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Liberté, Égalité, Modernité: How Olivier Rousteing Made Balmain a Revolutionary Force in Fashion

Yannick By on November 15, 2021 0 393 Views

Olivier Rousteing is sitting in a makeshift green room, talking with a group of business founders trying to reimagine the future of France. “There have been so many projects on my waiting list, and now finally we can make them happen,” he says, eyes wide. He is dressed, as usual, in black: black coat, black trousers, and, on his feet, clogs like black lapdogs, covered with faux fur. His fingers are shielded in long golden rings, giving his hands a mechanical fascination: half bling, half armor. When an attendant leads him to the stage wing, he leans against the wall and scrolls through Instagram. Rousteing became creative director of Balmain in 2011, at 25, and since then has consolidated the house’s power by courting the gaze of an extremely online demographic. He’s the chief force driving high Paris fashion from its old cloture, and—with some controversy—through a teeming, buzzy, digitally shaped new world.

“We might stay a bit afterward,” he murmurs to a colleague: He anticipates a large swarm of attention.

The conference where Rousteing is speaking now is not about fashion; it is called Fighters Day, and it’s a gathering of French entrepreneurs in the American mold: techies, start-up doyens, and “self-made” men and women of the kind who, until recently, scarcely existed in the French imagination. Onstage, in French, Rousteing speaks about his decision to set off on his own at 18—the first of several daring choices that shaped his path. “I left my fashion school after six months,” he says. “I fought because I had no school or background behind me, just determination and desire. I came to Paris, and it’s now 10 years since I’ve been creative director at Balmain.” He adds, softly, “It’s always a battle against yourself.”

The day’s unofficial motif is battling the odds outside the self, which has been a theme of Rousteing’s public life. A Black man reared in Bordeaux by two middle-class white parents, he is the highest-ranking person of color at the old Parisian houses, and he sits among two other business figures on the panel, also chosen for unusual paths: There’s Aminata Diouf, a former nanny who created the placement and training service Gribouilli, and Anthony Bourbon, a formerly homeless young man who started the meal-replacement shakes, bars, and powders company Feed. The panel is in Station F, a former freight center converted into a sleek start-up campus off Paris’s techie Quai d’Austerlitz. The audience is young, diverse, and multitalented, but Rousteing brings something distinct: an understanding of the way taste, creativity, and business intersect.

“For me it’s been very important to use clothes to talk about subjects such as diversity and ‘pop’—pop culture, population,” he says. “When I started my Instagram in 2013, I had a meeting with my president, who asked, ‘What are you doing? Luxury on Instagram is impossible. It’s cheap.’ ”

Since Rousteing’s wild ascent began, he has understood himself as an avatar of new paths: long hours, broken barriers, direct access, success beyond the old sclerotic elite channels. But recently, he’ll tell me later, he has wondered whether something has been lost in the gloss and glamour of ambition he has cultivated, and he’s started breaking barriers of a more personal kind.

“You have to embrace your fury,” he tells the crowd now. “But you also have to surround yourself with people who take care of you.” The keystone of this new effort, for Rousteing, has been the documentary Wonder Boy, by the filmmaker Anissa Bonnefont, which focuses on Rousteing’s fraught, heartbreaking efforts to learn the story of his birth parents. When it came out on Netflix in June, it was avidly watched in France, a success that local observers found unsurprising.

“Olivier is one of the most followed fashion designers in France, if not the most followed,” Pierre A. M’Pelé, himself a leader among the generation of French fashion journalists to reach prominence through online followings, recently said. “He understood very early on that social media and the digital sphere were inherent to the future of fashion—that it wasn’t just about shopping online but communicating directly with your audience. The reality is that people are hungry for fashion content, but also for more personal content: They want to know who is behind the brand, and about people’s lives. I blame this on the boom in reality TV over the past decade.” He paused. “But that’s what Olivier understood and has committed himself to.”

