was being led off-camera. It was ballsy, for sure, in its clarity of strategic thinking and self belief, and it certainly drove the brand to the visibility it has today.
Yet in Rousteing’s very early shows there was some street realness—or clothing more relatable in terms of its wearability, if you prefer—which had all but disappeared in the past few seasons, at least from the runway. Now he is eyeing that again. He’s in evolution mode. The new thing? What you’ll wear for day. “I think I want Balmain to feel fresher and younger,” Rousteing said in the house’s showroom the day after his menswear show. “We all know the glamour woman of the evening, but why don’t we bring a bit of couture to daily life? Even if we’re in the bubble of a dream, we have to show a different side.”
Like so much of what Rousteing does, it is both shrewd and timely. The shrewdness is tied to the acquisition of Balmain by Mayhoola, which also owns Valentino. It’s evident that everyone chez Balmain now has their sights set on a bigger prize. Outnumbering the wall-to-wall teeny-tiny dresses weighed down with lavish embellishments and embroideries, were bold, bright bouclé check tweeds in red or green used for sculpted coatdresses inset with knit panels, nip-waisted, gilt-buttoned jackets, and tapered cropped pants. The house-classic blazers might be rendered in distressed, splattered cotton drill, with metal studs running up and down them. Even the evening section, which Rousteing showed on the men’s runway, dismantled the typical armor like construction of the dresses in favor of what were essentially, he explained, supersized heavy-metal tees from the ’80s that had been spangled and sparkled—this is Balmain, after all—to within an inch of their seams.
As for the timeliness in shifting to a more accessible and inclusive daytime look. . . . For a designer who dubbed his runway models the Balmain Army, the recent tectonic political shifts, resulting in the women’s marches and demonstrations being held worldwide weren’t lost on Rousteing. “Everything that you see in the news, in the world around you, helps you create,” opined Rousteing on the shifting and expanding gender definitions and the importance of and need for diversity. “Fashion isn’t always the most open-minded—I think the music world is actually more so—but it can help, it can really push boundaries.”
