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On the last afternoon of Paris Men’s Fashion Week, at the Tennis Club de Paris on Sunday 28 June, Michael Rider showed his first standalone menswear collection for Celine, closing a season of debut shows with something that left most reviewers reaching for words they couldn’t quite find.
The short version: Brown University, 2002; Balenciaga under Ghesquière until 2008; then a decade as design director of ready-to-wear under Phoebe Philo at Celine; then creative director at Polo Ralph Lauren from 2018 until May 2024, where he was credited with revitalising the brand’s preppy heritage and had some whispering he was a potential successor to Lauren himself. LVMH announced his appointment as Celine’s artistic director in October 2024, succeeding Hedi Slimane after seven years. What the CV doesn’t quite capture is that after Philo’s departure in 2017, Rider spent time teaching French lessons to migrants at the Jungle camp in Calais before eventually landing at Ralph Lauren. That gap is the most interesting thing about him, and it says something about the kind of designer he turns out to be.
His debut womenswear collection arrived in July 2025 to considerable goodwill, drawing on the Philo years and the Slimane era without seeming anxious about either. Critics praised it as a seamless melding of Celine’s present and past, the skinny trousers of Slimane, the cool culottes of Philo, and the American sportswear ease that has always been Rider’s own register. Florists delivered gigantic bouquets of sunflowers and roses addressed to “Mikey” to the house’s Rue Vivienne headquarters for days afterwards. The FW26 menswear followed in January 2026 as an intimate multi-room walkthrough rather than a runway, giving guests direct access to the clothes and their construction. Sunday was his first time putting menswear on a proper catwalk in front of a full show audience.
At the end of a rather sluggish menswear season in Europe, for many critics, Celine Menswear was something new. That reads as a compliment. The collection resists easy categorisation in a way that feels deliberate rather than accidental. Not quite preppy, not quite bohemian, not minimalist, not rocker. Wallpaper described it as melding Ivy League prep with a Parisian insouciance rooted in the house’s codes, which is accurate but still doesn’t quite capture what made it feel different from everything else shown across the week.
Rider said he wasn’t working to a theme, just developing the Celine man’s wardrobe, building toward something with legs and roots. The looks: ballooning trousers, metallic leather jeans, colourful cummerbunds, low-profile shoes, sandals and sneakers across a wide range of variations. A collection of eclecticism and ease, where pieces seem to exist in a pleasurable state of having been chosen rather than designed. That is considerably harder to achieve than it sounds, and it is the quality that has defined Rider’s Celine from the beginning. His work for the house is, as nss magazine put it ahead of the show, “fun, wearable and possesses a playful sense of volume, decoration and colour” while remaining relatively classic. The tension between those two registers is where it lives.
Celine’s menswear has not always had a settled identity. Slimane introduced it and shaped it through his rock-inflected, narrow-shouldered vision. The rider’s version is looser, more personal, less obviously branded, and a standalone show on the schedule signals that the house is serious about growing it. Kering CEO Luca de Meo announced earlier this year that Saint Laurent intends to more than double its men’s business by 2030. Celine competing for the same menswear customer, at the same moment, is less a coincidence than a declaration.
Rider has spoken throughout his time at the house about instinct over intellectualisation, about clothes that change how you walk and feel rather than clothes that illustrate a concept. He turned down opportunities to lead other houses before this one, waiting until Celine came back around. Sunday’s collection looked like the reason why.
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