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Why Celine’s Michael Rider is creating a ‘hardworking wardrobe’Luxury is in existential crisis. With a vision rooted in clothes, not fashion, can this American designer in Paris cut through the noise?
Elizabeth Paton
PublishedMar 5 2026
Fashion is full of people who think of little else. Michael Rider, the artistic director of French luxury house Celine, is not one of them. The 45 year-old American holds impeccable industry credentials, having worked for some of the most influential names in the fashion business: Ralph Lauren, where he oversaw womenswear for the Polo line and a major revival in its popularity; Phoebe Philo, for whom he was studio design director during her nine-year tenure as Céline creative director; and Nicolas Ghesquière, now of Louis Vuitton, but who Rider worked for as a senior designer at Balenciaga after relocating to Paris from New York two decades ago.Since replacing Hedi Slimane at LVMH-owned Celine in 2024 — one of only a handful of hires during fashion’s great designer reshuffle who had never held a top creative director position before — Rider has garnered critical acclaim and commercial success with his fresh, fun and deceptively simple approach to luxury fashion design and merchandising, right at a time when the industry is grappling with how to entice disenchanted consumers into spending money again. But his résumé is also not a conventional one. A Brown University graduate, Rider spent his first years out of college working as a teacher in Oakland, California. After leaving Philo and Celine in 2017 he took a break from fashion, turning down desirable gigs to work with refugees caught up in Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis. And when he got the top job at Celine, setting the internet abuzz with curiosity, there was next to no information about him online. It would appear that Rider, who doesn’t have any social media presence, likes to do things his way.Calm and unflustered at the Celine headquarters a few weeks before his womenswear show at Paris Fashion Week on March 7, he also appears to be taking the role — and the heavy responsibilities and expectations that come with it — in his stride.Looks from Michael Rider’s debut collection for Celine . .“I like to know what’s going on everywhere, down to the inside of every sleeve,” Rider says. Tanned and lithe with tight curls, he looks younger than his years as he sits in a meeting room overlooking a grand courtyard at the Celine offices. “I owe it to everyone to be organised in the run-up to a show. Not just for my studio but the thousands of people in the supply chain whose work relies on the decisions we make in there. Fashion does a lot to not talk about that, but I’ve always liked being in factories. It is where I started out in this business back in New York. Sitting among the people making the things that people want people to love.” Celine’s next chapterCeline, which was founded in 1945 by Céline Vipiana and her husband, occupies a critical if mutable niche in the French fashion landscape.
After Louis Vuitton and Dior, it is a key brand in the LVMH group’s luxury fashion portfolio, with HSBC estimating annual revenues of around €2.5bn as of 2024. (LVMH, which acquired the brand in 1996, does not publicly break out revenues by brand.) It has also long represented cool and functional Parisian chic, offering covetable yet wearable clothes and accessories for those who can afford the hefty prices.
Under Philo — and Rider’s first time around at the house — Céline (it had an accent back then) felt attuned to a grown-up female gaze, with an aesthetic built on careful styling and oversized tailoring that attracted a devoted customer base.
When Hedi Slimane took over in 2018, he didn’t just drop the accent off the first e in Celine and pull the brand off the official fashion week schedule; his vision was an in-your-face, skinny-jeaned, teenage rock ’n’ roll fever dream that divided critics but also doubled sales before he eventually left in 2024. So what was it about Rider — both in character and record — that made him the right man to write the next chapter?“Michael has a background that naturally prepared him for this role. Having worked at the house he knows it intimately, and has brought together the differing legacies that shaped the house while bringing his own very personal vision,” Celine chief executive Séverine Merle writes over email.
“Celine is not immune to the crisis that has affected luxury brands, but I am very confident in the house and its future.”Rider’s collections are bold and colourful, with handbags with smiley-face zippers, and perfectly tied printed silk scarves . . . . . . celebrating the fact that the house roots are in wearable clothes For Rider, the appeal of a second time around at Celine lay in the fact that the house roots are in wearable clothes. A key architect of the preppy revival that has dominated fashion lately, his bold, colourful collections are awash with strong-shouldered tailoring, second-skin leggings, quarter zips, logo-heavy T-shirts and sweatshirts and lots of layered belts. Also, cute miniskirts, sexy little black dresses, handbags with smiley-face zippers, and perfectly tied printed silk scarves. In other words, looks that don’t rewrite the rule book — or take themselves too seriously. But given their laser-like attention to detail and elevated finish, they could also become the cornerstones of a wardrobe for far more than one season.
