A stolen shipment did not stop Olivier Rousteing from going the whole hog at Balmain, flowers et al

In his show notes for Balmain’s spring/summer collection, Olivier Rousteing addressed the “stolen” clothes that took place two weeks ago. “The recent robbery of fifty of our pieces was definitely not the type of news that my team and I were hoping to hear in the days leading up to this presentation,” he wrote. “But, of course, a big part of working in fashion is always trying to deal as best you can with unexpected setbacks.” Apparently the police found the getaway van and recovered “some of the boxes”, but, according to WWD, they remained with the police for fingerprinting. Mr Rousteing did not specify what was taken, and, therefore, what needed to be replaced and stitched up at the last minute. Despite the misfortune (some skeptics had called it a “stunt”) just 10 days before the presentation (last night, our time), the Balmain show—described by many as “defiant”—seemed unaffected by the caper.

The unprecedented may have struck, but it did not put a damper on the unrestrained. The clothes were as maximalist as ever. To better flaunt his more-is-best approach to designing, Mr Rousteing sent out the models onto a simple, undistracting, set-free runway with what looked like hospital curtains for a backdrop inside the Théâtre National de la Danse. And a soundtrack of an extended mix of Björk’s 1997 track Bachelorette (the Icelandic singer wore Balmain on her 2019 tour). That was all he needed to show off his not-always-delightful blooming exuberance. Mr Rousteing himself wrote—intentionally self-deprecatingly—on his Instagram page prior to the show: “Florals for spring? Groundbreaking…” He need not, in fact, shatter anything. His couture-seeming Balmain would not trailblaze or change fashion’s course forward, no matter how strewn with flowers the path is.

The collection was totally at odds with the utility fervour seen in the first three days of Paris Fashion Week (e.g. Saint Laurent and Dries Van Noten). Adoration of flowers can be appreciated, the injudicious use, not so. One outfit was so smothered with rosettes, Behati’s Tan Kel Wen would leap up in utter joy. However, Mr Rousteing offered not just rosettes. Some of the blooms looked sugar-spun, some stuck out like bad icing. There was a bodice that looked like a discarded spray after a wedding. A few dresses were so encrusted, the embellishments deserved the packing tag, fragile. Flowers did not merely appear as prints; there were hand-painted blooms that crept on mini cage-dresses to suggest growth on trellises. Sitting is not an option when wearing them, we presume.

If blooms were not enough, there were dendritic embellishments (mimicking thorns, apparently), branching through the body, and, in one outfit, out of the shoulder, bracketing the jaw, like sepals of buds. Parenthesis for comeliness? Putting aside the gaudy ornamentation, some looks such as a (pointy) brassiere-and-full-skirt combo suggested Michael Kors, while clash of floral prints or the rosettes that punctuated the hips of a miniskirt old Moschino. Much of the collection’s silhouettes gleefully reaped from the Balmain archives, index between the ’70s and ’80s, and appeared to have been made out with Joan Collins’s wardrobe in mind. There is no denying that the pieces go beyond the application of standard dress-making trims. It is understandable that, given the uninspiring glamazon silhouettes, it was necessary to embellish. But even in the fields, mother nature knows when to stop.

Screen shot (top): balmain.com. Photos: Launchmetrics Spotlight