The fashion industry is built on a constant exchange of giving and receiving. Creative directors and their teams translate their inner worlds into garments, offering them to audiences who wear, interpret, and cherish them. Yet it is often overlooked that these same creators are also part of the audience, consuming fashion themselves, shaped by what they see and admire, even as they contribute to it. We just have to look at some of the looks on the runways lately, where a disconnect between what's being presented and what makes sense in real life seems evident. Michael Rider has proved with his debut menswear collection at Celine how he has the perfect mind to embody both parts of the play, creating the clothes he would love to wear.
Would you choose to wear leather and latex tight clothes during this burning summer heat, or would you rather wear light, bright-coloured garments in fabrics made for the season and styling as vibrant as the feeling of the sun on our skin? The answer is obvious, and this season that answer was given by Celine. With a collection that has been highly and rightfully praised as one of the best of this menswear S/S 2027 season, Michael Rider positions himself as the perfect head to lead the French luxury house back into the realm of creative sensibility attuned to the modern mind it used to be during Phoebe Philo's tenure, whom Rider worked with as her design director from 2008 to 2018.
Coming from a very successful womenswear debut and a following collection that helped cement his vision, the menswear show was the most anticipated follow-up to confirm what we could already feel happening: that he is the right man for the right house. Choosing to present at the Tennis Club de Paris, a venue often used by Philo, is a significant detail by itself, not as a sign of something looking similar or replicating what has already been done but as a symbol that something different, but equally good, was taking place. The seventy-one looks presented worked so well, looked so good and felt so right; it was evident that intention and care were behind every choice.
We value finding detailed technical explanations in the press releases of the collections we will discuss; there's no way we would dare to talk about something we don't know the background of. However, encountering a text that was written almost as a diary entry of the person who created what we just saw is sometimes more meaningful and useful to understand where everything is coming from than anything else. “Enjoying what we do in the studio and desiring it ourselves, all of it, the clothes and the characters” is a sentence so simple, so obvious, that it feels so rare to read, but that is the core of Rider's collection and, most likely, of his practice as a designer, and that was materialised to perfection in every pair of trousers, coat, blouse, shoe, shirt or t-shirt that was put on the runway.
How well the colours and fabrics were chosen; the way they are put together, matching the right pieces with the right but contrasting complements in silhouettes that enhance every element that is part of the look, where the flowiness or the tightness feels natural and well-balanced with the rest of the outfit; and just how “this had to be made” it all looks — these are garments made by people who would love to be their own clients. There's not a detachment here from what the brand does and what the real-life consumer needs or wants; it's all on the same frequency, in the same line of vision.
Rider has managed to convey his honest creative spirit into a collection that can be praised from the most logical cold-minded technical perspective to the most emotional warm-hearted opinion of those who love fashion and who can identify when others who love it just as much.
