Did Olivier Rousteing change his stripes? Backstage pre-show, that was the message we were getting. He said: “I was known for the Balmain army, and for a kind of loudness and sexiness. Now I feel there’s more sensuality… She’s still the same woman—she’s just evolving.” To evidence this he pointed to the plethora of knitwear. “I’ve been working with gray melange, which is obviously a color that you never saw before at my fashion shows, and working with cashmere on a lot of jumpers. You will see the attitude is different.” So different was it, he added, that the only shoulder pads on the runway would be those in his jacket when it came time to take his bow. “Because I want to make a new softness, with shapes that are cocooning.”
No shoulder pads? This left me preoccupied while wrestling through the clots of clients and fellow content-generators in the showspace: was Rousteing about to compromise his maximalist soul as a balm to the brand’s recently refreshed management team? But this was a runway rethink that seemed pretty well considered. Those vaunted gray knits were indeed much softer options than Rousteing’s Balmain customarily presents, but the silhouettes retained his core exaggeration both in size and swathe, and came accessorized with decadently meandering thigh-high boots. The burgundy leather jumpsuit with a shawl collar-hood was both soignée and recognizably akin to the nomadically dramatic phase of fashion expression Rousteing played with at the turn of the decade. The peplums were also a typically respectful nod to the house founder.
And Rousteing’s stripes remained, even if not quite the same. A herd of zebra-touched looks might have been delivered more softly than hitherto seen, but enough came fashioned in shinily seductive beadwork with dramatic enough proportions to create a fil rouge between what had been and what now is. Similarly, where old Olivier would have played Cyndi Lauper’s original, now he soundtracked this show with the breathily soft Chromatics cover of “Girls Just Want To Have Fun.” The dresses and skirts with molded crocodile pattern embossments were here for exactly those girls.
This was for sure a shift in womenswear genre for Balmain, but Rousteing’s authorship was unmistakable. He said: “I’m proud of this collection because, for me, it is the beginning of a new era. And after 14 years, if I cannot write a new book, then what is the point? And now I think this is what I’m doing.”