“When people use the word ‘wardrobe’ it can almost be pejorative or flat, but a good, hardworking wardrobe is at the core of feeling fashionable,” says Rider. “I don’t know what drove brands into a situation where everything had to get so extreme, so extremely extreme, but that’s never what really turns me on. The best creatives don’t make their fans slaves to trends — they offer a lasting idea of how to get dressed and how to put things together.”Rider isn’t especially interested in fantasy fashion — you’ll never find him looking for inspiration from outer space. In his eyes, there are fashion designers who project big themes or theoretical ideas on to something, and then those for whom it’s all about themselves. He counts himself happily in the latter camp. He wants to see his vision reflected on and by the street. “Proud and squarely, it’s all about me and my sensibility. And by me, I also mean the studio,” he says. “It’s about all of us and what we are feeling and what it feels like to wear our clothes. We put them on and wear them out all the time.
”Despite an impish grin and quick wit, Rider is strongly driven by personal and professional pragmatism. Rather than offering endless pages of flowery show notes, he gives editors a sentence or two on collections if they are lucky (“I really struggle with pretension. The work speaks for itself, I hope”). He refuses to look at Instagram or TikTok, and only recently got an iPhone (“It’s not a political stance, if I dipped into the cesspool I’d drown”). And he is adamant that time spent away from the fashion whirl is essential for one’s character (he was spurred to teach refugees French after watching migrants gathering by the tracks from his Eurostar window).“I recommend it to all my friends: get out of Paris for a bit,”
Rider says at one point. “There’s a lot going on outside in the world beyond fashion week.” It’s refreshing to listen to, particularly given the luxury sector’s ongoing identity crisis and self-inflicted decline after years of skyrocketing prices, manufacturing scandals and loss of cultural cachet.
There are some in the industry who feel Rider’s approach at Celine is more of the same: overpriced and lacking a true point of difference. A branded T-shirt costs around £500; a black minidress with a gold chain is £2,150, and one of its cornerstone bags, the Luggage, is £3,650. But those who track data and sales say otherwise.
Alexandra van Houtte, chief executive of the fashion search engine Tagwalk, notes that many luxury clients want “clothes that feel current but aren’t fussy, that are not ostentatious and just do their job exceptionally well. Celine has found a strong position in the global luxury market within that space.” Harrods buying director Simon Longland adds that Rider’s impact “has been swift and overwhelmingly positive”.The Smile luggage is a standout performer at Celine The client response has been immediate, particularly across leather goods,” he says, noting the Smile Luggage, Besace and Soft Triomphe and Trio Flap as standout performers.
“In a highly competitive landscape, Rider is shaping a Celine that stands apart — defined not by trend, but a clear, confident point of view.”‘I love valid critique’Rider says that growing up in Washington DC, he always liked going out, making his own clothes and inhabiting different identities. “But I don’t know if I thought it was a serious contribution to the world. It took me a while to believe it could be.” After starting his teaching career, he decided that while he could always teach at 60, breaking into fashion later in life would be a tougher proposition. And so he moved to New York and started working in the then thriving Garment District. Every job he has taken since — and the legendary fashion characters he has worked with — taught him a very particular lesson that shapes his approach today. Celine summer 2026
“Nicolas is an architect, Phoebe is a stylist and Ralph is a merchant. They’re all very different. But as designers, they had this instinctive thing they did way better than anyone else.”According to Rider, the designer landscape today is a fraught one — not because of the designers themselves, but because of the way they are pitted against one another as if in some kind of gladiatorial arena. “Just before my debut, someone showed me some ticker board online pitting us against one another and with names going up and down based on social media likes, before anyone had even shown anything. I’d just never seen anything like that. That Thunderdome was a whole part of American culture I have expressly avoided,” says Rider.
He calls out what he sees as “a lot of useless, self-congratulatory Kool-Aid” in the industry culture, especially around shows. “I’m not sick of the idea of new energy or blood. That’s what makes things turn in this business. But there was all this noise and nothing really was said,” Rider continues. “I love valid critique, bring it on. The rest is making everyone nuts.”Paris may be home now (Rider’s husband, Emmanuel Morlet, is the head of knitwear at Dior). But alongside his extensive French training and experience,
Rider’s American sensibility runs clearly through his work, bringing realism alongside refinement. The lifestyle-focused world-building of Ralph Lauren, who Rider says had never heard of Celine when he hired him for Polo, feels especially relevant to what is being produced now. Rider also points to the shifting goalposts around what defines a designer’s legacy; the Laurens and Armanis of this world were around for 40 years; these days, staying in a single creative director position for longer than a decade has become extremely rare.
“Ralph doesn’t care about fashion but he’s obsessed with clothes,” says Rider, adding that explosive growth in luxury fashion is not — from a human or business perspective — sustainable, in his view. A powerful legacy comes from continuity. “I try to be a human being reacting to the world we are living in,” Rider says.
“I also think it can’t be great if designers bob around every few years who are meant to be making beautiful and very expensive things with real value. My hope here at Celine is that I set the tone for something longer-lasting.”
(in honor of the random stream of the collection and words said by Michael Rider the text layout follows the same concept)
