Celine SS24: Nobody Does Hedi Like Hedi

 

Celine Summer 2024 is an extension of Hedi Slimane’s timeless methods of tackling masculinity, defined by two unchanging tenets of his ever-evolving career — his love for indie rock and the Hedi way.

Celine Summer 2024 was the best of Hedi Slimane and Hedi Slimane at his best. His popularised skinnies joined other Slimane-staples of sequinned suits and studded Moto jackets in the house’s Delusional Daydream show. With the exception of an embellished knit halter neck here or silk tube there, the collection materialised pulls from the creative director’s archive spanning his 30-year career.

Throughout his capacities as a photographer, costumier and then couturier, Slimane has made it clear that he is an artist before anything else. With indie rock as his fascination, his work has long been relational— a symbiotic process that he has built on the foundations of his musical muses. The early aughts were a first-hand testimony of this. Before publishing his visual diary London: Birth of a Cult, its protagonist — Pete Doherty of the Libertines — was first the main character in Slimane’s work at Dior Homme. It was exactly that rockstar essence that was borrowed, manipulated and then applied to become Slimane’s signature. Two decades later, the formula still persists.

Rockstars possess an evergreen allure — not for the traditional tropes of masculinity, bulging biceps or broad shoulders — but for the power of their nonchalance, a quality that Slimane sought to study throughout his career.

Celine’s Summer 2024 thus comprised stage wear that these rockstars might once have donned, each with its own history and unique design influence. However, meanings and origins were discarded for new futures as figments of an axeman’s fashion.

Cheeky slivers of skin, exposing shoulders, collarbones, midriffs, or even entire torsos (Looks 11, 13, 26 and 42) are jarring against even today’s bending societal constructs of masculinity. Gender-rebelling constructs reveal themselves further in historic punk-ish garments. Demure satin bows and bodices against skin-tight leather flares that initially appear feminine are transformed into pillars of virility (Looks 40,41) before the show closes with a billowing, sheer cape dress bedazzled with rhinestones. These are not looks typically associated with society’s “manly men” but when proposed together on gaunt masculine figures, Celine clearly articulates the handsome chivalry associated with rockstar attitudes of rebellion.

Nonchalance recurs behind the scenes, too. In today’s staging of fashion shows, the norm has become to pile on more and not remove for less. It is a technique that has been speculated for the intention of selling — a KPI that guarantees creative directors’ security in what may now seem to be cursory appointments. Just see Walter Chiapponi and Ludovic de Saint Sernin’s hasty departures after one season. Slimane’s rockstar insouciance comes in his deliberate insistence to “do it the Hedi way” on his terms, by his design and inspired by his muses — disregarding the fast-moving trend cycles and consumer patterns that plague other houses. Perhaps staying steadfast to his beliefs will pay off. After all, word on the street is that Slimane’s indie sleaze aesthetic is set for a rebound sooner rather than late.

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