Celine's Rider finds his thread in Paris with flower power and foulards

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PARIS (AP) — Michael Rider’s second collection for Celine, shown Sunday in the Parc de Saint-Cloud, confirmed that his reset of the house is less rupture than weaving together its many pasts.

Where his July debut toyed with former Celine designer Phoebe Philo’s minimalism and Hedi Slimane’s bourgeois tailoring, at Paris Fashion Week Rider took a single motif — the foulard — and spun it into the season’s grammar.

Scarves were no longer accessories. They became structure: stitched into long, fluid dresses as if pieced from a dozen vintage squares; reshaped as silky tops; or peeking from the lining of an otherwise plain trench. Even handbags carried scarf fragments as decoration.

Around that anchor, Rider played with contrasts. Seventies flower power re-emerged in psychedelic A-line minis with clean silhouettes, their retro exuberance tempered by modern restraint. Oversize men’s suiting — black, double-breasted, cut with assurance — grounded the collection in sharp tailoring. A maxi skirt, buttoned and unbuttoned to reveal another layer beneath, nodded to both history and invention, elegant and forward at once.

Quirks gave the show its edge: a multicolored banded arm sock, color-blocked panels that signaled the return of a once-maligned trend. These touches recalled the “compellingly unsettling” play with proportion in his debut, suggesting that Rider’s strategy is less about imposing a total new look than about debating inheritance — a generational stance visible across fashion’s current musical-chairs season.

Paris Fashion Week has been marked by an unprecedented number of debuts — Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe, Miguel Castro Freitas at Mugler, and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel coming on Monday.

For some, the lack of a radical break at LVMH's third biggest fashion house may still frustrate. Rider’s fondness for collage can read as hesitation. Yet Sunday’s show suggested confidence rather than doubt: a designer willing to fold Philo’s female-first minimalism, Slimane’s bourgeois drama and his own preppy past into a coherent new language — one scarf at a time.