Hedi Slimane flies through the desert in Celine's FW24 collection

There is a common thematic node that ties together the Mojave Desert, psychedelia, the Mods of the ’60s, English tailoring, and it is music. Around music, the sartorial identity of the Mods and their extremely tight suits was built; from music itself, the concept of psychedelia was born, which the rockers of the Los Angeles scene then applied to real life by consuming lysergic acid during retreats in the desert. All these elements must have circulated in the mind of Hedi Slimane when he conceived the imagery of the new Celine video-show featuring a host of tall and slender young men with a devil-may-care attitude marching along Route 66 in a series of suits cut with the classic surgical precision that we have come to appreciate in recent years. If the video has a grandiose mise-en-scène (the helicopters in the desert and the flotilla of black Cadillacs immediately recall the iconic video of Monsoon by Tokio Hotel), the collection is of absolute severity: black reigns everywhere, interrupted by flashes of white shirts, a single gray Prince of Wales suit, and finally, looks with sequins, crystals, and an entirely sparkling coat that seems more cut in chain mail than regular fabric. 

The only one not wearing Celine clothes in the video is Brayden Liberio, a young professional cowboy filmed (and presumably photographed) by Slimane as part of a photographic project started in 2013 named California Teen Cowboy which may or may not be connected to the ninth issue of Hero Magazine, titled Suburban Heat, released in 2013 with a cover photographed by Slimane depicting a close-up of a young man with a cowboy hat. And if there was indeed an incorporation of the western theme in the collection (the show notes do not clarify this point), it was not the blatant turn into country territory made by Pharrell but rather a more subtle operation that, in the middle of the show, at the sight of certain capes or certain wide-brimmed hats, with a bow tie and hand-embroidered vests, cannot help but evoke the characters of Deadwood or Tombstone but also, to some extent, the silhouette of Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer, also very thin and with huge wide-brimmed hats, but dressed in large and flowing 1940s suits which are somewhat the opposite of Slimane’s tight and mathematically precise tailoring that, in referring to the 19th-century Anglomania, could only mean the clothes of Beau Brummel, the English dandy who changed the way men dressed by creating some of the “codes” that still inform tailoring today, especially regarding colors, layering, and silhouette. 

It was precisely the sartorial revolution created by Brummel that emphasized the total emphasis on cut at the expense of colors and decorations – a philosophy similar to that followed by Slimane for his extremely restrained collection, marked by the presence of blazers without lapels called frock coats, a reference to the frock coats worn by Brummel. The last curiosity about the collection is the title and the music with which it was presented: rather than remixing an existing track as done in the past with songs by emerging young artists, this time Slimane chose Hector Berlioz and his Symphonie Fantastique, which musically narrates the visions of an artist who poisons himself with opium to escape the pain of unrequited love. The symphony is divided into five movements through which a certain musical theme that Berlioz called «idée fixe», meaning a representation of obsession, continues to repeat. And tailoring is a lifelong obsession for Slimane, who once told Le Figaro: «I found my style more than 20 years ago, unless it's the other way around. It passes through a line, a stroke, an appearance, a silhouette that I have been obsessively pursuing since then and that defines who I am. It belongs to me, and in return, I am compelled to it.».