Who is balmain

What he loved especially was that their influence went beyond the fashion industry: His mom, who knew nothing of fashion, knew them.

The 21st century is largely an era of subcultural celebrity—there is no longer a paradox in encountering an ultrafamous person you have never heard of—but Rousteing has never lost sight of the dream of that pan-cultural success. Why this pressure—for a pair of shoes? His first internships in haute couture were unpaid, so he danced in a club to cover expenses. Rousteing describes his first years in fashion as an effort to match and merge: to try to be a designer of the sort he thought the industry wanted.

Observers of those first collections recognized their deference. Yet reception of the early collections was mixed, occasionally harsh. You come back home and feel, maybe I was the wrong choice. In answer to these anxieties, Rousteing doubled down and altered his approach. Rousteing says that Instagram seemed like a revelation along those lines: He saw that he could use it to build an organic following for the brand.

More attuned to the young mainstream than a lot of designers, Rousteing had noticed what he described as a growing distrust of traditional gatekeepers. Influencers, early on, let consumers bypass institutional taste. Yet today the largest followings tend to go to the largest brands, which have staffed, strategic feeds: Social media is part of corporate marketing. So Rousteing has again changed lanes and swerved ahead. At the moment, he explains, Balmain is going all-in on entertainment—music, broadcast series, film—and text.

She wears her hair, gently burgundy-tinted, in an elegant updo, and is dressed in a pristine black-and-white Balmain ensemble with big brass buttons. Saint John offers Rousteing a box of Tatie Cookies, and the Netflix crew sits opposite him at his desk, an enormous L of polished black marble.

A window nearby is open to the fresh air. Rousteing smokes like a French chimney, drawing each cigarette down to its first knuckle and stubbing it out. His brand, appropriately enough, is American Spirit. It was, he says, one of his proudest moments, and his hardest. For the house, it is an opportunity to bring garments into the public eye beyond the runway or the red carpet, and in a more organic setting than the churn of an ad campaign: Balmain and Netflix are collaborating on a capsule retail collection, inspired by the movie, to be available in early November.

Rousteing envisaged something different: entertainment that was simply good entertainment, that would circulate on its own strength. If the program as a whole is widely appealing enough, he reasons, its fashion acquires an audience naturally, because viewers are swept into its imaginative world. Across five to minute episodes, it tells a story of circumstantial convergence. She wants to be a musical star, but she cannot find her muse. At the motel, she connects with her queer half-sibling Tommy Dorfman , starts to fall in love with a mysterious itinerant poet Charles Melton , and encounters other colorful characters, such as Annie Ajani Russell.

The muse, eventually, appears. The final editing is wrapping up as Rousteing calls Lee Mason, then a commissioning editor at Channel 4, via Zoom from his office. Balmain helped rustle up the funding. Why would you transform a world-renowned paragon of taste and style, the worry goes, into a minor player in the blur of global corporate commerce? Will France ever win at the Kardashian game—and, if not, why forfeit a century of elite-craft fashion leadership to join that league?

Rousteing finds this view out of joint with the realities of an international age. This is the beauty of being global. Olivier traveled back to Bordeaux, met with his adoptive grandparents and had conversations with social workers.

Eventually, he makes a discovery about his mother and the basic facts surrounding his birth. In his research, Olivier finds out that his mother was just a kid when he was born and that she barely knew his father. He also finds out that he is not of mixed race as he grew up thinking his entire life, nor was it the fairytale he wanted it to be. Hide Caption. Kendall, Gigi, Karlie Walk for Balmain. View this post on Instagram.

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