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Olivier Rousteing had just turned 26 when he presented his first show as Balmain’s creative director in the glorious ballroom of the Intercontinental Hotel, on September 28, 2011. “I was so scared, and so shy,” he remembered today. We were back in the very same venue tonight—a wonderful, historic space, but one Rousteing’s Balmain has long outgrown—in order to deliver a point. “This season everybody’s talking about a new era, and new beginnings,” he said. “But I believe that you can build your new era, and you make your new beginning, by being yourself in the same house and challenging yourself.”

It was interesting to look back at the opulent rigidity and tightness of that first Rousteing collection and compare it with this one. There was opulence here, but expressed organically: dresses, shoes, and bags embroidered with rustling clusters of ethically sourced seashells or wooden beads. The garments and bags were as generously tasseled and fringed as the heavy curtains of the ballroom, but with an intention that was more bohemian than baroque. Instead of those debut-day hyper-fitted tooled leather square shouldered blazers, there were drop-armed and action-shouldered ’80s style leather blousons.

Back in 2011 Rousteing had yet to develop his Balmain Army approach. And now in 2025 he has softened it dramatically, deconstructing the tropes of uniform into a slouchy, heavily draped silk and satin shadow of its former hardness. There were many couture tropes, but expressed with an unfussy approach epitomized by the elegantly twisted cowl in an off-the-shoulder cashmere cotton knit sweater worn north of a shelled skirt. A bodice hewn from rose crystal bore Balmain’s signature technical virtuosity, but dedicated to a product that emanated naturalness more than delicacy. This was barefoot luxury for couture sand.

Rousteing turned 40 two weeks ago, and is younger than most of this season’s bandwidth-dominating debut-making designers. He is also a very different man to the Rousteing of 14 years ago, and furthermore inhabits a very different time. He said: “If you want to hear from life and learn from life, you can be a new you—and that’s a bit what I’m expressing through the collection this season.”