When Balmain—the only Parisian couture house to be endorsed by Gertrude Stein—opened in 1945, it seemed the incarnation of France’s smart, chic, internationalized postwar glamour. Pierre Balmain dressed Sophia Loren, Josephine Baker, Lady Astor, and the queen of Thailand. He combined trim tailoring with gorgeous flows of cloth to create strikingly proportioned profiles—eye-catching but modest, refined but unfussy—that came to be associated with the style called Jolie Madame and set a consumer standard for high fashion. After he died, in 1982, the house moved through the visions of other designers, changing all the while. There was Oscar de la Renta, who presided starting in 1992 and carried Balmain’s classicism into the new millennium. There was the upscale reimagination of glam rock by Christophe Decarnin, under whom Rousteing joined the house, in 2009.

When Rousteing ascended two years later, during a reshuffle following Decarnin’s sudden departure, he combined mass-market pragmatism (most of Rousteing’s collections include some pieces with a body-con, Saturday-night accessibility; he counts his 2015 collaboration with H&M among his proudest achievements) with a certain stridency of form and cut (he has been un-shy about strong patterns, angular cutouts, and, in one collection, a printed wolf-pack motif). “He represents the good in fashion—energy, passion, and fun,” says his fellow designer Kim Jones, who leads menswear at Dior and women’s at Fendi. Some say it’s easy to miss how deeply rooted in a distinctly French idea of craft Rousteing’s garments are. “People tend to think he’s, you know, a white girl from L.A., but there’s a lot more than that to it,” M’Pelé says. “There’s this idea that things can be incredibly well-made while remaining accessible visually—it’s almost an idea of the new French elegance.”

At a moment when many French houses reach the general public accessories-first, Balmain, which eked out an It bag only with its heritage-­inspired jacquard line last year, has gained ground because people buy its clothes: Under Rousteing, sales have increased sevenfold, and Balmain’s menswear market—which has in recent years become an index of a brand’s cool factor—has swelled to approximately 40 percent of its business. Almost from the start, Rousteing had anti-elite ambitions, with an emphasis on the ambitions: Reach beyond the domain of the fashion industry, he thinks, and you can summon pop-scale audiences. “You can be luxury talking to a huge community and not just a small bubble,” he says.

This was the Rousteing who commanded a battalion of avid volunteers on Instagram, with the result of promoting not only Balmain’s garments but also its whole aesthetic world. In the public eye, Rousteing cannily constructed himself as a character with close-buzzed hair, hollow cheeks, impossible coolness. He appeared in his own ad campaigns and seemed never to decline a selfie request, posing not just with the traditional red-carpet set but with a new mobile-screen-centered genre of celebrity that he dubbed “the Balmain Army.” Few figures have been more central to Rousteing’s fashion—and more emblematic of the brand of enthusiasm sometimes referred to as “Balmania”—than Kim Kardashian West, whom Rousteing met at the Met gala in 2013. They immediately hit it off personally and aesthetically. “He’s really fun and flashy, and he can go from sculptural to really casual while always making you feel glamorous,” Kardashian West explains. “Each of the pieces feels over-the-top in the best way.”

It was hard to forget Kardashian West sporting an exquisite silvery Balmain gown on the red carpet of the 2016 Met gala with much of her family wearing sibling garments in tow. But it was also hard to forget Rousteing pushing her sister Kendall, dressed in Balmain, into the sea at a New Year’s party in Dubai—a charming stunt that seemed custom-tailored to the contemporary GIF loop. “He just gets it, you know?” Kardashian West says. “He gets that you need to be in that space—whether it’s selling products or making sure there’s a social ­media moment, he knows it’s important.”

