Story

november 5, 2015

Text Henrik Skansen with Fredrik Austad & Maren Serine
Photos H&M x Balmain, Dior and Lanvin.

This is Headlines, a monthly column by our menswear blogger Henrik Skansen with selected highlights from the worldwide fashion scene.

1. Finally, after a wait that has seemed like forever, H&M x Balmain reveal their design collaboration. The collection has received an enormous amount of attention in social media. Balmain’s creative director, Olivier Rousteing, is the mastermind behind the internet hype that is based on a quite simple Instagram tactic. See, this fall’s most succsessful marketing strategy in Fashion was really not too complicated. The hype started with the arrangement of a preview show in New York this September where the H&M x Balmain collaboration was shown to selected powerful internet personalities. They were thrilled and by discovering the popular it-girls, Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid, that were some the big Instagram names that strolled down the runway, presenting #HMBalmaination to bloggers, Instagram celebrities and international Fashion press that instantly shared their snapshots with their followers. The collection is supposedly the most expensive design collaborations that H&M has done so far, and is expected to hit the stores worldwide the 5th of November. This might be something worth waiting in line for as we approve some of the materials and cuts to be quite good, but if you want to see for yourself, have a look at the campaign video here.

2. Raf Simons is leaving the House of Dior, a House with a maximalist legacy, after only three years as Creative Director. The Belgian designer that previously has spent seven years at the quite contrasting Jill Sander fashion house, famous for their minimalistic profile, was considered to be a promising new and exciting chapter for the house of Dior when he succeeded Fashion’s bad boy John Galliano in 2011. The official press release stated that Simons is leaving for “personal reasons”.

For those who want to learn about the heritage of the French fashion house Dior, we recommend the documentary “Dior & I”: an already quite legendary film that among other treats gives an insight to the process where Simons and his team created the first Dior Haute Couture collection from his brief leadership that now is history.

3.  Speaking of leaving; after 14 years as creative director in another French Designer House, Alber Elbaz is now leaving the luxury brand Lanvin, seeking new adventures. The Fashion media speculated around the possibility of him succeeding Raf Simons at Dior. What we have found to be an interesting detail among all of this Fashion Scene dramatics is that Elbaz himself has expressed frustration over a growing tendency of a development in the fashion system that worries him alot; it seems that that couturiers are forced to limit their artistry into simply function as image-makers for the brands. «Maybe we are no longer the industry of newness, because that was taken by technology, but we’re still an industry of a man and a woman, of a thread and a needle, of fabric and a dream» the respected Israeli designer proclaims and highlights a topic that mon Dieu agrees with him to be a possible tragedy for the people of the Fashion world that are more fond of aesthetic high quality than by devious internet hype.