Hedi Slimane - Designer

[tourbillions]

😭😭 Not him being compared to ralph lauren and armani. He can first try to last in a house for more than a decade and establish himself in that house season after season without skipping any fashion week calendar. OR since he is so great, he can put up his own house like Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani and actually grow it from ground up like Jacquemus did.

He wanna be Karl so bad but its not gonna happen if he is jumping from one house to the other every 4 years.

I hate demna's current work but to say he is niche is completely wrong. Everyone looks like a balenciaga fashion victim these days.

 

[Kanzai]

He has been the most relevant male designer in the XXI century. I’d even say his influence has been even wider than Armani’s.

He literally dictated the men’s wardrobe for nearly 14 years. Only Phoebe has been that relevant in the XXI century.

If that’s not acclaim worthy… to shape the easthetics of a generation I don’t know what is lol

Hedi Slimane’s influence never reached as wide or as deep as Giorgio Armani’s. Since the late 70s, Armani has been the quiet kind of revolutionary — he didn’t tear fashion down, he took it apart and put it back together his own way. He didn’t just change how people looked at clothes, he changed how they felt and moved inside them. Armani didn’t just create a style, he created an attitude. His influence over the past 45 years can only really be compared to Yves, Miyake, Rei and Yohji imo. There are many great designers, many masters of craft and vision, but not all of them were reformers of the body. He is the only Italian designer I’ve ever loved and easily my ultimate fav designer to the end of time.

I live in East Asia countries most of my life and his aesthetics is pretty favoured here. Armani is an extremely beloved designer in Japan, probably the only non-Japanese designer who has profoundly influenced the country’s fashion culture, while also being deeply inspired by it in return. As he once told Wallpaper magazine:

I’ve never hidden my passion for Japanese designers, for their quest for simplicity, for their always progressive and fresh vision of the relationship between clothing and the body. Miyake is the one I feel the closest to, specifically because of his attention to people. The clothes he created only come to life once they are worn, and they change from one person to another, following their way of being and behaving. This is what I myself try to do, because I never forget that if the first thing you notice about a person is their clothes, then the designer has made a mistake.

Article: Giorgio Armani on his creative inspirations, from Eileen Gray to Issey Miyake

 

[Kimihiro]

Hedi Slimane is a fabulous creative director and someone I would consider very influential. Definitely one of the most influential menswear designer of the XXI century, I think the only competition is Demna. I even believe his Celine womenswear was very influential. However he’s not a household name. His designs never were original. His career post Dior Homme was about packaging things in compelling and convincing ways and imposing them on people, many times indirectly. There’s nothing of sartorial invention. It’s the universe he create around these mundane articles of clothing that makes him compelling. My generation wore things made popular again (not invented) by Hedi. We had guys who didn’t have the right wear skinny jeans, and girls in grunge or Southern France cosplay. I think that’s influence. How many designers can say that for themselves? Even after flights of innovation and couture?

I don’t think he should be compared to designers of past. He cannot even start his own house. He cannot do frocks beyond sequined ones. He hasn’t serve fashion’s advancement since he parted Dior. He’s not a classical fashion designer per se. What he did though I think is start the current fashion landscape. Reinvent what the creative director is, how merchandised and sometimes mundane shows can be. The move away from being couturiers, to being taste makers. He packaged something so simple to something desirable. I think in that way he’s very influential, even if he’s part of what’s ill in fashion right now.

 

[RosesAreRed]

You can say what you want but I’m waiting for his next move. He is missed. Just hope he will do shows again, not only videos

 

[Caffeine]

That was in reference to his curation. But yes, he is not taken seriously in the art world by anyone other than collectors with more money than intelligence & the gallerists who prey upon them. Klaus Biesenbach, his main booster, is a thirsty clown who cares more about celebrity than serious art. It's not as if Helen Molesworth or Leah Dickerman (two serious, genuinely respected curators/scholars) is going to put together some sort of Slimane retrospective. It's not enough to have "flawless compositions" (whatever that means—that's not how photography works, at least fine art photography); his whole "art" career has been as a commercial novelty.