Image may contain Clothing Apparel Kendall Jenner Human Person Wedding Fashion Wedding Gown Gown Robe and Sleeve
Two of a Kind
Left: Model Kendall Jenner in a houndstooth coat and leather cap from Balmain. Right: Adut Akech in a Balmain jacket, T-shirt, and skirt. Jenner: Photographed by Daniel Jackson, Vogue, 2019; Akech: Photographed by Jackie Nickerson, Vogue, 2019

For years, the fashion establishment was slow to warm to his reorientation. During the long lockdowns, though, as life and work across the world became screen-mediated, Rousteing’s vision started to seem more practical and naturalistic: Screen style was now style proper; retail was a function of online energy. His efforts to pitch his fashion brand beyond the red carpet or the boutique window looked prescient. Rousteing’s colleagues say that nothing irks him more than the idea of a show attended only by the fashion press, and at a moment when a lot of designers have sent their shows back to basics—small audiences, modest surroundings—he has expanded venues, booked music acts, sold standing tickets, made the whole thing even more of a public display.

These days, you do not need to be in the fashion or entertainment elite to attend the unveiling of a Rousteing collection, which is not to say it’s easy to get in. Thousands of tickets to his 10th-­anniversary Balmain runway-​cum-concert in September, Balmain Festival VO2 (the lineup included Doja Cat and Franz Ferdinand)—Balmain’s second effort in this large-scale multimedia vein—were released online one morning in June, for a minimum donation of 15 euros, and were gone by the end of the day. “When you saw him at the first festival, the way he was connecting people, it was pretty obvious this was a format that worked,” says Alya Nazaraly, Balmain’s head of events, partnerships, and special projects. (The proceeds of the festival went to (RED), a nonprofit that helps with global health emergencies such as COVID and AIDS.) To Rousteing’s mind, the large open format reflects a motion toward democratization: Anyone who wants it enough has a chance to be there. “When you work in luxury, because of the supply chain, your price point has to be high,” he says. “But what you can at least do is present your product, your campaign, and your world to make people feel that they will one day have access to it.”

One morning in late June, Rou­steing makes his first visit to the September venue, La Seine Musicale, a concert space on an island in the Seine with Europe’s largest outdoor screen on the façade. When Rousteing arrives (black-on-black pinstripes, black hoodie, black baseball cap, black-and-gold Balmain sunglasses), the screen is playing a teaser for his festival, full of speed, music, and flash. “I’m usually unhappy and disappointed because I don’t think it will be enough,” Rousteing says, marveling at the array. “But this is really massive.” Outside, Nazaraly tells him, there will be vendors; inside, Rousteing takes wide steps across the main stage, trying to gauge the space and its relationship to the rows of seats above.

“I’d like a central screen,” he says, thoughtfully. “Because there’s an incredible moment in a Beyoncé video—​I don’t know whether I showed you.” He pulls out his phone and starts googling. “What I find interesting here is that there are, like, 20 Beyoncés. It would be kind of cool if those were our models. They’re not going to dance, but it would be great if there was one girl who came out and it felt like there were many.”

“I spoke with some top models, like Claudia Schiffer. I also spoke with Kim yesterday, and she’s coming. The idea is to have them come in before and record a video. Imagine 20 Kims who come and walk at the same time….”

He pulls up a Michael Jackson video. “I also like this,” he says. “You see—white box more than a black box? Very clean. The floor needs to be white, mixed with shiny and matte. What I imagine is a really immense screen—”

“Like U2?” Nazaraly jokes.

“Just saying,” Rousteing says with a kidding-but-not-kidding chuckle.

The collection, appearing in the midst of it all, begins with a recap of Rousteing’s best-known pieces of the past 10 years, cast entirely in a single color card, from cream to chocolate. “It’s a symbol for me of being mixed-race and Black African,” he explains. Then the runway changes over, and a wholly new profile is revealed, in black and white. “I thought, I want to do something from scratch—a new Balmain, a new Olivier, but still keeping my DNA.” I ask whether there’s a deliberate political overtone to the palette.

“At the end of the day, I’m paid to create clothes and to be a visionary in the fashion world,” he says. “But the idea that Black lives matter? To me this is not politics; it’s human rights,” he says. “Sometimes fashion people don’t get it and are like, ‘Oh, we don’t want to take a side.’ And I’m like”—he scrunches up his face—“Seriously?”

