At Celine, Michael Rider Weaves the Past and Present Into a Bright New Future

If there is one mantra that has served Michael Rider well throughout his two-decade-long career in fashion, it is this: “I never want to be the last one at a party,” he says, with the sort of casual confidence that can come only from experience.

When Rider was named the artistic director of Celine last October, after months of rumors that he would be the one to replace the provocateur Hedi Slimane, much of the industry began poring over his résumé, which includes lengthy stints as a senior designer at Balenciaga under Nicolas Ghesquière, studio design director for Phoebe Philo at Celine (then Céline), and, most recently, creative director of womenswear at Polo Ralph Lauren, where he was lauded as a potential successor to Lauren himself. But there was very little else about him to be found—no social media and only a handful of photographs in indie magazines. Those who know Rider well, however, believe he was destined for a moment like this. “He’s had so many opportunities to put his ego to the test before, and he’s always chosen integrity over anything else,” says his friend the actor Dan Levy. “The amazing thing about Michael is he is exactly who he is at all times. There’s no frontward-facing persona. He is just authentically himself.”

On the afternoon of July 6, as rain poured down onto an enormous silk foulard suspended over the courtyard of the Celine headquarters, on the Rue Vivienne in Paris, Rider finally showed the world who he is with a collection that spoke volumes. His Celine was filled with ideas that were practical, bright, a bit preppy, and slightly twisted. The show opened with a skewed khaki blazer worn over pants as tight as leggings, paired with an armful of chains and charms that called to mind the clusters of love locks that once littered the Pont Neuf. There were many clever nods to the contributions of Rider’s predecessors—he added, for example, a curved zipper to the 15-year-old Celine Luggage bag, originally designed by Philo, making its hardware look like a smiley face emoji.

Rider has already amassed a tremendous amount of goodwill. “He demonstrated his distinct, authentic style and presented a 360-degree vision of how we dress today,” said Jonathan Anderson, the new artistic director of Dior, who attended Rider’s show. “I knew we were home from the very first look,” said Alanis Morissette, another special guest. “It was that combination of sensibilities: a sort of refined, subtle, nuanced element of structure and androgyny, but also whimsy and a little bit rock ’n’ roll, and I need it.” Kristen Wiig counted off the many things she had loved about the presentation: “The little boots with the laces, and the little black dress made from all the Celine labels, and the argyle sweater, and the royal blue pants with the white boots, and that shimmery black rope dress. I can name everything.” Levy embraced the designer’s brother, Jordan, asking, “Aren’t you so proud?” and pointed him toward the backstage, where Rider’s peers, including designers Raf Simons and Lucie and Luke Meier, had gathered to show their support. Someone told Simons he looked like he was practically glowing. “It must be the Celine lighting,” he responded.

For days afterward, florists delivering gigantic bouquets of sunflowers, yellow calla lilies, roses, and daisies with cards addressed to “Michael” or “Mikey” pounded on the doors of the Celine headquarters as workers tore down the elaborate show set. Critics praised the collection as a seamless melding of Celine present and past—the skinny pants of Hedi Slimane (2018–24), the cool culottes of Phoebe Philo (2008–18), and the American sportswear chic of Michael Kors (1997–2004). The noise level around him was extraordinary, and yet Rider was calm and considered. “It took me a while to do this, because I made choices my whole life that were based on instinct or intuition,” he said.

Rider, a handsome and fresh-faced 44-year-old American whose wildly unkempt hair makes him look French and whose stormy features and tanned complexion make him pass for Brazilian, was born in Washington, D.C., where his parents worked as lawyers. His late father, James, was considered a national authority on mediation, and his mother, Eleanor, practices civil rights and poverty law. They supported his early creative interests, which included fashion, but also his intellectual rigor. Rider initially pursued a career as a teacher, studying in the department of education at Brown University. He spent a year in Brazil exploring Paulo Freire’s theories of pedagogy, and after college moved to San Francisco and was hired by the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, where, for two years, he taught seven subjects to 17 students in the eighth and ninth grades.

“I loved teaching and working with my students, who were going through all the things you could imagine—abortions and violence included,” says Rider. “But at a certain point, I felt something was missing. I was grading papers and I thought, I can always teach, but I’m not going to bust into fashion at age 50. I moved to New York and hustled.”

Rider interned in the Garment District for the designer Rogelio Velasco, who had worked closely with Geoffrey Beene and Isaac Mizrahi, and got a paying job at Ina, the legendary consignment store where models sold off their freebies. This was in the early 2000s, a great moment of change in fashion, when luxury empires were rising and hot designers moved from house to house, revitalizing old labels and becoming well-compensated celebrities in their own right. Rider fixated on Ghesquière, who had transformed Balenciaga from a sleepy licensee operation into a runway powerhouse beginning in 1997. He went to Paris and applied for an internship. He had four interviews—always with a translator—but didn’t get the job.

