PARIS – In Olivier Rousteing’s office perched on the sixth floor of Balmain’s Paris headquarters, stark white walls and black marble surfaces are coated with perfume bottles, bags, and blown-up campaign imagery. Order rubs shoulders with accumulation in the Balmain style, which Rousteing continues to champion as the house’s creative director since 2011: a silhouette that marries powerful shoulders to body-hugging curves and opulent details, projecting womanly glamour and galactic flamboyance.
Raised in the bourgeois city of Bordeaux, the designer now reinterprets the codes of French glamour for a cosmopolitan, radiant woman who knows neither taboos nor borders.
“Heritage, modernity, and inclusivity are the elements that have fuelled my longevity in the house and sum up my career at Balmain,” Rousteing says.
From partnerships with Kim Kardashian and her family to Beyoncé, for whom he has designed costumes for music videos and tours, Rousteing has renewed Balmain’s historic ties to celebrity while taking them to new, global heights. Those partnerships have electrified the designer’s Instagram account — which now counts 10 million followers — as well as powering exponential growth for Mayhoola-owned Balmain, where sales have increased more than ten-fold during his tenure.
In an exclusive interview with BoF, the designer talks about his vision, his longevity, the strength of his doubts, his relationship to social media fame, and the aftermath of a hijacked shipment just days before Paris Fashion Week.
You joined Balmain in 2009, and have been creative director since 2011. How do you account for this kind of longevity in a fashion world dominated by short-term bets?
I have been in these walls for 14 years. I started as the right-hand man [of Christophe Decarnin] in 2009. Being one of the players without being in control allowed me to immerse myself in the DNA of the house.
Since I took over, we’ve structured the project around a few key points:…
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