Image may contain Clothing Apparel Julia Stegner Human Person Hair Sleeve Zazie Beetz Furniture and Couch
Close Encounters
Model Julia Stegner wears a Balmain dress. Model and actor Ajani Russell wears a Balmain jacquard top and skirt. Actor Zazie Beetz wears a Balmain crop top and skirt. All clothing at balmain​.com. Makeup, Tyron Machhausen; hair, Nigella Miller. Braids for Beetz by Antoinette Black. Fashion Editor: Tabitha Simmons. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, November 2021

Rousteing came to his identity as a designer the same way he came to his identity as a person: gradually and in public view. As a child, he was always sketching and often lonely. He describes his family as nurturing and loving, but his origins cast a shadow of precarity over his life. “I was really scared to go back to an orphanage,” he explains to me. “I needed to make sure that my parents didn’t think they had made the wrong choice.”

He became a model student on the track to the white-collar elite. “In Bordeaux, a conservative city, everybody would rather I were a lawyer,” he says with a smile. But academic success didn’t bring him popularity. “I was off on my own. I never had friends,” he says. “I always loved to dress to be who I wanted to be, which was not always easy because of, you know, the meanness of kids at school.”

At home, he dreamed of the grandeur of the era’s global pop culture and the supermodels who embodied it. “There’s no one that, for me, was a greater influence than Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, and Claudia Schiffer,” he says. What he loved especially was that their influence went beyond the fashion industry: His mom, who knew nothing of fashion, knew them. The 21st century is largely an era of subcultural celebrity—there is no longer a paradox in encountering an ultrafamous person you have never heard of—but Rousteing has never lost sight of the dream of that pan-cultural success.

His decision to go to fashion school, at Paris’s ESMOD, flummoxed his family. “The beauty of my parents is that they never got it,” he says. “When I come back home, they still don’t understand. ‘Why this distress? Why this pressure—for a pair of shoes?’ ” His decision to leave fashion school after only a few months, launching into a competitive creative field with neither entrée nor degree, concerned them more. His first internships in haute couture were unpaid, so he danced in a club to cover expenses. “I have seen the beauty of the night,” he says. “And the worst parts.”

Rousteing describes his first years in fashion as an effort to match and merge: to try to be a designer of the sort he thought the industry wanted. Observers of those first collections recognized their deference. “When he started, he was very much building on the foundations left by Christophe Decarnin,” Pierre A. M’Pelé says.

Yet reception of the early collections was mixed, occasionally harsh. “It’s hard when you see people telling you that you have no talent and are not good enough to be in fashion,” he says. “You need to be respected by your team—they trust you, some twice your age. You come back home and feel, maybe I was the wrong choice.”

In answer to these anxieties, Rousteing doubled down and altered his approach. After three years as Balmain’s creative director, he experienced what he describes as a breakthrough: He decided that, instead of trying to match some ideal of the “perfect” Parisian-house designer, he would try to be himself.

Rousteing says that Instagram seemed like a revelation along those lines: He saw that he could use it to build an organic following for the brand. More attuned to the young mainstream than a lot of designers, Rousteing had noticed what he described as a growing distrust of traditional gatekeepers. Influencers, early on, let consumers bypass institutional taste.

Yet today the largest followings tend to go to the largest brands, which have staffed, strategic feeds: Social media is part of corporate marketing. That’s why, Rousteing thinks, normal people have moved on; the distrust that used to shadow the glossy page now touches Instagram, which young people are starting to see as too managed, too inauthentic, too top-down. So Rousteing has again changed lanes and swerved ahead.

At the moment, he explains, Balmain is going all-in on entertainment—music, broadcast series, film—and text. “I think words are going to be so much more important in the future,” he says. “People are going to look for stories more than a picture that’s going to vanish after two seconds.” As Balmain sees it, the future is narrative.

