Hedi Slimane delivers masterclass in modern nostalgia for Celine
At his Celine catwalk show on Friday night, the designer Hedi Slimane distilled what looks to be the most compelling trend of this season of fashion shows. Working title: rock’n’roll bourgeois.
Slim knee-length dresses were worn with slinky chain belts; towering platform sandals with sensible 40-denier semi-sheer tights; slim bootcut velvet trousers worn with Princess-line above-the-knee coats. This was a masterclass in Parisian allure: take one part Avenue Montaigne privilege, and mix with one part backstage pass. Shaken, not stirred.
Slimane, never one to play by the fashion rulebook, was indisposed to backstage interviews, but the genesis of shrunken velvet jackets, tweed short suits, glittered dresses and faux-fur jackets brought together ideas from the Almost Famous costume department with elements that recalled the Yves Saint Laurent archive. The backstory of the Celine label also made itself felt, in the revival of the equestrian-themed Sulky handbag.
The show came at a high-pressure moment for Slimane. His predecessor at the brand, Phoebe Philo, is widely rumoured to be about to launch her next project – the cultural and commercial success of which will unavoidably be a yardstick for Slimane.
Slimane’s first diktats at Celine were to remove the accents from the brand name, a move interpreteted as an attempt to write the holistic, harmonious femininity of Philo’s Celine into history. But in recent seasons his makeover has taken a surprisingly retrospective and nostalgic turn. With its modern take on 1970s bourgeois, he has reinvented himself as the custodian of Parisian fashion memory.
However, his nostalgia is cut through with an astringent modernity, which is what makes it compelling. If some of this collection was redolent the 1970s references of Tom Ford’s mid-1990s Gucci shows – the cut of the velvet trousers, the silhouette of the dandyish coats – that was perhaps because Ford, like Slimane, has a gift for making nostalgia modern.
