Hedi Slimane is a tad late unveiling Celine’s spring 2023 collection, but he will be early — way early — with the one he’s designing for the following season.
WWD has learned that Slimane and Celine are plotting a fashion show in Los Angeles, California, on Dec. 8 to unveil the fall 2023 collection — more than two months before fashion weeks for that season kick off in New York, London, Milan and Paris.
Meanwhile, the spring 2023 collection will be showcased as a film, to be streamed on Celine’s website and social platforms sometime during November — more than a month after Paris Fashion Week wrapped nearly a month of spring 2023 showings.
Celine’s spring 2023 collection was filmed on models in the south of France, but the precise timing and other details are still under wraps.
Likewise, Celine did not disclose an exact location for the Los Angeles runway event.
California has become a hot spot for destination shows, with Ralph Lauren, Dior, Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent among brands that have mounted runway displays there in recent years.
Celine’s fall showing joins a smattering of itinerant runway events in early December, with Dior unveiling its pre-fall menswear in Egypt on Dec. 3 and Chanel its latest Métiers d’Art collection in Senegal.
A resident of Los Angeles throughout most of his years helming Saint Laurent, Slimane staged a big fashion show for that brand at The Hollywood Palladium in 2016.
He joined Celine as its creative and image director in 2019, leading the brand into menswear, fragrances, beachwear, made-to-order crocodile handbags — and even pet accessories.
He’s also made off-calendar timings for collection unveilings a feature of his Celine, which recently has been going from strength to strength.
Revealing its third-quarter sales results last month, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton said revenues grew 24 percent in its fashion and leather goods division, and trumpeted very strong growth at Celine.
Slimane’s obsession with L.A. subculture and the cool kids in the indie rock scene preceded his arrival at Yves Saint Laurent in 2012, and stretch back to his influential stint as the designer of Dior Homme between 2000 and 2007.
“I arrived in California in 2008, and I was already very attracted to Los Angeles, where I frequently went since the end of the 1990s,” he told French newspaper Le Figaro in 2018.
“I would start all my Dior collections there, in my hotel room. The city was still asleep, so it was the perfect time to fill in a blank page. There was no creative or artistic stimulation yet, nor was there an emergence of a strong music scene.…[Los Angeles] has changed today. It’s been taken over and the authenticity is slowly getting lost because the megalopolis appeals to the world and the youth. Los Angeles is an open-air construction site and its mythical places are disappearing day by day.”
Reports /TrainViral/
