“Fierce.” That’s the word Olivier Rousteing uses to describe Balmain’s men’s and women’s designs alike. And, after a four-year hiatus of uncharacteristically quiet, off-schedule presentations, Rousteing has decided this is the moment for his highly decorated, elaborate, a little OTT and generally great fun menswear to hit the catwalk once more.
Although, perhaps it isn’t entirely business as usual. “After four years I have changed,” Rousteing says. “The house has changed, in a way. Even if I kept my DNA and an identity, it’s made an evolution.” His French accent is thick — and it’s an accent evident in his designs, too, which often feature marinière stripes, glinting gilded buttons, ropes of pearls and sharp tailoring.
For our Zoom call, a week before Rousteing’s menswear show in Paris this Saturday, he is holed up in a stripped-back corner of the Balmain studio, wearing a dark sweater and trousers and knit beanie. Perhaps this is part of the evolution: these clothes are miles away from the attention-grabbing ones he usually designs and wears himself — broad-shouldered blazers studded with gold buttons, kicked-out flared trousers, jacked-up sneakers.
Yet, during his 13-year tenure at the French couture house, Rousteing has so successfully melded his own identity with that of the house Pierre Balmain founded in 1945 that many customers don’t know it existed before him at all. Which is also understandable given that when Rousteing took over, Balmain’s turnover sat at just €20mn — it is now €300mn, with 44 boutiques around the globe and, since 2016, a majority investment from the Qatari fund Mayhoola.
When he took the reins, at the tender age of 25, Rousteing was considered the “baby” of French fashion — appointed from within the ranks of the house’s studio, at a time when superstar designer appointments were all the rage, he was an unknown upstart. Yet he points out that, in a reconfigured fashion landscape of shorter and shorter creative director incumbencies, at 38 he’s something of an unexpected old master (after the exceptional 35-year leadership of Véronique Nichanian at Hermès’ menswear, he is the longest-serving non-founding creative head of a Parisian fashion house). Rousteing has survived this long, he says, by sticking to his guns. As he said, his look evolves, but it never strays too far from his own taste. “Maybe sometimes my collections are great, sometimes they are not,” he says. “But I would rather be hated for who I am than loved for what I’m not.”
Rousteing is, of course, a man — so it’s natural that Balmain menswear is close to his heart, and at the heart of his wardrobe. It comprises roughly 30 per cent of the house’s global business, but the noise it makes is considerably louder. Balmain menswear is flashy and bold. Its appeal is aspirational and universal (Rousteing asserts that the clientele ranges from 20-year-old pop stars through to 50-something married couples). His clients want logos, they want denim, they want leather, and they do want tailoring, namely the label’s double-breasted blazers, with wide shoulders, and a deep V of those flashy and very visible gold buttons.
“The buttons are obviously something that — when you see those girls or those boys coming to a club or to a restaurant — you’re like ‘Oh, my God, you have a Balmain jacket,’ Rousteing reasons. “And I think the V is about a superhero.” A superhero with deep pockets: on the brand’s website, a stud-embellished leather biker jacket retails for £6,700, jeans can clear £1,000 a pair, and an aspirational logo-emblazoned T-shirt is £395.
Rousteing feels notions of masculinity have shifted over the past decade, and that “the guy today feels proud and confident to have a wardrobe close to his girlfriend. There is a sense of sharing, of not being scared of your feminine side.”
Hence, if his Balmain menswear collections began a decade ago festooned with faux military embroideries and bandleader jackets, increasingly they include elements drawn from Rousteing’s womenswear — ladylike polka-dots, slanted fedora hats, cropped jackets, and lots of crystals.
For Rousteing, this menswear collection in particular is highly personal — it melds together sharp couture-influenced and distinctly French tailoring with influences from Africa, in collaboration with a trio of artists from the continent — Ghanaian Prince Gyasi, British-Cameroonian Ibby Njoya, and Nika Mtwana from South Africa.
Rousteing was adopted by white parents as a baby and brought up in Bordeaux — it was only in 2018 that he discovered that his birth mother was Somali, his father Ethiopian. So this collection is an engagement with his hitherto unknown roots. “It’s between my origins, the continent that I come from, and the continent where I basically got my education,” Rousteing says.
Of course, the collection is glamorous — Balmain always is. Glamour, for Rousteing, isn’t necessarily about showing off, but can be about something comforting, protective even. “I always say it’s more an armour. A glamour armour, because in this world we need protection.” The embroidery Rousteing adores can all add up to a kind of armour — some Balmain pieces are remarkably heavy, so elaborately are they festooned with beads and sequins and gilded chains.
He has also used glamour to deflect attention — in 2020, a fireplace exploded in his house, leaving him with severe burns. “This changed me a lot — my approach of body consciousness, on hiding and covering,” he comments. Glamour, however, is a double-edged sword, perhaps. “I think I’m deep in what I do, in what I think, but sometimes people take it really lightly because they see the glamour and the bling,” he reasons. “This time, it’s a lot of emotions in this collection.”
Namely, re-embracing his own past and melding it with his present, as well as with the couture maison he calls his creative home. Part of the aforementioned evolution, this Balmain men’s collection is relatively pared back and relies on the African artists’ vivid prints, instead of bedazzling embellishment, and focuses on sharp suiting, fast emerging as a key look of the autumn/winter 2024 menswear season as a whole.
It makes a change from quiet luxury. That isn’t Rousteing’s thing. “I’m just really afraid of quiet luxury and worried about it,” he says, tentatively. “[But] I love the brands that are really quiet luxury, and don’t pretend to be because of a trend.” He pauses.
“I started at Balmain when Phoebe Philo was at Celine. Jonathan [Anderson] starting at Loewe and I started at Balmain . . . at the time it was called minimalism. And I was out of trend. After, white T-shirts with denim, what we call normcore. I was out of trend. After there was a street wear happening with the incredible success of Virgil Abloh. I was out of trend. And after this I think there was quiet luxury, and I still believe I’m out of trend.” He smiles. “So maybe because I’m out of trend, I’m actually more trendy?” Rousteing shrugs, then goes back to doing what he does best.
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