Beyond that there are some very clear threads running from DH to his SLP and his Céline—perhaps most notably his complete flat-footedness when it comes to colour or any pattern that isn't animal print. I don't buy at all this idea that these ventures weren't related. Everything comes back to a boring fetishism of youth and youth culture, whether the angle is "supple" or "hard edge."

And I also don't buy the supposed "revolutionary" impact of his denim; a few darts does not a master make. You can find similar jeans well before that point in time, and everything he was doing with raw denim is preceded by innovations in Japan. The great accomplishment of his Dior Homme was, to be frank, his synthesis of music and fashion—the way he made bands full of emaciated twinks feel like the second coming of rock and roll. But that was clever marketing and social placement more than it was design. Take a look at the Met Costume institute—they own 3 pieces designed by Slimane, and *53* by Nicholas Ghesquiere, because the former's contribution is, as posterity has come to reveal, more or less negligible.

Unlike art, fashion needs to flatter the human body and give humans fantasies and make us feel better, not worse. Hedi's work satisfies both handily. His clothes make people look good and feel good.

Same with Karl. He can laugh at people for being overweight and what not (he was at one point overweight until his DH inspiration thanks to Hedi), but his clothes made people feel good. When you put on a Chanel jacket, you look good, you feel good, and it boosts confidence. Either you are having a good time, or you have made it. I've seen numerous C-suite women wearing Chanel jackets that fit perfectly like Coco originally designed them - flattering, confidence, ease.

What image did Blazy project? Women who are rejected by men as wives? Women who can never make it unless there are men behind them? I didn't talk about this in the Chanel thread but it has bothered me since the Boy reference.

There are designers who elevate you, and there are designers who put you down. Blazy remains to be seen, but Hedi is certainly the former.

 

[Caffeine]

people are so passionate about this guy over nothing. he like everyone else who improved sales the past few years had success in Celine due to all the logo t-shirts. Even his chanel dupe bags looked more coach than anything.

In my eyes no matter how well made his rtw was, it did not push anything. It was always just him cosplaying/applying for the Chanel job doing what he thinks Chanel should be. Let's not even talk about his celine couture.

Do you know why his RTW sells, not just the tshirts?
I didn't know until I talked to my sales and by accident, when she rang me up I was near the stock room.
I looked at the clothes that were being delivered to the customers.
It's the $2,000 blouses, it's the $4,000 dresses with bows and prints - I'll let you in a secret: women like these because there is no cinched waist so it's very easy in them and it hides the middle section for middle aged women and you look chic.

All these "banal" things the "artists" look down to, women are drawn to. Especially in today's fashion world where clown jackets fill up the runway, Hedi's Celine was one of the remaining houses that made elevating daywear.

Then we get to his black dresses in that last show, designed for evening. At that price point, you can only buy a basic Chanel dress. Little structure, no boning, tweed or silk. But Celine gives you a couture-like structured dress that, again, elevates you.

If a designer is to design for women, he needs to love us and understand us, down to the part of the month when our bodies are bloated. Hedi is that man. Karl was that man. But most of the younger designers today either hate women or they have no appreciation for the female body.

 

[Creative]

And the idea that to be a great designer you need to be a McQueen…

I respect McQueen a lot but I feel closer to Hedi’s idea of fashion. But that doesn’t mean I can’t see how great McQ was. I don’t know why people can’t see how good Hedi is even if their approach to fashion is different.

 

[Creative]

😭😭 Not him being compared to ralph lauren and armani. He can first try to last in a house for more than a decade and establish himself in that house season after season without skipping any fashion week calendar. OR since he is so great, he can put up his own house like Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani and actually grow it from ground up like Jacquemus did.

He wanna be Karl so bad but its not gonna happen if he is jumping from one house to the other every 4 years.

I hate demna's current work but to say he is niche is completely wrong. Everyone looks like a balenciaga fashion victim these days.

