Oliver Rousteing’s rhetoric was as flowery as Balmain’s rose-wreathed clothes this evening. Despite having had to remake 70 per cent of the collection at top speed after the originals were carjacked en route from Charles de Gaulle airport, Rousteing was as ebullient and lyrical as he has ever been. He dropped bon mots like wedding guests drop confetti. Wearing his epic new braids and a majorly-shouldered Balmain jacket (“because you have to have big shoulders to survive in the fashion industry!”) Rousteing shrugged off what would have been a state of emergency for most houses.
Instead he said, “What this collection is about is this: I die tomorrow, I just want people to remember that I made sure that Balmain is a French luxury house. And what is French? I think this is more the question.” Rousteing’s answer started with tailoring, including plenty of the house’s big-on-social angular, gold-buttoned blazers, and sharply cut dresses with womanly upholstering at the hip that in some elements echoed the house’s 1990s and 1950s couture output. Several of the models carried chain-strapped conical bags filled with bouquets of what looked like patent leather roses in black. One dress featured two navy coquille-shaped panels running from strong shoulder to armpit over a rose-buttoned corseted wool bodice that merged at the hip with a double layered miniskirt in red polka dot white silk. The chisel-toed shoes in this case were willfully mismatched color-wise, in orange patent. It was a look you couldn’t miss.
The kapow color-story continued with a green blazer over a mid-thigh pink ruffle skirt in irregularly pleated pink silk over those shoes, this time in tricolore blue. Then the tailoring receded, overgrown by the silks, which came layered, strapless and ruffle-edged in peach or topped in blue with a roiling tangled bodice of metal branches budded with enamel roses.
Rousteing quoted the house founder’s close friend, Gertrude Stein: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” A long red silk dress was gathered from the navel in a twist of fabric arranged into a rose: a patent leather coat bloomed with dozens of them, also in patent. They grew from necklines in semi-transparent recycled plastic and rioted in prints taken from a reworked Pierre Balmain scarf design. They rose rosily as molds, or maybe 3D prints, on a rubbery red jacket and skirt. They sprouted at the end in intricate early-Rousteing Balmain signature embroidered pieces (which was the one, especially time-consuming to produce, part of the collection that was blessedly not in that stolen van).
All these multitudinously crafted roses seemed to reflect Rousteing’s instinct to cultivate his expression of “French luxury” in many exaggerated varieties of womenswear flavor; chic, gamine, bourgeois, aristo, street, boho, rive droite, rive gauche, and more. “These roses have thorns, you know?” he said. “The Balmain rose cannot just be a romantic rose. There is also toughness and strength. So it’s about love, it’s about colors, happiness and joy. But it’s also about torment! Just because you are tormented it doesn’t mean you need to do a black collection.”
To a highly-appropriate Björk soundtrack, Rousteing delivered a hyper-Balmain collection this evening: it was punchy and humorous and emotional, populated by wearable expressions of bold-type mood and social sensation.
Collection
This article was originally published on Vogue Runway.
