Olivier Rousteing is still under 40. Yet he is also the third longest-standing non-founder creative director in ready-to-wear luxury fashion (after evergreen Véronique Nichanian at Hermès menswear and the mighty Ian Griffiths of Max Mara). So even as fashion cycles through its latest red wedding moment, Rousteing’s combination of veteran experience and youthful potential allows him to take a pragmatic and sanguine view.
Speaking in his office, he said: “A designer needs to change: to develop through reinvention. So it’s not just only a house becoming bored of a designer and looking to change—the designer him or herself should become bored if they do not change how and what they do. You keep your DNA, but you make very different albums.”
At Balmain, Rousteing remains both signed to the label and committed to perpetual reinvention. The photography of these resort lookbooks reflected his intention to approach the collection from a fresh angle while deploying his deep expertise in the business to maximize its performance.
In womenswear, a focus on bouclé pieces in pastel checks (a little Clueless), black, and some racier color-combos kept aside in the showroom reflected the fact that around over 20% of Balmain’s ready-to-wear pieces are in tweed. A seasonal floral reworked from a Pierre Balmain original was present in some of the multiple new fabrications of a growing core line of Balmain handbags; the Anthem (belt buckle), the Sync (chain), the Ébène (par-baked croissant), and the tightly-waisted Shuffle.
Knit bandage dresses and a split skirt floral aside, there was a notable step away from bodycon towards a focus on innovatively detailed oversized tailoring in wools including prince of wales check that often came cropped and placed in silhouette-skewing adjacency to matching microskirts and shorts. A coat so roomy you could put it on Airbnb came patterned with a felted Monet-esque print that reflected Pierre Balmain’s artistic passions, Rousteing reported. His column-pediment wedge boots were delivered this season in a shearling fabrication as well as leathers and worn against lingerie dresses. Cocoon-like capes in peach or lemon cashmere were standout wardrobe pieces.
Menswear played a radical-conservative gambit of contrasting extreme tailoring—either angular and fitted, or oversized and softer—against denim, leather, or jacquard sportswear. Formal shoes were elevated from banaility by raised soles and extruded metal welting. You could see both bourgeois French paradigms and street silhouettes transposed to tailored fabrications. Lurking in the showroom were many non-shot but still highly photogenic pieces, including labyrinth pattern shirt-and-short sets, leather and wool stadium jacket blouson hybrids, and bouclé overshirts.
Said Rousteing: “The real question is always what do you want to propose? And while my answer changes through the seasons, it also always relates to going back to the past and bringing it to the present in order to build the future. This is why I am always having this conversation with the original work of Pierre Balmain, and looking to express that dialogue in new ways.”
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