Oct. 6, 2025

Celine’s Walk
in the Park

WORDS ANDERS CHRISTIAN MADSEN

CELINE

Anders Christian Madsen reviews the Celine Spring/Summer 2026 collection by Michael Rider.

The notion of wardrobe-building is essential to Celine. While its charismatic creative directors have each had their very distinct approaches to the house, they’ve shared in their visions a fundamental view of Celine as building blocks for an evolving single-brand wardrobe where you don’t really need to shop anywhere else. With his second runway show for the house — within three months — Michael Rider demonstrated his talent for continuing this principle. His sophomore collection confidently built on the strong rebooted identity he proposed for Celine in July, leaving his new audiences with a clear understanding of what’s going to happen here. In this season of newness and change, that was pretty impressive.

“We worked on both at the same time, from the start,” he said backstage, referring to the July and October shows. “What I love about Celine is that there’s continuity in the brand, and I don’t think we’ll ever be one to jump from concept to concept. And the concept is: you may not be the person wearing the strangest thing — that you may throw away — but you’ll have the best coat and the confidence to wear it. We felt like the July show kept rolling and summer hit, and you’re packing your suitcase. It’s the same character, it’s just hot out.” Rider, who worked at Balenciaga, at Celine under Phoebe Philo, and later reinvigorated Ralph Lauren’s Polo, clearly has a mind not only for design but for retail, too.

CELINE

You’ve got to be confident about your product if you’re going to ask the congregated fashion press to trek to Parc de Saint-Cloud on a Sunday at noon. The leafy oasis — where Marie-Antoinette’s rose garden was once located, and where Sinéad O’Connor shot the video for Nothing Compares 2 U — served more as an ambient prelude for the show than a real backdrop. Guests got to take in the palatial topiary and fountains before reaching a runway constructed like a massive ramp stretching uphill through the forest part of the park. Amid the otherwise ease-inducing atmosphere of Rider’s Celine, the surroundings and the experience echoed the runway films Hedi Slimane released for the house following COVID-19.

To an upbeat Fiona Apple soundtrack, Rider presented the summer versions of his new Celine girls and boys. It’s a wardrobe that samples the bourgeois look of Céline Vipiana with the handsome, artful tailoring of Phoebe Philo, and the slender romanticism of Hedi Slimane, infused with a certain sense of prep courtesy of Rider’s Polo years. There were jaunty full-skirted floral dresses, sculptural sporty long-sleeved dresses, silhouettes pieced together from scarves, and miniskirts draped into bows. The women’s tailoring came deconstructed or as little military or equestrian jackets. The men’s suiting was broad-shouldered and slightly hourglass, and intercepted by reconstructed rugby jerseys, skinny trousers and leggings, and dandy-esque shirting.

It was styled and presented in a kind of hodgepodge of genres and ideas, the way we wear our own clothes and the way people look in the street, or indeed the park. Together, Rider’s sampling felt coherent like a wardrobe, but without ever tipping into the conservatism that can easily come with that way of designing and showcasing a collection. There was plenty to take in. “I’ve done a lot of different things, but why Celine felt so right is because it’s what I love most: people and a brand that stand for something; and they stick to it. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t have attitude, and that’s the most beautiful thing: when you can make something that lasts that’s full of attitude,” Rider said. With Sunday’s show, he stuck to it and made more than a few of us want to stick with it, too.