A square of silk, knotted once at the waist, and the outfit arranges itself around it. Michael Rider has built a season at Celine where the scarf arrives first and the clothes fall in behind it.
The foulard sits at the center of the Celine wardrobe this autumn. It knots at the waist over trousers. It winds around a wrist beside a stack of gold charms, or loops through the handle of a bag and stays there. Rider treats a length of printed silk as a working garment.
Three foulards carry the idea. The Night & Day print runs in blue, white and yellow. The Patched C and Stamped C Calèche foulards fold the Triomphe monogram into a field of Parisian sketches, hand-drawn stars and small moons. Each sells for £440, and each is built to be folded, reknotted and moved from the neck to the hip to the strap of a bag.
The square
Silk has long been Celine shorthand. Céline Vipiana opened the house in Paris in 1945 and built it on scarves and leather, on the idea that a woman could dress quickly and well. Rider reads that history closely. He keeps the Triomphe where Vipiana left it and lets the print do the rest.
The campaign calls itself Infinite Possibilities, and the name is literal. A foulard becomes a bandana, then a top, then a belt. Rider adds a colourful silk cummerbund to the roster and threads golden charms along a belt and a wrist. The pieces are made to be rearranged by whoever buys them.
A scarf is the most democratic thing in a luxury house. Anyone can tie it, and no two people tie it the same.
Léa FontaineThe eye
Rider came to Celine from Polo Ralph Lauren, and before Paris he grew up in Washington. That American training shows in the ease of the styling, in the preppy confidence of a scarf worn like a club tie. The bourgeois codes of the house meet a looser, more offhand way of wearing them.
He has described Celine as a place people come to get dressed, for ordinary days and late nights and the hours between. The foulards read that way. They ask for a knot and a decision and very little else.
Celine, Paris. Courtesy of Celine
The clothes around the silk stay quiet. Clean trousers, a good coat, a shirt open at the collar. The foulard holds the colour and the signature, and the rest of the look stays still behind it. Celine has put its whole argument for the season into a square of silk and a single knot.