Balmain Fall 2023 Menswear Collection

The Hotel Regina, just across from the Louvre, is where many of my fashion colleagues rest their heads at the end of a long day of shows. Its proximity to A Jean Nicot, plus its creaky parquet floors and ancient plumbing are part of its charm—plus it’s usually pretty quiet. Not tonight though.

“We’ve had a great crowd,” said Olivier Rousteing at around 7PM. For his menswear presentation Rousteing invited clients, celebrities, and fashion folk to drop into Regina’s velvet upholstered bar. Inevitably cast members of Emily in Paris were present—“because who doesn’t relate to Emily in Paris?”—as well as a host of up-and-comers from a multitude of territories. Champagne coupes were tilted and gossip shared as wave after wave of drop-ins came and went. Crucially all of them mingled with models wearing some of the 45 looks from Balmain’s fall ’23 collection.

My favorite was Mamour, the model in look number 2, who towered over the crowd in his platform penny loafers. You could not see these because of the long-hemmed and kicky flared velvet pants spotted with crystals—“because Mr. Balmain was obsessed with polka dots”—that were worn underneath a tightly tailored jacket, accentuated cuff shirt and “mega bow” tie. Following his back-to-the-house’s-roots womenswear collection, Rousteing extended the theme tonight by looking at Pierre Balmain’s debut menswear collection, released in 1966. Rousteing incorporated elements of that period’s Rive Gauche vs. Rive Droit aesthetic tension and was also inspired by the earliest commercial sketches by Karl Lagerfeld, produced during his first ever paid gig—which was for Balmain. The 1970s Labyrinth monogram, pointed collars, crystal basque dressing (here applied to suiting) and cleverly cinched jolie madame silhouette were all crossover elements from the womenswear show we saw earlier this week.

By diving deep into looks that sometimes seemed anachronistic but were also sometimes stone-cold classics—again, the theme of the season—Rousteing was fomenting a delicately questioning provocation. Its answer? As he put it: “I think there is a shift of what the new world and its people want to see from fashion: they want to dream about something that is timeless. The past is a safe space, but it also informs the present and helps us understand the future.”