“Argh, I am sorry to call so late but the rehearsal ran over!” said Olivier Rousteing via his Apple iPhone in Paris and my Google Pixel in Venice. “But we still have a few minutes before the show starts, and I have the board here so we can talk through the collection right now! Or, if you want, we could wait until after the show? I am doing no interviews then and I can call you straight after!”
Interview the designer after the show? That’s an idea so old it feels quite nouvelle: This year’s enforced bloom of digital collection deliveries has made the pre-Zoom even more ubiquitous than the pre-see used to be. Yet watching a show in which you already know the designer’s thinking sometimes feels just a little like cheating, or at least having the dots joined for you. So sure, why not go old school?
On Balmain’s IG Live there were about 5,000 of us backstage, watching as Rousteing strode the line in a PB monogram face mask delivering last minute “you look great!” benedictions to his models, many of whom were wrapped in gold emergency blankets. Over on Balmain.com, front of house at the Jardin de Plantes, we were in a holding pattern: A camera operator was de-steaming his lens as the director ran through his angles for a final check. Then, the show started, but it was not quite clear precisely when that was—Instagram’s feed was running about two looks ahead of Balmain’s url. Were the streams also running on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn all inhabiting slightly different time zones?
Instagram was first, so Instagram it was. Through the dry ice came Rousteing, face mask off now, to sit on a wooden stool at the end of his runway. Then to him came six models who walked not with the rush that is the contemporary style. Instead they meandered from one side of the runway to the other, tilting hips, running hands through hair, twirling, pausing to allow us better to see the adapted 1970s archive looks in gray cashmere and grain de poudre patterned in the same archive monogram Rousteing had worn on that face mask. Sonia Icthi, the sixth model out, almost fell victim to the time-traveling combination of a 1970s wide bell-bottom with a 2020s high 110mm heel mesh sock shoe, but like all of these experienced couture models in the opening, she was a pro, and recovered gracefully from her stumble. Over the soundtrack—at least online—we heard pronouncements which were presumably from Pierre Balmain himself. In French he spoke of the pre-eminence of French elegance—so French—while in English he opined: “Black is the only color young people can wear more successfully than old people. A young girl dressed in black is always tremendously beautiful. An older woman in black can be dreary. That’s why black is not an old color, it’s a young color. Black velvet is the epitome of young and sexy. Because there is also a touch of sex in fashion now.”
As Icthi wound to the end of her wend, Rousteing applauded and accompanied his six openers back down the runway to end this hors d’oeuvre. The lights lowered until the opening synth of The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” played to signal the serving of a huge Balmain plat principal. Out bombed four models, two male in loose-panted wide-shouldered suits, two female in pagoda-shouldered suits, whose garments were powerfully fluoro pink and green. Layered flowing jersey looks (pagoda shouldered) gray suiting (pagoda shouldered), a fluoro green distressed bouclé jacket (you guessed it), then a jolt of red what-looked-like latex (un-pagoda-shouldered, actually) followed in a series of Armani-style grouped charges.
Already unfolding but reinforced at that red look was a cycling short story pitched squarely at the huge Kardashian constituency whose pulse Rousteing’s fingers are so attuned to. Then came a step across to washed denim, first in cut-offs then in washed menswear explorations of French prep. A turtleneck in this fabric, part of a Franco-Canadian tuxedo, was wonderfully sweet and sour and knowingly naff: possibly a passing tribute to Steve Jobs with whom’s Apple Balmain was promoting a season-specific playlist.
We docked at French marinière style—Breton tops and blazers, amplified and Balmain-ified—then set sail again into evening (after a long monogram section). Highly-accentuated tailoring—Les Smokings, of course—were delineated by vividly contrasting cream lapels. Swarovski crystals abounded—the press release claimed the collection contained close to 2 million of them—and their glitter served to shield sheer skirts and blouses. Then came seven mermaid-y two pieces and dresses in shades of what appeared to be silk jersey, worn barefoot. At the end, surprise, came two children wearing scaled-down cuts of the gray suiting worn earlier; they were very cute and made me wonder what Hudson Kroenig is doing these days.
During all this distractions were ample. From my seat in my hotel room I could see friends in the IRL audience, including a Balmain employee who I messaged to compliment his jacket. He messaged me back to say I’d mistaken him for Jon Kortajarena. He then sent me a video of myself, pretending to be in the audience watching the show, as one of 58 absent “guests” installed on screens in three rows on one side of the room. They’d placed me second row. I threatened to walk out—The New York Times’s reviewer was front row, what was Vogue Runway, chicken soup?—and how could I see the shoes through Cindy Crawford’s hair?
As well as elegance, the French invented existentialism: This was a show that offered fresh interpretations of the first while prompting questions related to the second. These included: If you’re physically watching a show digitally in Venice while digitally watching a show physically in Paris, where actually are you? And even more brain-scrambling, who watches a show on LinkedIn?
When he called back as promised, Rousteing had plenty of answers. The denim was sustainable and the crystals recycled. Of course the arc from veteran couture models to the two children at the end—Mélodie We and Nahel Lanimarc—was a mechanism to translate his thoughts about transmitting the archival values of Balmain that he’d explored thoroughly during lockdown (hence the monogram) across the generations. Absolutely, the pagoda shoulder was a failsafe Zoom call silhouette. Of the ingenious virtual front row, he said he’d hoped at first we could have all been there virtually in real time, but that the pre-record pretense was necessary due to time zone problems.
Perhaps most interestingly of all, after a show that pushed the envelope of digital show transmission more than any other I’ve seen this season so far, Rousteing said: “I think the future is all about physical, about real emotions. We cannot just say that digital is the key. We need to get together...tonight it was really inspiring to see the people in the audience. They were clapping and I think they were less with their phones…. We do need the screens and we do need digital to stay connected, but I do not believe that digital is the key to creating emotions.” Last call done, Olivier said he was going home to watch Netflix, eat Five Guys, and chill. However you saw it, this was a great blast of a Balmain show, but IRL it must have been awesome.
