Sensitivity&Style

Michael Rider's intuition is setting us all free

hiii mi goodie girls! I hope you’re having a great summer.

If you’re anything like me, and in any capacity online, Michael Rider is most likely in your screenshots folder. D.C. bred and Paris buttered, the American Creative Director of Celine has infused the runway with joyous optimism, no small feat in today’s climate. This alone would prompt anyone to dog-ear his collections. Let me set the scene for you - I’m SPRINTING through JFK to catch my flight (I don’t run, and that day I became an airport runner, arguably the worst label to acquire). I hear them calling group 8, I pause, questioning the amount of time I have to pop into the newsstand to grab a Vogue and parmesan crisps. Mentally weighing the pros/cons of having being fed graphically and physically versus being unstimulated and hangry on my 6 hour flight home. I checkout and scan my boarding pass all during final call. Boomshakalaka yes lawd.

At current, I’m reading Empire of the Elite, which has been eye opening and riveting, both encouraging and revealing about Condé Nast’s origin, evolution, and (I’m still in the midst of it, but I would assume there’s a third phase of the corporation). Which, if you work in any sort of realm adjacent to marketing, branding, fashion, PR, influencer, etc… put it on da list baby. The way in which we even can publish writing here on Substack has its roots in the trailblazing corporate offices of Condé Nast. The way in which Hollywood is somewhat synonymous with Vogue, how celebrities are walking ads and front row on the runway, and even the way I have the opportunity to make money on brand partnerships, someone at Condé Nast paved the way for. It’s truly fascinating peek into the bricks of the industry.

book

All this to say, it prompted me to pick up a print magazine #BRINGBACKPRINT. Let me tell you, I dog-eared my way through the issue like the words were going to get up and walk off the page. Corner after corner, folded down, like I was trying to keep a hold of sentences before they could get away from me. Perhaps the most captivating was the hero article on Michael Rider. Rider, a DC native, had his first chapter at Celine years ago, before becoming the creative director of womenswear at Polo Ralph Lauren. Now returning to his rightful throne at Celine, it’s hard to ignore the cobblestone avenues he’s traversing down, how many heads have turned, and how much joy he’s ignited with his recent collections.

“Most people who are sensitive have deep relationships with the things that they wear. And those people tend to have a lot of style. I wish I got that feeling more from fashion.” (a sickeningly accurate quote from Rider)

He’s a tactile designer - thinking in fabric weights and textures, in how something feels on a body. “When real life is your moodboard,” he says, “ideas jump out from everywhere if you’re paying attention.” I’m always looking at everything — definitely people. I’m also a collector. I have a lot of stuff inside of me that somehow finds an outlet. (editors note I’m physically sick at this sentence I had to put the magazine down).

Suddenly the quote wasn’t about him, the article wasn’t a Vogue correspondent interviewing him on a crisp spring day in Paris, it was like reading my own journal. It was mine. Word for word, my whole personality, rearranged into a stranger's mouth. The collecting, the noticing, the stuff inside of me that somehow finds an outlet.

His brother said something about him that I keep turning over: that he (Michael) took an early interest in what people wore, possibly as a way of trying to understand where he fit into the larger world. His wardrobe became identity and creative outlet at once, before it ever became a job. BROOOOO that was ME!! In Louisiana, desperately trying to take a hammer to a southern mold. Using it as my armor to defend myself.

Albeit an intern at Nicolas Ghesquière’s Balenciaga was a 180 degree pivot from being a Latin American studies major at Brown, Rider knew it was the tip of the iceberg to his calling. As the article goes on, “[it becomes] more and more clear that if Balenciaga was his apprenticeship, joining Celine in 2008 as the design director of ready-to-wear, where he worked under Philo, was his coming of age.”

mi coveted MR for Celine sunnies

There’s something about Rider leaving for RL all those years ago that feels so right. “You have to know when something is special and unique and leave it at that,” he said. “I wanted to breathe.” So he went to Ralph Lauren, dubbing Ralph a fabulous dreamer and storyteller in his own right, to run womenswear at Polo RL for a while, somewhere and someone that let him dream differently before Celine came calling him back, changed and re-energized.

TBH I don’t think I’ve fully made peace with that part yet… the leaving to breathe, the knowing when something is finished with you even if you’re not finished with it. That might be its own substack someday. Today is NAWT that day mi dolls, not during this violating retrograde it’s not.

All that to say - I simply cannot stop thinking about this piece. But sitting with it longer, I think what’s resonating is bigger than a feeling I'm chasing or not chasing. It’s the way Rider is making decisions with intellect and heart. It's the fact he’s so eloquently captured the notion of what I’m trying to convey to you - well-designed items change your life. “Fashion can make people dream, and it can make people’s realities more functional and more exciting at the same time. I think it can also change the way we see the world, the way we see each other. And—profoundly—the way we see ourselves.”

How do I even follow this?? I don't, really. I sent it straight to Merritt the second I put the magazine down, and what she sent back topped me. Take it from her—

We’ve all heard the phrase, “if these walls could talk.” I think about the walls of my childhood home often. The same house my mom grew up in, that my dad picked my mom up for prom from, the one my grandfather built. Imagine everything those walls have witnessed.

But lately I’ve found myself wondering something different. What if clothes could talk?

Think of all the life they have seen. Furniture stays home. Photographs and Instagram capture a moment after it happens. My journal will hear about it later. My outfit experiences it all!

I think this is why clothing feels so deeply personal. Its value has very little to do with a price tag or how one of a kind it is. The value comes from the life I’ve lived. This is why an old t-shirt my dad gave me, now worn with holes in it, is practically priceless!

My clothes have wrinkled through long dinners with my family, carried the scent of my perfume (currently either Ranger Station Daisy or DedCool Mochi Milk), studied abroad with me & my roommates, and sat on the sofa watching Father of The Bride with my soon-to-be husband the week of our wedding. Over time, they stop reminding me of where I found them but become reminders of who I was and where I’ve been.

I found the most FAB vintage Chanel heels in an antique store with my mom a few months ago. Ivory lace, the classic black cap toe, and the tiny Chanel logo on the heel. I gasped when I saw them and gasped again when I saw they were my size.

Now, when I look at those, again FAB, heels, I don’t think about the day I saw them in the antique store. I think about the old wine room where my family and in-laws gathered for dinner two nights before our wedding.

My dads t-shirt and these vintage Chanel heels are opposites. One begins as ordinary, one begins as luxury. Yet, they are equally priceless.

Hadley sent me a Vogue interview with Michael Rider, Celine’s artistic director, where he says he has a name for the shirts he has worn and had a good time in. The name being “good-time shirts.” (very creative!) An example he gave was his green fatigue shirt with a hole in the elbow, which had become so intertwined with his memories that, in his words, “when he puts it on, it takes him places.” That phrase stopped me.

I love to go places in style, but I really love my pieces that take me places.

Rider captures something Vogue called the complex, slightly messy inner lives of the people under the beautiful clothes. I’ve spent years saying jewelry is armor… that it protects and defends you, that it’s a piece to interpret before you ever actually meet me. I think what he’s doing is the other half of that same idea. The clothes don’t just protect what’s messy and complicated underneath. Done right, they reveal it. On purpose. In public.

So maybe that’s what I actually dog-eared. Not a profile of a very talented man having a REALLY good year. A mirror, slightly out of focus, of a question we ask everyday when we get dressed whether we know it or not. What am I allowing people to see about me? And how much do I really want them to see?

ANYYYYYWHOOOO! okay that’s all for now dolls. If you have anything you’ve dog-eared your way through because it felt too accurate to read all at once, send it my way.

mwah ciao xo HHG