Paulette Hamilton 
PARIS —
Six months after dressmaker Hedi Slimane debuted his version of Celine at the runway to a loud chorus of grievance for a collection that turned into deemed juvenile and raunchy, Slimane submitted a sophomore attempt that become stripped of grit, deflated of swagger, and only a little bit dry. Serious. Frill-free.
Blazers. Blazers. Pleated culottes. Silk blouses. Printed scarves. Tasteful gold necklaces. Sober clothes for crazy instances.
Instead of crotch-short, sparkly cocktail attire worn via women with a morning-after flush, he has given oldsters bourgeois rectitude hiding in the back of aviator shades. They are the type of garments which can be fashion handiest due to the fact a few individuals of note — a few chiefs of the cool % — say they’re, when genuinely they are entirely the components of a classic fashion that has been around on account that forever — or at the least because the Nineteen Seventies — and probably always could be. Somewhere out in horse us of a Virginia, at a cottage in Connecticut or a historical society assembly in Grosse Pointe, Mich., a 65-year-vintage woman is catching a glimpse of those runway photos and chuckling: “Oh, so now my cloth wardrobe is in fashion.”
Is this what women need from Slimane? Is this his make-accurate after a spring series that vaporized the minimalist sophistication that Celine had to emerge as regarded for, under its former creative director Phoebe Philo? Each capability Celine consumer has a particular answer. Some may also want their garments to cause them to appear as dominant on the outside as they feel on the inside. Others may additionally want their clothes to assist them in living out a few delusions of debauchery. Still, different women may additionally look to their garments to deliver them the style equal to a sugar rush. Many of them may additionally ask most effectively that their clothes be relaxed, useful, and relevant.
The most straightforward query a designer can, without a doubt, solution: What do they want to provide ladies?
What is Slimane’s proposition? Has he come to satisfaction girls or to help them up? It would seem that he has come to get dressed them.
On Friday night, in a darkened box tent with the dome of Les Invalides in the historical past, a tumbler rectangle descended from the rafters and onto the long runway. A single darkish-haired version stood interior carrying a blazer, pleated culottes, a sizeable floppy headscarf tied off to the aspect, a structured handbag, and aviator sunglasses. She proceeded down the runway with reason, as though she’d merely stepped out of 1 of these glass elevators in a few large town workplace towers that, lower back in the Nineteen Seventies, appeared so boldly contemporary.
She changed into accompanied by the model after version, each sporting a few versions of that look: pleated plaid skirt with a navy blazer, pleated culottes with a blazer, plaid culottes with a solid jacket, plaid skirt with a sweater, black leather-based culottes, fur jacket, grey flannel culottes. A pair of jeans had furnished intermittent breaks with over-the-knee boots or a published dress with long sleeves and a high collar, and then it changed into the lower back to culottes and blazers and sweaters.
Your eyes begin to stray from the garments to the audience to see rows of barely glazed expressions. Yes, ok. We get it. Bourgeois right taste. Conservative. What is that fragrance coming to shape the runway? A whiff of Pendleton? Notes of Barbour? The models in flannel and denim and tweed marched down to stand the photographers to what sounded like the same 8 bars of tune on a perpetual loop. And then! Lo, at the runway: fun. A pair of sparkly gold culottes and a same jacket! By nine p.M., the display was over. The models paraded out in unison for one final walkabout; Slimane took his bows, and that becomes that.
These had been clothes that had been ageless — inside the generation wherein they may live to tell the tale and the range of women who may want to wear them and no more extended sense as though they’d raided a junior high coat closet. Will this be the tone of Celine as the logo movements forward underneath Slimane’s route, this sort of no-nonsense dressing?
Slimane gave his target audience classics for fall. These clothes weren’t born and nurtured in these instances. However, they could thrive in them. The best question is whether or not Slimane will let them.