One afternoon in summer, Netflix’s chief marketing officer, Bozoma Saint John, shows up at the Balmain studio with a group of French Netflix staffers in tow. Saint John, who first came to prominence on the Apple product stage, is tall, gregarious, commanding, and—although she has just flown in from Los Angeles—more Parisian-​looking than all the Parisians in view. She wears her hair, gently burgundy-tinted, in an elegant updo, and is dressed in a pristine black-and-white Balmain ensemble with big brass buttons. Saint John offers Rousteing a box of Tatie Cookies, and the Netflix crew sits opposite him at his desk, an enormous L of polished black marble. (“My mausoleum,” he likes to say: It is where he spends an eternity of time.) A window nearby is open to the fresh air. Rousteing smokes like a French chimney, drawing each cigarette down to its first knuckle and stubbing it out. His brand, appropriately enough, is American Spirit.

He regales the group with a story about Coachella, where he costumed Beyoncé and her troupe for their headline performance in 2018. It was, he says, one of his proudest moments, and his hardest. “They were adding dancers every day—we started at 150 and ended up around 300. I’m like, Do I have enough fabric?”

“Like, Oh, my God, how am I going to outfit everybody?” Saint John chimes in sympathetically.

“All my life I’ll remember the body rehearsal,” Rousteing goes on dreamily. “Bey was next to me—there was a girl singing for her when she was trying to rest her voice—and Bey started to sing ‘Crazy in Love’ next to me.”

“And you’re over here trying not to sing along!” Saint John says. “Trying to pretend it’s all cool.”

“And then my grandma started calling me because I hadn’t been answering for a couple of days. I’m like, ‘It’s Beyoncé—can you call me back?’ She’s like, ‘Stop lying!’ ”

Image may contain Clothing Apparel Evening Dress Fashion Gown Robe Kate Moss Human Person Plant and Flower
Lady in Red
Model Kate Moss in a handkerchief-hem jersey minidress from Balmain. Photographed by Venetia Scott, Vogue, 2015

Rousteing remains exceptionally close to his grandparents, who have been known to appear at his shows and weep with pride: “They have the sweetest hearts,” he says. “And they’re cool in the real sense of cool: They’re the kinds of 85-year-old people who are always ahead of their time.” They figure in his stories as much as the big names he cannot help but drop—the time, for instance, he and Justin Bieber were so famished they stopped for a cheeky pizza slice en route to the Met gala. Meetings with Rousteing tend to have a meandering, spitballing, klatch-session rhythm: Compliments and enthusiasms are volleyed, ideas are floated without commitment, requests are made so obliquely it’s unclear whether they’re requests at all—a style more L.A. than Left Bank. Over the past couple of years, Balmain has built an unofficial creative relationship with Netflix, which released Wonder Boy and produced an even larger project: the film The Harder They Fall, a revenge Western, directed by Jeymes Samuel and produced by Jay-Z, with a Black cast, including Idris Elba, Regina King, Jonathan Majors, and Zazie Beetz.

“I found it very interesting, as I was doing my research, that 25 percent of cowboys or people in the West at the time were Black—I had no idea,” says Beetz, who plays a flinty saloon proprietress on the frontier. “We were a large part of that history, yet you don’t see it in our media or any kind of cinematic depiction of that time.” The movie’s costume designer, Antoinette Messam, incorporated period and contemporary elements and built a collaboration with Balmain to help flesh out this imaged frontier. “I was very adamant that I needed my character’s outfits to be functional,” Beetz recalls. “She is a woman who gets shit done—she travels and fights and is known for her strength and ability, and she’s a businesswoman—and this isn’t her first rodeo.”

