Balmain - Men's Fall Winter 2024-25 - Runway Show Selection

“It’s luxury, but it’s definitely not quiet.” That’s how Olivier Rousteing summed up Balmain’s fall men’s collection, with its riot of bright color, figurative prints and polka dots, metallic gleam and couture-caliber embellishments.

He opened the display with an overcoat paved in pea-size crystals that portrayed two eyes, a nose and red lips. Rousteing explained the face belonged to no one, generated by AI, and then made a painful expression when asked how the crystals were gradient-colored to achieve the effect. For now, it’s a mystery belonging to Balmain’s formidable atelier.

After nearly 13 years at the creative helm of the house, Rousteing keeps finding new missions for himself, the latest being to apply to menswear the same level of intensive craft and freewheeling expression seen in women’s fashion, and to build bridges between Paris and Africa. (The designer is of Somalian-Ethiopian descent, and was raised in Bordeaux by his adoptive parents before pursuing fashion studies in the French capital.)

Rousteing characterized Balmain’s return to a dedicated men’s show after four years of coed displays as a “rebirth,” with him freely borrowing ideas from the women’s archive of Pierre Balmain, referencing the arsenal of codes he’s introduced, tailoring being primordial, and following his own fashion instincts."
Text By Miles Socha, JANUARY 21, 2024, 5:01AM, for WWD.com
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