At the historic Palais de Compiègne, once the summer stage for French royalty and imperial magnificence, Hedi Slimane unveiled Un Été Français, a collection shaped by memory, restraint and an almost cinematic sense of atmosphere.
Designed in May 2024 while Slimane revisited Françoise Sagan’s La Chamade and the shadowy soundscape of Nico and The Velvet Underground, Un Été Français resists the temptation of nostalgia for its own sake. Instead, it captures the fleeting, incandescent nature of youth - its beauty, defiance and its inevitable melancholy.
The collection’s heroine emerges with a deliberate fragility: black silk jersey headbands, razor-sharp fringes, and a long or short bob silhouette suggest a studied nonchalance. A sharp, minimalist eyeliner evokes not just the recently departed Françoise Hardy - to whom Slimane pays discreet tribute - but a broader lineage of 1960s French muses: women who carried elegance without artifice.
Slimane’s tailoring, always incisive, is softened into lighter registers for summer. Pleated boarding school-inspired skirts appeared in featherweight cashmere; hand-embroidered twinsets glimmered like refracted sunlight; suede and glazed lambskin coats skimmed the body with an ease that belied their construction. Elsewhere, suspended silk dresses - embroidered with two-tone feathers, giant rhodoid flowers lacquered with crystals - spoke to the artisanal excellence of Celine’s ateliers without veering into spectacle.
Yet it is the emotional undertow of the collection that gives it permanence. Broderie anglaise dresses, entirely hand-crocheted and sequinned, recalled the barefoot elegance of Jane Birkin and the Côte d’Azur's quieter summers. Architectural black silk evening gowns traced the body in long, clean lines, offering a more solemn glory.
Accessories were treated with similar intelligence. Necklaces were layered not for ostentation but for the suggestion of a life lived outdoors, unfussy and sun-drenched. Slingback heels in lacquered python, crocodile and lizard gleamed with a precision that never slipped into excess. The Joséphine bag - rendered in jewel-toned exotic skins with a distinctive curved handle felt both modern and steeped in the codes of French craftsmanship.
Completing the portrait was Un Été Français, Slimane’s new olfactory creation for CELINE Haute Parfumerie, worn by the models in the accompanying film. A composition of bergamot, petitgrain, neroli, jasmine, and gorse, layered with a soft ambered vanilla, the fragrance distilled the atmosphere of Slimane’s own summers spent in Ramatuelle - sun-bleached, saline, and edged with the quiet sadness of time slipping away.
As Nico’s voice floated over the vaulted halls of Compiègne, Slimane’s models moved through the palace like fragments of a collective memory: elegant, ephemeral, unforgettable.
With Un Été Français, Hedi Slimane offers not a nostalgic tableau, but a meditation on the tension between permanence and transience - and, in doing so, reasserts Celine’s rare command over modern elegance.