The Harder They Fall is in many ways the perfect realization of Rou­steing’s hopes for Balmain’s growing reach. (“Let’s make the younger generation feel that that kind of story wasn’t all for one color,” he says.) For the house, it is an opportunity to bring garments into the public eye beyond the runway or the red carpet, and in a more organic setting than the churn of an ad campaign: Balmain and Netflix are collaborating on a capsule retail collection, inspired by the movie, to be available in early November. Creative screen projects are not unheard-of for fashion labels—Tom Ford has directed; brands such as Saint Laurent have commissioned films—but the results tend to be, in the most immediate sense, fashion-centric: pieces about style, created with an auteur-like designer’s hand. Rousteing envisaged something different: entertainment that was simply good entertainment, that would circulate on its own strength. If the program as a whole is widely appealing enough, he reasons, its fashion acquires an audience naturally, because viewers are swept into its imaginative world.

Balmain’s flagship project in this vein is Fracture, a miniseries for Britain’s Channel 4 that was conceived and developed in-house. Across five 10- to 17-minute episodes, it tells a story of circumstantial convergence. Maya, a young woman (played by the American singer-songwriter Jesse Jo Stark, who also contributes original music) has arrived at a grim motel, called Le Rêve, in a semi-­desperate state. She wants to be a musical star, but she cannot find her muse. At the motel, she connects with her queer half-sibling (Tommy Dorfman), starts to fall in love with a mysterious itinerant poet (Charles Melton), and encounters other colorful characters, such as Annie (Ajani Russell). The muse, eventually, appears. “I don’t think Annie knows exactly what the obstacle is that Maya was trying to overcome or what her turmoil is currently about,” says Russell, an actor, activist, and skateboarder. “But she knows that it’s creatively related, and she just wants to see her friend succeed.”

“Each character represents a different persona that Olivier has in his head when he creates,” Michail Papadogkonas, Balmain’s head of content creation, who saw development through from start to finish with Nazaraly, tells me. The final editing is wrapping up as Rousteing calls Lee Mason, then a commissioning editor at Channel 4, via Zoom from his office.

“I’m so excited about Fracture!” Rousteing explodes. “It’s always been a dream for me.”

“My pleasure—we’re always looking for interesting ways to fund drama,” Mason said. (Balmain helped rustle up the funding.) “But we also want to do something we’re creatively proud of.” He added, “It just feels so forward-thinking. You’re representing characters in a way that a lot of drama hasn’t got to yet—and I’ve made a lot of LGBTQ+ shows.”

“I know—I’ve seen all of them,” Rousteing shoots back.

Rousteing sometimes describes himself as an embodiment of “la nouvelle France,” a term that has become in equal parts hopeful and vexed. For ambitious young people—especially those, like Rousteing and his co-­panelists at Station F, who are of color, disadvantaged, or poorly connected to the old establishment—the prospect of a more open, competitive, putatively meritocratic France has freeing appeal. (“The strength of France is the history; the weakness of France is the history,” Rousteing says.) On the other side of the ledger are concerned that “la nouvelle France” is basically an Americanized France: manic, mercenary, corner-cutting, and increasingly indistinct. Why would you transform a world-renowned paragon of taste and style, the worry goes, into a minor player in the blur of global corporate commerce? Will France ever win at the Kardashian game—and, if not, why forfeit a century of elite-craft fashion leadership to join that league? Rousteing finds this view out of joint with the realities of an international age. “Am I Americanized? Yes. I’m proud of it,” he tells me. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong about being influenced by another country. This is the beauty of being global.”

Rousteing’s collections have referenced ’90s global-pop influences, and he spends most nights now getting home from work at 10 p.m. and scarfing down a plate of sushi or pasta while watching Elite or Too Hot to Handle—hardly L’art de Vivre in the traditional mold. One afternoon in the office, perched at his marble desk, he dials up a small group at Puma, with which he is hoping to release a basketball shoe endorsed by Kyle Kuzma, of the Washington Wizards—the continuation of a collaboration with Puma that Balmain started in 2019, in a campaign fronted by Cara Delevingne.

“Any thoughts from your side on how we want to start to get the message out?” Adam Petrick, Puma’s global director of brand and marketing, asks. “Does it pop up on a court? Does it pop up on a person? Does it get leaked? Where does the shoe appear in front of people for the first time?”

