Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Courtesy of Celine, Soshi Otsuki, Comme des Garçons Homme Plus
The luxury industry has already lost so many people who think brands are out of touch that it probably sounds hollow to say that Michael Rider did a phenomenal job on Sunday because his clothes spoke to many and not a few. But he did, and what’s more, he knew the collection had the kind of excitement that could help change the tempo of the industry.
Rider is in his second year as creative director of Celine. Until now, he has done elegant French clothes with an American sportswear edge. Like many big-brand designers — Celine is part of LVMH, owner of Dior and Louis Vuitton — Rider has done collections that carefully stay within the guardrails of a brand’s image and style. Think of all those Celine shows of his predecessor, Hedi Slimane, that almost never changed: the same skinny silhouette, the same moppy hair, the same rock groove. And most brands do some version of that runway routine. It’s partly why so many collections look alike to us.
But Rider escaped those limits of expression in his spring men’s show in Paris, and as a result Celine felt freer — and more uncanny. There were skinny jeans with trim sweaters or sleeveless T-shirts, but also parachute pants with a twisted cardigan. I think Rider realized there was a lot more room in the brand’s story, that it could represent other lives and tastes and still be recognizably Celine. That’s what Matthieu Blazy has done at Chanel. He’s opened up the narrative so that it’s more than a single or dominant look — more than a costume of status — and I suspect that Blazy’s approach has been an influence on Rider. But he’s like-minded anyway.
Celine
Photo: Courtesy of Celine
Celine. Courtesy of Celine.
Celine. Courtesy of Celine.
“We have a sense that we’re the customer of Celine,” Rider said of his design team. “We make the things that we want and the characters that we want to be.” After saying that they would probably do a similar mix for the women’s line, he added, “I think the idea that it feels layered, and it feels like the world around us and the world of our consumers — that’s really interesting.”
What did that mean, exactly? Besides the skinny jeans and blooming parachute pants — which were certainly fun and different — there were bookish or nerdy guys in neat blazers, striped dress shirts, and ties, with their straight-legged pants belted slightly high on the waist; there was one young man in an elegant dark wool coat buttoned high on the chest, with a white funnel-neck cotton shirt and his deeply vented coat flapping over his jeans. It was posh boy in a believable form and attitude. There was also a flowing, tentlike coat in army green that evoked a music festival.
Celine. Courtesy of Celine.
Celine. Courtesy of Celine.
Celine
Photo: Courtesy of Celine
The collection was stuffed with separates, like a bright-green sweatshirt cut away partially in back and a sleeveless top in brown suede, worn with silver leather jeans split open at the knees. The accessories ran with Celine’s new freewheeling vibe and included scuffed sneakers, bohemian sandals, and ballerina-style slippers.
Celine. Courtesy of Celine.
Celine. Courtesy of Celine.
Can a men’s designer create a suit today that’s convincing, that would make a guy want to get out of his jeans? If you’re Soshi Otsuki, you can. Otsuki won the LVMH Prize in 2025, a decade after he started his brand in Tokyo. Like the work of his predecessors, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, Otsuki’s clothes are mostly about his relation to his past and to Japanese society. “They’re about an inferiority complex that Japanese people have about fashion,” he said recently. Born in 1990, Otsuki wasn’t around for the boom years of European influence, when Japanese businessmen only wanted to wear Armani’s new soft tailoring or the bolder shapes of other Italian designers. But he obviously studied what was happening — then and in his own time — and those very human feelings about clothes and status seeped into his work.
Soshiotsuki. Courtesy of Soshiotsuki.
Soshiotsuki. Courtesy of Soshiotsuki.
What struck me about Otsuki’s latest collection, which he presented on Saturday, was that he seemed to be both loosening up and moving on from his earlier ideas. Not giving them up, I mean, but rather enriching them and at the same time speaking with clarity and a certain urgency. Fashion really needs clear ideas at the moment. I liked a lot of the stuff on Junya Watanabe’s runway, like his tracksuits, but he got completely carried away with his bling theme, piling on ropes of pearls, fake jewels, and the logos of his collaborators — more than a dozen, including DHL — that after a while, you didn’t see anything. You’re just awash in irony that you understood with the first grab of rapper glitter.
Junya Watanabe. From left: Photo: Peter White/Getty ImagesPhoto: Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Junya Watanabe. From top: Photo: Peter White/Getty ImagesPhoto: Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Otsuki’s clothes actually made me go somewhere in my imagination. I share with many people — including, obviously, Otsuki — a memory of men wilting in their summer seersucker and poplin suits, of my beloved father getting off the commuter plane on Cape Cod after a week at his office. Otsuki made that harried and heated feeling seem real without forcing it — he forces nothing. Ties were loosened slightly, suit coats sagged a bit at the shoulders, and sometimes the top button of trousers was left open. A too-fancy business lunch? Well, most clothes look better — that is, more attractive — when something is left undone.
Soshiotsuki. Courtesy of Soshiotsuki.
Soshiotsuki. Courtesy of Soshiotsuki.
