Paris Fashion Week: All eyes on Hedi Slimane

Hedi Slimane’s debut on October 1, 2012, as the new creative and image director of Yves Saint Laurent, with a ready-to-wear collection he’d rebranded months before as, simply, Saint Laurent, was the news event of that Paris season.

They came en masse: Kate Moss and Jamie Hince; Marc Jacobs and Diane von Furstenberg; Mario Testino; ValErie Trierweiler, France’s de facto first lady at the time; Azzedine Alaa; Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent’s partner and the guardian of his legacy; and Betty Catroux, among the most famous of the designer’s muses. Their anticipation was only heightened by the parallel debut of Raf Simons at Dior, whom the media insisted on casting (to both men’s evident dissatisfaction) as Slimane’s foil and opposite.

All were curious to see what would come next for the man who in 2007 abruptly halted his career as the groundbreaking menswear designer for Dior Homme — where his pin-thin tailoring was coveted by everyone from Karl Lagerfeld to Madonna — and spent the intervening years as a photographer, mostly in Los Angeles.

Seated front row, at least they could see. It was harder for those major-magazine and newspaper editors shunted to the back row or, in some cases, to the standing-room-only pen. Others, like Cathy Horyn, the fashion critic at the time for The New York Times, and Imran Amed, the founder of The Business of Fashion website, were explicitly not invited. (Amed sneaked in anyway, with a friend’s standing ticket.)

Slimane’s latest show, to be held in Paris on Monday, is inspiring nearly equal interest. If months of speculation are to be believed, it may well be his last for the house of Saint Laurent. Slimane and Kering, which owns Saint Laurent, are in protracted contract negotiations, and rumours persist that the designer and the company have been unable to agree on terms. (Saint Laurent officials declined to comment.)

Many believe that the search is already on for Slimane’s successor, with Anthony Vaccarello, a Belgian designer, being touted as the front-runner. “It’s a rumour,” Vaccarello said shyly on Tuesday night at his own show. Nevertheless, his show was busier than usual, with a buzz some attendees attributed to Vaccarello’s potential new prospect.

“It’s a bit like what happened to Haider Ackermann when Karl said he could take over Chanel,” said Elizabeth von Guttman, a co-founder of System Magazine, who said she had been contacted by the public relations team to reconfirm her attendance after increased requests. (Lagerfeld, for the record, has not budged from Chanel.)

If Slimane, 47, leaves fashion once again, he will go out as a designer whose every move over the past three-and-a-half years has been studied, debated and, in some corners, aped.

He has remade Saint Laurent in the image that suits him, with a gusto that borders on the heretical, considering, as the chief curator of fashion and textiles at the Muse des Arts DEcoratifs in Paris, Pamela Golbin, said, “The house of Yves Saint Laurent is a cultural institution in France.”

Slimane moved the design studio to Los Angeles from Paris; raised eyebrows and hackles in fashion’s insular world by renaming the house’s ready-to-wear “Saint Laurent” (in print, “Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane”) and redesigning its logo; and reinstated its couture line although he declined to show it during the couture fashion week and made it available only to those he deemed worthy.

As for his ready-to-wear collections, Slimane shows them when and how he pleases. In the days leading up to New York Fashion Week, he uprooted his show from the Paris men’s fashion week and planted it in Los Angeles, where it was attended by Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Joan Jett, Courtney Love and Jane Fonda.

“I’ve known Hedi for years,” Lady Gaga told a reporter. “He’s such an incredible man. He really made it cool for us to dress like rock stars again.”

(At that show, Francois-Henri Pinault, the chairman and chief executive of Kering, brushed off questions about Slimane’s future at the house, telling Women’s Wear Daily: “We’re discussing. We have till the end of March. No rush. Tonight is about celebrating the brand, celebrating Hedi, celebrating LA, the music, all that. Nothing else.”)

Slimane’s designs have not always pleased critics, many of whom have, from the first, found them wanting in ambition or novelty. Nor for that matter has Slimane himself, a curious and occasionally infuriating character, who has refused to explain his work or give any but the rarest of interviews.

Unusually thin-skinned, he has proved prickly if provoked. The scathing open letter he wrote to Horyn in 2012, calling her, among other things, “a schoolyard bully,” has become near legendary; the fashion journal Vestoj republished it as a centrefold, of sorts.

That first show set the template for Saint Laurent shows to come, one from which Slimane barely veered: Despite the upscale space, the Grand Palais, it was runway-show-as-rock-show, with klieg lights spinning, pulsing music (always a fixation and fascination of Slimane’s) and a shadowy catwalk of young models (and musicians masquerading as models) oozing attitude.