“I almost feel it should appear during a game, you know?” Rou­steing says. “I think it would be nice if, when the game starts, there would be a video where you explain the dream coming true.”

The meeting progresses, but Rousteing remains distracted, still imagining the nonexistent video.

“Maybe you see a kid 20 years ago, sketching that shoe on the corner of his table in the classroom, just dreaming of being a basketball player,” he says all of a sudden, starting slowly. “He’s dreaming he’ll get over all the struggle that he had in his life as a kid and as an adolescent. One day he wakes up being one of the most successful basketball players in the world talking to the kid that he was and saying, Looks, you started to sketch that shoe as a simple kid dreaming of being a basketball player”—he’s speaking quickly now, as if in a trance—“and now he’s one of these guys who is super strong and that we all love, an idol, and has that shoe on his feet and starts to win, and you see the applause of people around him, and he’s so loved and admired.” He pauses to catch his breath, then adds, “You know: Sketch your life, sketch your dream.”

Master of Ceremonies  Rousteing after his spring 2022 show in September.
Master of Ceremonies
Rousteing, after his spring 2022 show in September. Photo: Alessandro Lucioni / Gorunway.com

For most of Rousteing’s life, both he and his adoptive parents believed that he was biracial. In Wonder Boy, he learns during his search for his adoption file that both his parents were Black Africans, his mother from Djibouti and his father from Ethiopia. He’d always assumed that they had a relationship, but the truth, he finds, is more disturbing. At the time of his conception, his father was 25, his mother 14. She noted no relationship between them in the papers filed at his birth—a cesarean delivery because, it’s thought, her hips were too narrow to bear him. When Rousteing learns this information, he begins to sob uncontrollably before the documentarian’s camera. “C’est atroce,” he says: atrocious, horrible. He’d hoped that they were two adults in love.

At the end of the documentary, Rousteing writes his birth mother, whose identity he’s not allowed to know, a letter, for delivery through channels, but he never has it sent: He doesn’t want to force himself on her world, he says. Perhaps, he hopes, she’ll see the documentary and recognize her son in his success. Maybe she will get in touch herself.

One bright morning, when the city is warm, humid, and redolent of jasmine, I visit Rousteing at his home, tucked behind a chain supermarket in one of the most squarely middle-class neighborhoods left in central Paris. Inside, the normie pretense breaks. A private courtyard leads to a vaulted staircase trimmed with ferns and banana plants. The decor, black and white with a natural wood floor and a gabled glass ceiling shaded by slatted wood blinds, has a resort-like, equatorial-cabana air. I take a seat on one of several low pieces of black furniture on a furry black rug. Large door-length windows open out onto a lush brick patio that looks as if it could be in Los Angeles, Miami, or São Paulo—anywhere but Paris. Some large-format art books are piled on a dark-marble table behind the sofas (“I’m inspired by things that give me emotions,” Rousteing says; “it can be a beautiful book of pictures…or I can go to an exhibition and be moved and touched by art”), and before me, on a mirror-like table, sits a scented candle, a carafe of water, and some bowls of beautiful morning pastry.

Rousteing gets a cup of coffee, collapses onto a low chair, and lights up an American Spirit. He is dressed in a simple black hoodie, his thumbs frayed through its cuffs, and black leggings. The rings are off.

“I’ve always had a kind of carapace, a kind of a mask,” he tells me. “I think sometimes I went too far and played a character who became myself more than who I was.” Living as a persona, he felt protected—precisely because the Rousteing whom the world saw wasn’t the one who emerged at home or with friends. Lately, though, Rousteing confesses to me, he has begun to worry about the public mask becoming his real face.

“When you see a documentary about designers after they’re dead, you see that they were vulnerable, fragile, alone. But they never really showed that at the moment,” he says. “I think it’s important for designers to say that they are struggling, and it’s hard, and not an easy world.” Too often, he thinks, the aspirational fantasy of fashion blurs into a lie about the fashionable life being perfect. “The problem with burnout and pressure in fashion,” he says, “is that many designers have to pretend.”