Well Demna is more niche because he speaks to a very specific kind of person…they need to be young and have a thing for fashion.

Hedi spoke to a much wider audience… people going to the office, young kids… everyone under 50.

 

[Caffeine]

And the idea that to be a great designer you need to be a McQueen…

I respect McQueen a lot but I feel closer to Hedi’s idea of fashion. But that doesn’t mean I can’t see how great McQ was. I don’t know why people can’t see how good Hedi is even if their approach to fashion is different.

I loved McQueen. Someone above mentioned Galliano and McQueen. In fact, both of them made very structured clothes, no matter how they looked from the outside. McQueen even put boning around the waist area in skirts (they looked great but felt awful).
(I rarely see this type of construction nowadays. PPP's Balenciaga has some and I was pleasantly surprised. )

 

[Caffeine]

Well Demna is more niche because he speaks to a very specific kind of person…they need to be young and have a thing for fashion.

Hedi spoke to a much wider audience… people going to the office, young kids… everyone under 50.

Oh, above 50 for sure. When you put on a bow dress, you only show the lower legs. If you do a good job protecting the skin around knees, even with a pair of flats, you will look 10 years younger and you also feel good.

 

[LadyJunon]

I think that the issue with Hedi at Chanel is that he's diametrically opposed to a lot of the goals for Chanel.
Chanel wants to be part of fashion again - Hedi is asthetically consistent to a fault. Perfect for brand building, awful for putting their shows in a good light again.
Chanel has no interest in launching menswear - Hedi's whole fashion identity revolves around menswear and more often than not, the womenswear is simply a retail-ready mirror of it.
Chanel wants a seamless transition - Hedi is known for his abrupt rebranding, a very costly project for a brand like Chanel.
Chanel wants a decade-plus-long era - Hedi's longest tenure caps out at almost seven years at Celine.

 

[tricotineacetat]

I don't think it has to be about novelty, especially novelty as progression, so much as strength & seriousness of proposition. My opinions of McQueen and Galliano as high as they are of the minimalists, even though they were coming from the opposite direction. That's because they take everything that is excised in minimalism—again, something like historicism, narrative, ornament, perhaps fantasy—and push it to the other limit. History is everywhere in their work, but there's an estrangement effect because neither is as literal as Hedi; the source material is refigured in relation to the present, and in a way that isn't as simple as adding a few darts. And there's also such a complex play between ornament and structure in the work too, insofar as ornament often seems to become structure rather than mere embellishment (and to be a wanker, this is the sort of relation Derrida is talking about when he's talking about the supplement or the parergon). I think it's also why Galliano's work is at times overtaken or dominated by ornament, or why McQueen fixated on bodily constraint and silhouettes that appeared exoskeletal. They were thinking very seriously about the extent to which clothing can restrain or extend bodies, and how this took different forms across history (or in relation to the non-human world). So if we compare a McQueen collection to one of Hedi's, we're comparing something like an aquatic asylum (Voss, in 2000) with what, twinks in bands? It's just night and day.

The best I can say about Hedi is that he made very high quality, desirable clothes. That's great, but I don't think it's interesting or worthy of much acclaim.

The more I read comments like yours, the more I appreciate designers giving you no or at least very cryptic responses what lead them to design the collections they had just presented - Because interestingly enough, the ones that could just rely on the confidence of their own design language (of proportions, techniques and fabrics they would come back to over and over again), they don’t need to reference an art show they had just seen…

 

[RosesAreRed]

I still would love to have HS at Chanel one day

 

[Caffeine]

I still would love to have HS at Chanel one day

Highly skeptical. After Karl, they need a corporate man. Hedi is not.
Maybe all it takes is a billionaire backer.

 

[fruitdots]

Well Demna is more niche because he speaks to a very specific kind of person…they need to be young and have a thing for fashion.

Hedi spoke to a much wider audience… people going to the office, young kids… everyone under 50.