But I also liked how often Otsuki broke up his tailoring, with suit coats in a slightly contrasting tone or texture with shorts — like, for example, a jacket in oyster gray with tan knee-length shorts and a loose brown tie. Or a light-beige coat with boxier cream shorts and a thin shirt in burnt orange with a pistachio-green neck scarf. Otsuki has a wonderful sense of color. He loves that punchy shade of French blue that has been in the European men’s repertoire for eons.
Comme des Garçons was delightful. Rei Kawakubo’s one-line message for her show was “If the war were to end …,” and her simple answer to that was we’ll be wearing light, loose-fitting layers in colorful shirting stripes and bubbly pastel prints. So, basically, our pajamas.
Comme des Garçons. From left: Photo: YANNIS VLAMOS/Courtesy of Comme des Garcons Homme PlusPhoto: YANNIS VLAMOS/Courtesy of Comme des Garcons Homme Plus
Comme des Garçons. From top: Photo: YANNIS VLAMOS/Courtesy of Comme des Garcons Homme PlusPhoto: YANNIS VLAMOS/Courtesy of Comme des Garcons Homme Plu… more
Comme des Garçons. From top: Photo: YANNIS VLAMOS/Courtesy of Comme des Garcons Homme PlusPhoto: YANNIS VLAMOS/Courtesy of Comme des Garcons Homme Plus
Kiko Kostadinov’s collection was clear and concise, an extension of the long tunics with trousers and oversize shirts from last season — with the difference being that he used stitching and boning inserted under the surface of blazers and jackets or on the front of a tunic for a subtle detail. Also sharp was a cropped jacket with shorts in a matte coated denim.
Kiko Kostadinov. From left: Photo: Courtesy of Kiko KostadinovPhoto: Courtesy of Kiko Kostadinov
Kiko Kostadinov. From top: Photo: Courtesy of Kiko KostadinovPhoto: Courtesy of Kiko Kostadinov
“We started this season with the desire to do something very light and delicate and airy,” Julian Klausner, the creative director of Dries Van Noten, said. The colors were lovely — muted pastels mixed earth tones — and the boxer-style shorts, light tank tops, and lingerie bits, in washed fabrics, were meant to conjure an idyll. The collection was dreamy, with some good play pieces, but I didn’t quite believe it as a realistic proposal.
From left: Photo: Umberto Fratini / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Dries Van NotenPhoto: Umberto Fratini / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Dries Van Noten
From top: Photo: Umberto Fratini / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Dries Van NotenPhoto: Umberto Fratini / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Dries Van Noten
I wasn’t into Rick Owens’s collection this season — and not because we were sitting outside in the scorching heat (he couldn’t help the weather) or that he showed a ton of black clothes, including some inflated shapes that used Adidas cooling technology for athletes. I mean that they left me cold. What did they really accomplish? Amid the tragic grimness (“We are all processing menace,” his press note began), I preferred some very precise and clean tailoring in a compact silk crêpe and slinky track pants and tops in nude-beige or black jersey. They looked inviting.
Rick Owens. From left: Photo: OWENSCORP/Valerio MezzanottiPhoto: OWENSCORP/Valerio Mezzanotti
Rick Owens. From top: Photo: OWENSCORP/Valerio MezzanottiPhoto: OWENSCORP/Valerio Mezzanotti
A lot of designers were showing boxers, or at least a portion as a layered element. Rider and Otsuki had them. So did Willy Chavarria. I was glad to see Chavarria move away from his predictable suits, but while using fabrics and embellishments that evoked domestic stuff — black pants in a floral wallpaper pattern, a shirtdress in yellow kitchen-curtain cotton — were probably meant to be uplifting, I found the effect deadening, like visiting your great-aunt’s living room. I also didn’t think Chavarria’s sense of polished casual dressing was all that interesting.
Willy Chavarria. From left: Photo: Gaspar J. Ruiz Lindberg/Courtesy of Willy ChavarriaPhoto: Gaspar J. Ruiz Lindberg/Courtesy of Willy Chavarria
Willy Chavarria. From top: Photo: Gaspar J. Ruiz Lindberg/Courtesy of Willy ChavarriaPhoto: Gaspar J. Ruiz Lindberg/Courtesy of Willy Chavarria
Sarah Burton made a cautious start with Givenchy menswear, her first since she became creative director. One of her predecessors, Riccardo Tisci, left an indelible impression with his men’s clothes, mostly because his silhouette was so distinctive. (I saw football players’ bodies.) Tisci also took risks with his imagery. It was a personal, emphatic statement, and the clothes usually sat apart from his women’s, and in many ways they were better.
From left: Photo: Courtesy of GivenchyPhoto: Courtesy of Givenchy
From top: Photo: Courtesy of GivenchyPhoto: Courtesy of Givenchy
Burton, by contrast, wants the two sides to live in harmony. Excellent tailoring for both, with big jeweled cuff buttons for him. Floral embroidery on classic coats for both. The guys manage to get more sportswear items, like leather tracksuits in bright colors and a pajama-style set in dark plaid, which was too literal to be cool or ironic.
After the jolt of the Celine show, Burton’s challenge may not be fusing the two sexes — why is that even necessary? — but rather how to avoid the trap of sticking to a fixed way of doing high fashion.
