For Celine’s Fall/Winter 2021 collection, Hedi Slimane took his drone cameras to the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, a cradle of French style, to capture his young models striding, lost in their thoughts, through the stunning formal gardens and the exquisite formal fountains and pools landscaped centuries ago by André Le Nôtre. It’s landed as a sequel to the last Celine menswear show, in which Slimane’s young chevaliers roamed the battlements of the Château Chambord in the Loire valley.
Titled “Parade”, the Celine Fall/Winter 2021 collection was inspired by the words of three French decadent, libertine poets eternally famed for exalting the excess and pain of misspent youth: Paul Verlaine, who wrote “Her gaze is like the gaze of statues”; Charles Baudelaire, who said, “My youth has been nothing but a tenebrous storm, peered now and then by rays of brilliant sunshine”; and Arthur Rimbaud, who penned, “I alone have the key to this savage parade”.
The particular quotes that creative director Hedi Slimane notes speak of beauty, youth, and the wild. Translated into the collection, the fashion is a continuation of the youthful, dressed-down vision of the Spring/Summer 2021 runway that showed in Monaco. Blazers were paired with jeans and cowboy boots; crop tops peaked out from under hoodies and trench coats; bourgeois classics mixed in a freewheeling way with hoodies, ball caps and jeans with blown-out knees; glittery sweatpants added a glam edge to puffer jackets.
Eye-catching items included jumbo-leg jeans, sexy one-shouldered tops and bubble-shaped blousons in khaki and army green – all to the tune of “Un Daydream”, an original song created for the occasion by the Paris-based artist Regina Demina.
This was a confident and approachable collection, styled to achieve an offhand chic.