Balmain Spring/Summer 2019 Couture Collection

The new haute couture moment spurred by the work of Pierpaolo Piccioli, John Galliano and Clare Waight Keller has made all the designers of Paris want to join in. The leader of a couture house, it was a natural step for Olivier Rousteing to reboot Balmain’s haute line. He has the ateliers for it, and has proven through his highly embellished ready-to-wear how much he values craftsmanship. His first couture collection for Balmain - staged intimately in the maison’s store on rue Faubourg Saint Honoré - naturally had an early-beginnings vibe to it: the ideas were there, the aesthetic cemented, its polish not quite dry. Part Narnia and part Snowpiercer - no Tilda Swinton associations intended - Rousteing cut and styled his couture debut to honour the silhouettes of Pierre Balmain and bedazzled the with the surface decoration he can’t get enough of.

Big baubles transformed bodies covered in textures from feathers to beads, capes and folds architecturally enveloping parts of the physique. A pearled corset was worn with mega-beaded net trousers, a textural overload echoed in the intricate, almost box-of-chocolates-like compartmented motif dresses Rousteing has done in the past. The shine we’ve seen on a few couture catwalks this week manifested in what looked like a polyurethane quilted mini dress and a lacquered mega bow cocktail number. The aspiring couturier exercised the fan structures that filled his last ready-to-wear show in a series of dramatic looks before introducing a white-washed hopsack motif that evoked a sense of DIY not out of place in a debut couture collection. In seasons to come, Rousteing will weigh and measure the preferences of the couture clientele he now has to build up, and see what that will mean for the future look of Balmain.