Michael Rider’s debut just a few months ago brought forth an answer to a question most of us were asking at the time where creative director debuts were at peak season: how do you carry forward a legacy that was itself built on another legacy? Michael Kors. Phoebe Philo. Hedi Slimane. These are living legends in the fashion industry. Objectively, tough acts to follow. And yet, Michael Rider manages to find footing in his current time at CELINE. Menswear was introduced by Hedi Slimane in 2019, using the men’s line to be a sort of freewheeling practice of his true design methodologies, one that didn’t share burden of the house’s 81-year old history or the codes established by Philo or Kors. The CELINE Man of the past was narrow-bodied. Rock. Chic. Rock-chic. Subversive in style and at times, costumed for the bourgeois or derelict intellectual.
Michael Rider navigates his way by choosing to not be in his predecessor’s shadow. “Character over costume,” he writes in his press release. It feels like an aesthetic opposition, but it is not. Rather, an embrace of the good parts and filling up the rest with his own take of what the CELINE Man can now look like. The Men’s FW26 collection feels like the continued liberation from the past, while still recognizing its importance.
Staged at CELINE’s Paris headquarters in a presentation format, the clothes were not donned by models but were lined up against the wall with hangers. Flowy floor-length trenches come arranged with colorful flat bottomed striped ties. Pins, charms, scarves and buttons adorn an otherwise plain-but-interesting looks. The ring harnesses of the Slimane-era Cuban heeled boots get enlarged and playful. “We took the frame of menswear, and what CELINE stands for, and then talked a lot about the energy of today, the here and now, the way people live and want to look,” Rider notes.
This is the CELINE Man you find on the street. Not a character, not a persona, but a real person. He walks with that same cool aloofness, but this time, he’s much more approachable. He’s a reflection of how men dress in this day and age, only elevated. What strikes as most affirming in this collection is the honesty of it all. The industry is plagued with pompous artspeak as a means to invoke meaning. Fashion can often be framed as a deeply intellectual endeavor: ingroup signalling — “I’m choosing to wear this shade of color because it’s reflective of our current climate crisis, the rise of fascism, to reflect the dollar exchange rate, whatever, etc,” CELINE is having none of that. CELINE is particularly aware and present. Instead of the house trying to overexplain itself, it scales back and lets the garments do the explanation.
The core customer understands this. CELINE merely suggests the idea and allows the wearer to fill in the blanks. “Character,” a word so often used by fashion houses to describe their clothes, is here contextualized through the customer — as the true beholder of it. Michael Rider is giving you the agency this time around.
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