Demna is "niche" because his moment is still relatively contemporary. But his favored proportions have moved well beyond niche to a more general public, even if the average person on the street couldn't trace them back to his influence. It's really not that different from Slimane—most men who ended up in skinny jeans around 2008 wouldn't have had the faintest idea who Hedi was.

The model is the same: gay guy with a knack for networking and marketing manages to tap into or direct the zeitgeist in way that feels more significant in the moment than it does after the fact. The sense I get is that a lot Hedi stans fell in love with him because his peak at Dior Homme overlapped with their youth. Sure there was a real critical mass there, insofar as Hedi was right in the middle of a hyper cool scene (call it indie sleaze now), but that's no different from how Demna positioned himself more recently. And I'm sure in 15 years time we'll have Demna stans here raving about how he made the most couture hoodies, with the most perfectly placed darts. I'm just less sure that it's anything more than nostalgia or reactivated fantasy. You slip on your vintage Dior Homme jeans and suddenly you feel like you're 22, listening to Razorlight and Uffie and smoking cigarettes.

 

[fenty]

Do we think Blazy is lasting a decade at Chanel?

 

[fruitdots]

Do we think Blazy is lasting a decade at Chanel?

Probably. It's a privately held house, so he's free of the whims of shareholders. And I think the Wertheimers consider him a longterm investment, so unless he really pisses them off, or sales really tank, he'll be safe enough. It would be a very different story under Kering or LMVH, but he was lucky to land at Chanel.

 

[yslforever]

Do we think Blazy is lasting a decade at Chanel?

No

 

[Lola701]

With all the shifts, it seeem only one thing remains the same. Its never about talent and skill. Connections and being at the right place at the right time is all it takes.

It has always been the case though.
Talent is important, taste is important and skills is something that you learn anyway.

That’s why I have always had an issue when people wants to apply social norm and fight against nepotism when it comes to fashion because they wants to apply corporatism rules to a field that only became an industry 25 years ago and that has a very specific status in France for example.

When we are talking about creative fields, what is important first, is never the skill. The skills becomes important when it has to be at the service of creativity.

If we want to talk about Hedi, they were probably plenty of kids in the 80’s who were into photography, who had a sense of style too.
Hedi just happened to be in Paris, to go out in the right place like Le Palace and Les Bains Douches where a lot of fashion people went. He also went to the US hanging around creative people,
So when he meets Jean Jacques Picart, ask to work for him and that JJP for whatever reason, decided to accept, he entered a world through the right door.
Hedi’s experiences at New Man or Jose Levy would have only made him one of many if he didn’t take his destiny in hands and worked with Picart.

Without the connection of Picart, whatever skills he may have would have been pointless anyway. But those skills he had became useful when Pierre Bergé offered the position of Head Designer at YSL.

If you want to be a graphist, work in data, do accounts in the fashion industry, you can submit your resume. Nobody is asking you about your taste or your talent.

If you want to be a designer, you have to bring something else than skills. The same for being an Art Director.

The irony is that Picart stated that Hedi didn’t want to be a designer but an Art Director. In each case, it’s a matter of taste, POV and it can be a talent.

Highly skeptical. After Karl, they need a corporate man. Hedi is not.
Maybe all it takes is a billionaire backer.

Karl was highly Corporate too.
Hedi is also very corporate.
The reality is that designers working in fashion for French maison or even in Italy are very corporate.
It’s not a vision of corporatism that is Anglo-Saxon.
It’s a very French, almost Latin vision of corporatism. If the rules of the Anglo Saxon world were applied in France or Italy, the fashion industry would have been very very different.

You know a non corporate designer? Azzedine Alaia.
He refused to take over Dior because he knows himself.

You can be very corporate and also value your freedom. Hedi fulfilled all his contracts, indulged in commercialism more than some designers. Him clashing with an executive or throwing tantrums on social media doesn’t change the fact that he is very corporate.

 

[Lola701]

Do we think Blazy is lasting a decade at Chanel?

Yes it goes fast.
Nicolas stayed 10 years at Vuitton when it wasn’t necessarily his nature to do that.

He will stay a decade.