At Paris Fashion Week this season, Celine enlisted an unexpected collaborator: the filmmaker Gus Van Sant. For the house’s fall 2026 presentation, Van Sant shot a series of portraits of the models appearing in Michael Rider’s latest collection—capturing them both in their everyday street clothes and again in their runway looks.
The project nods directly to Van Sant’s cult photography book 108 Portraits, an influential collection of casting-style Polaroids he made in the early 1990s. In those images actors such as Keanu Reeves appear stripped of Hollywood gloss, their character and potential distilled into a single frame.
Van Sant approached the Celine assignment with a similar eye. The Polaroids feel less like traditional fashion imagery than fragments from a casting session—quick, instinctive portraits that emphasize the transformation one can make through clothing. Seen side by side, the models’ personal wardrobes and Rider’s precisely tailored silhouettes create a subtle dialogue between real life and runway fantasy. “The models were brilliant and the clothes were beautiful,” Van Sant said of the project, noting that he and Rider bonded over a shared Rhode Island connection: Rider studied at Brown University, while Van Sant attended the Rhode Island School of Design.
Van Sant, of course, has long moved fluidly between mediums. The director behind films like My Own Private Idaho and Good Will Hunting, he most recently released the thriller Dead Man’s Wire. But for Celine’s fall outing, he returned to the quiet immediacy of the still-life camera—capturing, as he has for decades, the elusive spark of character that lives somewhere between the lens and the subject.
