Remember heading to the meeting feeling as sharp as your tailoring? Or hitting the grimy dive for a gig in black denim, lurex, or leather? How about a spot of tennis in way-too-much-for-Wimbledon pastel pleats in a luxe ’90s track top? Down the inevitable Zoom Olivier Rousteing was tangibly excited at the prospect of 2021 allowing us to get reacquainted with these and the many other human pleasures that demand physical presence. And in this ebullient and enormous pre-fall collection Rousteing was effectively placing a cosmic order for all that he hopes might happen in the year ahead.
“It’s a collection for morning-to-evening, and it’s a collection that is about taking care of yourself,” he said. “But when I say taking care of yourself I mean by going outside your home and doing what you enjoy. We’ve all been taking care of ourselves by staying in our homes, staying in pajamas, robes, hoodies. But maybe let’s think about the idea of going out, seeing people we haven’t seen for months, and taking pleasure in seeing and being seen.”
Rousteing’s enforced year of living digitally—“showing collections on the iPad, urgh, it’s just not right”—has convinced this earliest of fashion’s digital early adopters that there is no substitution for Being There. “We are working with emotion. And we are working with people who have great craft and expertise. And the result of that is a reality. So I don’t believe in showing just virtually. Don’t get me wrong, I love social media, but it is a tool for communication, not for creation.”
What Rousteing created in this collection was a convincing Balmain pitch for a joyous post-vaccination wardrobe. The tennis stuff kit was personal—“I love to play tennis,” he said—as was the decision to return to some of his earliest motifs as Balmain’s main man, the Faberge egg detailing from Fall 2012. “There is a lot of nostalgia in the collection,” Rousteing observed: “I tried to go back to when there was more happiness in fashion.” It will be 10 years ago next February that Rousteing was chosen to take the helm at Balmain, an upcoming milestone that he said: “is kind of scary. Because it means I am among the longest serving designers at a house in Paris, and I’m 35.” As we were going back, way back, it seemed apposite to bring up this comment from Nicole Phelps’s Fall 2013 Balmain review for Style.com: “Rousteing makes blingy clothes designed for going out and having a good time; if you come looking for pantsuits or a winter coat, you’ve got the wrong idea.” Hearing this, Rousteing laughed so loud the speakers on my laptop distorted: “She was absolutely right! Because if we just talk about utility well then we don’t need fashion, we don’t need designers, we don’t need reviewers—we’re all fired!”