A real high: Michael Rider delivers a Celine show to remember
For Spring-Summer 2027, Michael Rider sharpened his vision for Celine with 71 looks of bourgeois eclecticism, spontaneous styling and highly desirable real clothes. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
The sensory world that Michael Rider is creating at Celine is hitting like catnip spray for the 2020s fashion crowd. In this world, he manages to stimulate every nerve in the oversaturated mind of the post-digital age. That’s not an easy feat. Entering the manicured formality of the Archives Nationales’ gardens on Saturday afternoon, we were met by an eccentric palapa that looked like it had been beamed out of a tropical dimension. At Celine, cravates rouges all wear different ties with individual prints. On the seats, you find peculiar knickknacks: frameless sunglasses in different colours, rolled up in Celine-branded paper rings, alongside badges with the words: “If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high… hooray for you.”
The quote, which also opened the soundtrack, is spoken by Dorian Corey in Paris Is Burning. The legendary New York drag performer became one of the film’s most memorable voices through her dry reflections on ambition, recognition and legacy. “There’s something about what she says at that moment that felt really relevant right now. It’s nice to deflate a little bit of the balloon. Not at Celine, but just in general,” Rider said after the show. “It feels generous and true.” That combination of stimulus and lightness is one of Rider’s strokes of genius at Celine: he gives his audience endless things to notice and obsess over, only to remind us not to take it all too seriously.
For obsess, we did. After the show – comprising 71 looks of what felt like pure, unfiltered, instinctive dressing – there was a giddiness among critics, unlike anything felt at another show this season, as we made our way to a more private garden. There, a tower of filled champagne glasses and a Marie Antoinette-worthy table of pâtisserie served as another sensory stimulus. Rider’s collection, and the aesthetic he is developing at Celine, could be described as bourgeois eclecticism. But there’s so much more to it that ‘individuality’ might simply be a better word. Every look and character that he sent down the narrow runway in that palapa proposed a different, irresistible silhouette.
In his dresses, Rider casually creates a sense of daytime glamour that constantly sits within the tension of the sensual, sophisticated and chic. Loosely draped but softly sculpted on the body, they are pragmatic and impressive all at once. In his tailoring, he cuts a silhouette that fuses the last fifteen years of fluctuating super shoulders and extreme hourglass waists into frames that are viable and wearable but wildly exceptional. In his sportswear, he accomplishes a luxurious lightness boosted by opulent fabrication and fabulous cuts. Within all of those categories, there are infinite, desirable details and styling accents that have you tipping to the edge of your seat to keep up. Again, that’s not easily done to the minds of the post-digital world.
So, what’s his secret? “We’re pretty intuitive and that’s how we roll and that’s hopefully what people can see and feel, and hopefully more and more in the stores,” Rider said. Speaking about the spontaneity that seems to be one of the secret ingredients in the recipe for success he’s cooked up in just a year at the house, he said it’s just how he is. “When I see those things on other people in the world, it’s the thing that really turns me on. I’ve probably been frustrated, or not turned on, by a certain flatness. That’s not what I find stylish. What’s interesting about Celine is that tension. It’s a rigorous place – we’re not living on the edge at Celine – and you’re coming to get real clothes. But I love that. I love when real clothes are worn spontaneously. I think most of us get excited when we put on something and feel, kind of, happiness.” Judging from the reactions to this show, Rider’s instinct is proving infectious.
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