Flying the flag of Celine Homme, a young chevalier gallops on his black stallion toward the Château de Chambord, followed by a posse of fellow knights on white chargers. On the fantastical turreted rooftops stands a lone blond princeling, wrapped melancholically in a black cloak and a high-necked white frilled-neck Renaissance blouse. And so begins the dramatic unfolding of Hedi Slimane’s “Teen Knight Poem,” his “Nouveau Romantique” rallying call to the teen spirit of 2021.
Youth might leap to the conclusion that the scenery is some kind of CGI-created dream castle—but not at all. The Château de Chambord is a hunting lodge in the Loire valley built by the “Chevalier King” Francois I in the 16th century, a monument wreathed in French Renaissance history, chosen as a narrative background for a collection balanced between a flight of medievalist escapism and Slimane’s laser-keen contemporary focus on products to get contemporary guys buying.
Slimane “fell in love with” the Château de Chambord because of its spectacular black-and-white architecture. We know about the authentically real, extravagantly haute setting because of the unusually explanatory press notes he sent out this season. There’s even a credit for the horse Goya, the “17-year-old Black Andalou stallion,” ridden by “Raoul, son and nephew of friends of Hedi.” And a footnote detailing how Slimane sent the sound of a “French military drum march” as a keynote to The Loom, his British musician friends Jack and George Barnett, to inset as the beat of this season’s house-style mesmerically looping Celine soundtrack.
The trope—young boys bravely clad in various references to armor—had an elation about it. A conscious elevation of intent too. Whereas last season, Slimane had gone down to e-boy teen-bedroom level, now he was up to high culture—inspired by portraits of the court of Francois I and placing an explicit emphasis on extreme French luxury. Broad-shouldered leather gilets and oversized knits sounded a kind of simultaneous clarion call to ’80s pop culture and medieval battle gear and tabard-like silhouettes, also a neat way of circling back to Slimane-invented skinny-legged territory. Nouveau romantic dangly earrings, studded knit helmet-beanies, and metal-tipped Chelsea boots piled on the accessory inventory—some random yeti ski boots too.
Luxury, though: When all’s said and done, Celine is a luxury French house, and—never mind the spinning out of accessible hoodies and unmissable logos (which there were also aplenty)—that reputation has to be upheld too. Slimane’s notes held his answer to that. The embellishments in stones, crystal, and chain mail glinting among this collection were “realized in Parisian couture and embroidery ateliers”; the final look took 23 embroiderers more than 1,300 hours of work. Not much difference there from the labor lavished on the ceremonial garb in the 16th century, when you think about it. Are there neo-princes out there in the world today who will go for that? Probably.
