“Olivier! Olivier! OLIVIER!” Once this show had wound to its end—via two full runs around the runway by Olivier Rousteing, his air-punching models, and the troupe of authentically fragrant male dancers that closed it—we could hear that chant booming out from backstage. According to a photographer friend who was with them, gleefully shooting, the dancers had lifted Rousteing aloft to crowd-surf above.
Rousteing is already pretty well-known with—(checks phone)—5.8 million Instagram followers and counting. However the recent release of Wonder Boy, the documentary about his work which reveals his discovery that he was born to Somalian and Ethiopian parents before being adopted by the parents who raised him in Bordeaux, has made him much more broadly known in France.
“I think I can deliver messages that are beyond business or beyond fashion,” observed Rousteing backstage before. Indeed, his recent appearances in French media have been focused on neither of those subjects. Instead he is emerging as a cipher of French multi-cultural identity, and indeed pan-cultural identity more broadly. Yet while that goes beyond his work it is also expressed through it, no more so than in tonight’s collection.
As he said: “I think my vision has become bigger because I’ve discovered where I come from. I’m proud of my origin and I’m proud of who I am today thanks to my French parents in Bordeaux.” Rousteing’s agenda this evening was to create a collection of clothes that was a mirror of himself, a man whose upbringing and cultural identity is French and bourgeois, but whose recently established genetic code is bi-national and North East African. Or as he put it: “Half Ethiopian, half Somalian, and 100% Frenchman.”
As a consequence of the path his fate has followed, Rousteing is much more intimately acquainted with the traditional costumes of France than he is of either African nation in his portfolio identity. Here he shifted affectionately and knowledgeably through aviator jackets (a Le Petit Prince reference with post-colonial undertones, also); foulard cardigans, pea coats and blazers, smoking jackets, distressed uptown denim, some glorious wide-collar woolen overcoats, argyle sweaters (some in sequin), and marinière stripes (ditto).
Alongside these were pieces that must predominantly have bubbled up from Rousteing’s imagined sense of the attire of Africa, but which thanks to his talent as a designer and his inherent inclination to the epic were no less convincing. He draped silk and crepe to combine soft tailoring with princely raiments in a fashion that was sometimes quite beautiful and borderline revelatory. You could call it a breakthrough collection—and totally authentic too—amongst the genre of extra-tailoring we’ve seen so much of recently.
This was a bit like that scene in The Matrix when Neo just gets it, thus can effortlessly halt bullets mid-flight that would previously have felled him. Rousteing’s new self-knowledge has given him access to a hitherto unseen spectrum of expression upon which a key realization was that the multi-cultural identity he was haunted by when it was unquantified is, now that he knows, a superpower. This he used gently by reminding the hundreds in his audience—via map of the world prints and zodiac embroidered coats (he’s a Virgo, btw)—that all our differences are what we have in common. Or as he put it: “we are all together. We have one sky and we look at that sky together. We are just nomads, nomads of the world.” This made me think of an excellent line from Yellowman’s “Nobody Move Nobody Get Hurt”: “he come from the planet of Earth.” Plus those sneakers were out of this world.
