Celine

Celine was founded in Paris in 1945 when Céline Vipiana and her husband Richard opened a small shop dedicated to made-to-measure children’s shoes. In the 1960s, the duo steadily expanded into women’s ready-to-wear and accessories, crafting trench coats and handbags that became part of the uniform for modern French women. Luxe sportswear with couture-like finishing was, and is, Celine’s raison d’être.

Michael Kors was brought in to revive the label in the late 1990s, but it was Phoebe Philo who made Celine one of the most important brands in luxury fashion after she joined in 2008. Critics credited her with pushing fashion in a new direction, toward a more spare, stripped-down kind of sophistication. What Philo’s Celine offered women was, as Vogue put it, “a grown-up and hip way to put themselves together.”

Through the 2010s, that minimalism took on an artsier tone and influenced an entire generation of young designers (and more than a few copycats). Perhaps the only name as influential as Philo’s at that time was Hedi Slimane, who shocked the industry by ushering in a vintage-y, grungy California vibe at Saint Laurent. When Philo departed Celine in late 2017 Slimane was named her successor.

Before he’d even designed a garment, it was clear his “new Celine” would be a clean break from the old. Slimane’s first order of business was to drop the accent over the e in Céline Vipiana’s name, just as he’d cut “Yves” from Yves Saint Laurent; he revived the Arc de Triomphe logo and introduced Celine’s first-ever menswear collectsion, bringing his signature New Wave suits to a new customer.

Slimane found similar inspiration in Celine’s “luxe sportswear” past. His particular obsession is the brand’s bourgeois aesthetic of the ’70s, “a time of nonfashion,” as Vogue’s Sarah Mower wrote of his agenda-setting fall 2019 collectsion. If those pleated skirts, knee-high boots, and tweed blazers made up the “uniform” of ’70s parisiennes, Slimane made those items newly relevant—and downright desirable—for his digitally adept Millennial disciples.

After another transformative tenure, the future aesthetic of the house felt like a question mark following Slimane’s departure in 2024. However, his successor, Michael Rider—a former employee of the brand under Philo’s reign—quickly charted a new course as he stepped back into his old shoes.

A former creative director of Polo Ralph Lauren, Rider reintroduced the original crescent “C” logo and ignited an American in Paris-tinged preppy craze that he accented with styling tricks like piled-on necklaces or an abundance of scarves. Two seasons in, Rider honed in on slim-fit, classic silhouettes, with many tempting extras. “That’s Rider’s knack,” said Mower of the fall 2026 collectsion. “He lets it seem as if it’s up to us to put all of this together in our own way, while deftly providing all the desirable accompaniments to go with it.”