Wonder Boy, then, was Rousteing’s maiden effort to stop pretending, to be open and self-revealing: “The camera was like a contract with myself,” he says. Yet it quietly emerges that he prefers to put himself out there before the lens, with its great, anonymous audience, then before individual people in his life. Rou­steing is a 36-year-old gay man who, by his account, has not had a boyfriend in 15 years. In the documentary, he chats with one of the few confidants he keeps, his driver Mohammed, about a handsome young man at his gym whom he doesn’t dare approach; we watch him returning to the vast home where, after work, he eats by himself at a large table, like the lonely astronaut at the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“I’m really lonely, but I’m not asking for sympathy,” he tells me. “I have friends”—people like Kardashian West, Delevingne, his driver, and some old buddies—“but I don’t have a lot of friends. It’s really quality over quantity for me.” He adds, “I don’t do many dinners, I don’t go out much, I love being on my own or to chill with one or two friends.” His image of being an impossibly cool party boy always out on the town, he says, is just that: something—like the airplane flights he hates, owing to claustrophobia but puts himself through constantly—that he finds necessary for success and the wide acclaim he knows he craves.

“I think everybody needs to be loved. The difference between me and the rest is that I just want to be loved by everybody, not one single person,” he says. “I need the eyes of the public to feel alive.” In a sense, the current world, in which vulnerability is often easier to perform publicly than privately, is one that Rousteing’s digital-age vision helped create. Finishing Wonder Boy convinced him that the full, more authentic package of Olivier Rousteing had a market (“I feel the need to go bigger, more global”), but it also underscored how isolated much of his life was. “I think, you know, I was happy to have the camera,” he tells me, very softly. “Because for a moment I was—I had people in my life, you know?”

Rousteing admits to me that he still does not feel he has attained enough success to find peace and wonders whether he ever will. He asks whether I know the myth of Icarus. “The story is about flying, flying, flying until you burn yourself, and I think it’s a bit the story of my life,” he says. “I want to be more free. But being free can also be a danger because you can sometimes dream too big.”

Like the boy worried about being sent back to the orphanage, he frets constantly about losing the luck and favor that has secured his upward flight so far. “When I worked with Beyoncé at Coachella, I never said no to anything she asked for, because I didn’t want her to feel that I was the wrong designer to do it—you know, like, Oh my God, why did I choose Balmain?” he tells me. I ask where this fear comes from. Rousteing is silent for a while, then gently wipes the edge of his right eye.

“I think the drive and the fury of success and wanting to feel free comes from the fact that I would rather be loved for who I am than hated for who I’m not,” he says.

When the Fighters Day panel ends at Station F, everybody on the dais stands, and the audience rushes the stage. A cluster has formed around Rousteing, three or four people are deep. A queue follows his press person, who dutifully passes his email address around. I have been spotted with somebody who was spotted with Rousteing, so people query me too: Can I get a message to him? Rou­steing squats at the edge of the stage, looking magisterial, fiddling with his rings, patiently listening to people as they tell stories or pitch him their dreams.

Then all at once, it’s time to go—the other panelists, unaccosted, have cleared out—and an extraction operation starts. Rousteing is passed between two staffers, squeezed through the stage door by two more, and shuttled down a hallway, where he’s intercepted by a phalanx of guards in dark suits. They whisk him out a side exit to the street, and from there, looking all around, toward the black SUV in which Mohammed waits.

Rousteing is wearing his black COVID mask, and his other, more personal mask too: cheeks sucked in, sunglasses on, the perfect image of a glamorous, much-photographed star. Somewhere between the theater and the car, he lights a cigarette, and then, with an air that could be relief or resignation, crushes it underfoot, rushes forward, and is bundled into the car’s open door, swallowed once again into the shadows of a private world.

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