“He’s very, very savvy at using the resources he’s been given to realise his own fantasies,” said Tim Blanks, the editor-at-large of The Business of Fashion, who was at that show and nearly all of those since. “They’re very grandiose. It’s techno-grandiosity.”

Celebrities and rock stars were quick to embrace his design aesthetic, but many fashion critics took a dimmer view.

Slimane “all but disappeared down a self-created hole of pretentiousness,” Lisa Armstrong wrote in The Telegraph. “The clothes weren’t bad. It’s just that you’ve already seen them all on Kate Moss, Rachel Zoe and, before them, Stevie Nicks.”

After looking at the show online, Horyn wrote, “Considering that Mr. Slimane was an avatar of youthful style, I expected more from this debut.”

Perhaps this reaction was to be expected. His show, Yves-inspired though it was, amounted to a klaxon blast of youth, delivered under the aegis of one of the most august, nearly mythic, labels in French fashion.

Yet Slimane had the support of Yves’ faithful — Catroux, and Berge, to whom the first show was dedicated — as well as that of Kering. Even some who would later sour on the label found something impressive about the early clothes.

“The thing that was quite remarkable about them, they made the models taller and thinner,” Alexander Fury, the fashion editor of Britain’s The Independent, said in a recent interview. “And if they do that to models, they’ll do that to normal people. And normal people will pay for that.”

That assessment was accurate. Despite the lukewarm reaction from critics, retailers, by and large, had a very different response.

“Loved it,” Colleen Sherin, a retail fashion director and a former vice president at Saks Fifth Avenue, said in an interview last year. “From the first show, we did. I did.”

Sherin said that during her tenure, Saks, which had carried the collection since Saint Laurent’s own day, bought and sold it — extremely well.

Customers have followed. The once-sluggish Saint Laurent is a commercial powerhouse, reporting just under 1 billion euros (Dh4 billion) in revenue in 2015, up nearly 38 per cent (or nearly 26 per cent on a comparable basis) over 2014. (In 2011, the year before Slimane’s appointment in March 2012, the company reported 354 million euros, nearly $385 million.)

“The first show, all the old ladies hated it,” said Justin O’Shea, the global fashion director of myTheresa.com, a Munich-based e-tailer that was acquired by the Neiman Marcus Group in 2014. “Now they’re all wearing Army parkas. They all come around in the end.” He now counts Saint Laurent among the top five bestselling brands on his site.

Since that first show, Slimane has remained unwavering in his vision, borrowing from the Saint Laurent archive — particularly its mid- to late-’60s halcyon — but styling his shows aggressively, a la guttersnipe. The pieces have a vintage lifted-or-thrifted look on the runway. But the stores (all redesigned to Slimane’s specifications) are filled with expensively made, easily approachable (if often, still pin-thin) pieces. Dare one call them classics?

Many have become cult items in their own right: the fur-trimmed Army parkas, stripe-detailed varsity jackets and just-so leather jackets, tuxedo tailoring for women, many of the needle-nosed shoes and bootees.

“What he does and how he shows are very radical things, which often seem to be in opposition,” Blanks said. “If Yves Saint Laurent blazed a trail, Hedi’s the one able to go behind him putting out the fires and making something commercial out of something that was created entirely for its own sake.”

His legacy, such as it is, may be less felt in design than in approach: his 360-degree view of Saint Laurent, which emphasised not only the collections but also the aura around them. Slimane’s Saint Laurent is not solely about clothes for clothes’ sake. It is just as much the shows he stages, the music he commissions to score them, the advertisements he shoots, the stores he redesigns, a holistic view of a label that he controls almost entirely. He has not merely designed a collection; he has designed a brand.

Other designers may work this way — already, at another Kering revival project, Alessandro Michele has begun putting into effect his refresh of Gucci from the ground up — but for Slimane it seems an obsession.

“Every single detail seems important,” Slimane said in a rare interview with Yahoo Style in 2015. “It is quite overwhelming to design all those elements, but if the house wants to keep a distinct voice, there is no other choice.”

Blanks called Slimane “one of the most complete conceptualists that we’ve got.”

“I don’t think whoever goes into Saint Laurent will pick up where he left off, if that is going to happen,” he said. “I think Hedi Slimane is such an obsessive, and I just don’t think there are many other people with that degree of obsession.”

“Maybe he won’t leave a legacy,” Blanks added. “Maybe he is such a consummate stylist that there’s nothing to leave behind.”