Something happened at the beginning of the Celine show that was instantly all over the Internet, but which these runway photos don’t capture. There was a girl, standing in a mirrored box that was hoisted high above the end of the runway and then slowly lowered. In the darkened space, you could guess at what it was—a throwback boutique dressing room from some nonspecific time in the ’70s or ’80s, perhaps? The clothes fit, for sure. As she stepped out at ground level, this girl was wearing precisely what the original Celine was and had meant to every French bourgeois woman—before fashion ever got its hands on it. A pleated, knee-length, divided country-checked skirt with a horse-bit belt. A white silk blouse, a printed logo scarf. A black blazer, glossy knee-length high-heeled boots. A ladylike shoulder bag on a chain. Aviator sunglasses.
There have been all sorts of jokes about “old Celine” since Hedi Slimane took over. But in his third showing for the house, this—and everything that followed—was his turning of the tables. This was old, old Celine—exactly the kind of politely classy merchandise originally sold under the label before LVMH acquired it, long before even Phoebe Philo’s predecessor, Michael Kors, was drafted to make runway shows out of it.
In our time of so much fashion, this was Slimane’s moment to iterate, and reiterate, his version of French fashion from a time of nonfashion—a niche of Parisian upper- and middle-class style that he must have understood from being a boy growing up in France. In a way it was exactly what Slimane has always done—taking the subject of a seam of preexisting street style and drilling into it for all it’s worth.
If that came as a surprise—this counter-counterculture turn from a designer known for his deep obsession with youth style tribes—it was worked through with all the singular focus and conviction that is Slimane’s known methodology. From beginning to end, it was an exercise in imprinting essentially two looks on the consciousness of his audience in the black box tent—and on the world beyond. There were culottes and variations on silk ladylike dresses, or the skinny jeans, high boots, and jacket combo that simultaneously made up the other side of the bourgeois French girl’s wardrobe throughout the ’70s and ’80s.
Yet within that insistent, narrow-seeming framework, this was Slimane working as the brilliant mass communicator and merchandise magician LVMH appointed him to be. For all the women who might have been expecting more of his super-short cocktail dresses, here was an about-face and a completely new way to be, clearly broken down into its constituent elements. Where there were New Wave stilettos and biker boots, now there are horsey, classically heeled boots or over-the-knee ones with wedges. Here is a new/old cut of skinny jean brought back again. Here is a different way to wear a short bomber or a glittery jacket—with a conventional country tweed divided skirt or conventional granny-style skirt to the knee.
And here are the required accessories you will need: the polite old-school Celine logo shoulder bag, the horse-bit belt, and the only pair of aviator-style sunglasses you must now buy. Other designers have toyed with the theme of bourgeois this season, but this made them look like dilettantes. It was an overnight diktat of change in the way it used to happen before fashion became today’s multi-choice smorgasbord.
Effectively, it also put out of fashion everything that Slimane himself had started back in his days at Saint Laurent, everything that now has trickled through to fuel fast fashion. It’s the uprising of the Parisian bourgeoisie—a most surprising no-compromises French manifesto for these troubled times. Take it or leave it, says Hedi Slimane. And we already knew from the hubbub in the crowd leaving the scene which way the popular vote would go: It was a near-unanimous oui.
