The excitement around Michael Rider’s Celine is palpable. The sensation of watching his shows feels like being serially elated and yet happily grounded at the same time. His spring collection resists being summed up in a single phrase—and that’s an integral part of the beauty and the thrill of what he’s been building up in just over a year in the job. Rider’s way is to show us one thing after another, after another, after another. Each is of itself, completely realized to stand alone.
There’s no pointing at mood boards or quoting artists to prop up credibility here. Rider is working on instinct about what feels right, what he and his team see about them, and how they put themselves together. “We’re pretty intuitive, and I think that’s how we roll,” he said backstage with his charming mixture of tentativeness and conviction. “I like the idea of looking at things that are recognizable without, hopefully, living in a world of cliché.”
Which meant whiplashing your head back and forth to try to decide which of these 71 inspirational, individualized ways to dress, for women or for men, would be yours if you had the chance. It began with a perfect black mid-length summer dress with a V-neck, gently cinched to the waist, and a pair of pointy pumps. It ended with a perfect white suit with high-waisted fluid pants and satin high-heel lace-up boots. In between, amazing stand-alone looks kept coming: a woman in a black velvet column dress nonchalantly holding her train over one arm; dresses and coats cut from rumpled satin; clean-cut leather coats, T-shirts, and all-gender chinos-y type pants.
Also: new patchwork print versions of the silk drawstring balloon pants that first sent fashion fanatics into ecstasy on seeing Rider’s spring menswear show. Then: the luminescent apparition of a silver plissé sliced-hem tunic over pants. Its wearer looked like a goddess—of a casual, modern kind—with a tiny polka-dot tote crooked in her elbow. She appeared to be her way somewhere, which is very much the humanizing factor that holds the whole together. Rider’s people look like they’re in a bit of a hurry. They may have gone out with one trouser leg stuck in their sock; boys might be slouching back from Ibiza or a rave; a woman in a beautiful black off-the-shoulder taffeta top and skirt was coping as best she could with the annoyance of city heat by slinging her coat under her arm while carrying her handbag, thus looking even chicer.
Accidental, spontaneous styling is “what turns me on,” said Rider. “I think that’s how I am, and I don’t know how not to do that,” he added with a laugh. “That’s what I respond to when I see those things on other people in the world, and when the studio and I are out living. I love when real clothes are worn spontaneously. I mean, I don’t plan my looks, but I think most of us get excited when we put together something and we feel fabulous. But I think what’s interesting about Celine is that tension, because this is a rigorous place. We’re not living on the edge at Celine. You’re coming to get real clothes.”
We were outdoors, in a manner of speaking, sitting under a Celine palapa in the middle of a verdant Paris garden on possibly the most surreally beautiful sunny day of the year as we zoomed in and out on every detail of what Rider had pulled off. It was as tiny as the fine chain belts hooked to a central button on one or two tailored jackets, or a couple of wrapped suede slippers with two side buckles, or the pearl earrings bobbling along just so.
It was also as big as the fact that Rider has become one of the world’s most influential designers in just over a year. If you’ve bought a red sweater, or a red anything in the past few weeks, it’s because of that color he put in his first men’s show. Or if you’ve switched from wearing big old trainers to soft jazz shoes—well, that’s because of him too. In this show, it was fun to see him owning the red—vibrating shades of red on red, in fact—in Look 17. He’s a very clever guy, this one: experienced enough to know what he’s doing, and fresh enough to the role of creative director to enjoy it.
At one point during his backstage chat, he mentioned the importance of taking creative risks. Perhaps he meant taking the risk to be himself in the public eye. Whatever it is that leads him on, Rider has effectively already shifted the dial on what people want to wear, far beyond the small number of those who can afford Celine. In fashion, that’s a sign of a rare talent.
