By Seth Khouri
For the past two fashion seasons, a question has remained at the forefront of my mind: how long into one’s tenure at a maison does comfort truly take root? Here, it is important to clarify the sense in which comfort is meant. I do not refer to complacency or a kind of design “safety,” so to speak, but rather the confidence required to rewrite a house’s codes and shape a new vision. This question, of course, invites a certain amount of discourse. For some, that comfort never quite arrives—an outcome made evident in the recent game of creative-director musical chairs that defined much of last year. For others, it emerges more gradually, revealing itself season after season as a designer slowly builds narrative and authority. Yet, more rarely, and most impressively, that sense of ease appears almost immediately. For his third outing at Celine, Michael Rider carries the confidence of a creative director who has been at the helm for decades.
For his previous two offerings, Michael Rider explored a distinctly preppy sensibility, materialising across an array of rugby polos, silk scarves, chinos, and oversized suiting. This season, however, that foundation allowed Rider to place tailoring firmly at the centre of his FW26 excursion for Celine. “I do think Celine is a place you go to find beautifully cut clothing; a slimmer silhouette,” he shared. “Classics is one thing, but we like bite. A jacket’s a jacket, but it’s figuring out the character. I don’t like the idea of something that covers up what people are going through.”
Through this lens, Rider subtly inverted the hallmarks of last season’s offering. Suiting was dialled back, sharpened, and cut closer to the body, a clear departure from the previously oversized proportions. Across the menswear looks, silk scarves were exaggerated to the point of theatricality, often covering much of the wearer’s face. Elsewhere, French peacoats and precisely tailored trousers dominated the offering. Womenswear echoed a similar sentiment with a series of asymmetric dresses cut to drape differently across the body, oversized leopard-print fur coats, a run of bolo hats, and leather jackets rendered in camel brown and metallic silver.
Rider’s stylistic instincts continue to assert themselves with each passing season, with discourse surrounding his artistic choices filtering steadily through fashion’s many circles. In many ways, that influence extends beyond the runway itself. Increasingly, one senses the familiar phenomenon long associated with Celine—that people don’t simply wear the clothes, but begin to style themselves in its image. With a maison that has previously hosted some of fashion’s most formidable creative voices, from Phoebe Philo to Hedi Slimane, expectations remain inevitably high. Yet under Michael Rider, Celine appears once again to be shaping the visual language of the moment, less a brand to follow than one that fashion instinctively orbits around.