A few days later, back in New York, Rider got a call saying that the internship was his after all, if he returned to Paris in two days. “It was all very dramatic because it had to happen so quickly,” he recalls. “I put my apartment on Craigslist, with all of my stuff in it, packed a bag, and called a guy that I had met over the summer, because he was the only person I knew in Paris—if only for an evening—and I was like, ‘Guess what? Can I crash with you?’ All that’s to say that a lot of people were really kind and helpful, which I think made it possible for me to do something so strange and risky.”

Rider was hired full-time after one season. He was selected by Ghesquière to work as his “pin giver,” a role that saw Rider outfitted with two holsters filled with any number of pins, scissors, and ribbons, standing silently by the designer’s side, intuiting his every need and next step during fittings. “Balenciaga, at that time, was like a hermetically sealed religion,” says Rider. “It was quietness and intensity and only speaking in French. So I put all of this pressure on myself to learn. I had started dating this guy, Manu, who spoke no English, so that helped.”

Manu is Emmanuel Morlet, now Rider’s husband, then a designer on the Balenciaga team specializing in knitwear (he’s currently the head of knitwear at Dior). Rider had spotted him the summer before, sitting in a park wearing red suede cowboy boots. “In Paris, at the time, it was quite remarkable,” says Rider, who himself stood out with his very long hair, some of it in dreadlocks. “I’m staring at him. He’s staring at me. But he’s on the phone, and he’s sort of very French and looks kind of disturbed, and he’s really beautiful. And then he just storms out of the park past me and doesn’t say anything. When I had those four interviews, I would always go early because I didn’t know Paris very well, and I would sit at a café a few blocks away, and every time I would see this guy. I never connected him to Balenciaga until my first day, when I’m waiting in the lobby and in comes Manu in his red boots. He kind of looks at me and rushes to the elevator and goes upstairs—and he tells me this later, that he asked everyone, ‘Do you guys remember I told you about that Brazilian kid I saw in the park? Why is he downstairs?’ When they told him that I was American, and the new intern, he was like, ‘Oh, quelle horreur!’ He was blushing and hiding in the corner when I arrived. We’ve been pretty inseparable since.”

After a few years, in 2008, Rider got a call from Philo, who had been named creative director of Celine, to come on as head designer. (He eventually became design director.) The job was demanding. For the bulk of nine years, Rider traveled back and forth on the Eurostar train, debriefing the design team in Paris, sending samples to Philo in London, and participating in some of the greatest moments of Celine’s history (hell, of fashion history). After Philo’s exit, Rider began teaching again, this time in Calais, giving French lessons to migrants at the Jungle, a shantytown that was especially strained by the refugees from Syria and South Sudan who were streaming into Europe at the time. He and Manu were enjoying being outside of Paris, “looking askance at what was happening in fashion,” says Rider.

He was shocked when he was contacted about a job at Ralph Lauren. The idea of designing for Polo was “deeply, deeply strange, totally amazing also,” he says. “I mean, Ralph Lauren is in my blood, like that of all of us Americans—actually, of everyone in the world.” Rider describes his first encounter with Lauren at his headquarters, on Madison Avenue, with the relish of a film director laying the foundations for the opening scene of a film. “I was nervous, of course. I’m in his waiting room, a vestibule with faux mahogany walls and black and white portraits of jazz musicians, and he looks amazing. He stares at me and gets kind of wet eyes, like a little moved, and he gets a little smile and takes me by the hand, and he doesn’t say anything. He’s kind of pulling me into his office by my hand, and he keeps looking back at me. This is very strange. At the time, I had a mustache and my hair was not gray—it was shorter but curly, and I had parted it on the side for him, thinking, I’ve got to pull myself together for this. It’s silent, and then he says, ‘You look exactly like my father. I have a picture of him when he arrived at Ellis Island, and it is exactly the spitting image of you.’ We ended up speaking for three hours, and we did not talk about clothes once.”

He accepted the offer.

The six years he spent at Polo were viewed as a successful period of reinvention for the women’s collection. At the Celine show, many guests could not help but link items like the creamy turtleneck sweaters, the oversize rugby shirts, the popped collars, and the khaki coat to Rider’s time at Polo and his reverence for Lauren himself. “Ralph loathes the intellectualization of fashion,” says Rider. “The first thing he said to me at a presentation was, ‘Michael, why do you want to confuse people? You shouldn’t have to explain something. You should feel it.’ He was so right. That’s why so many people can project themselves into this lifestyle that he does, because it’s authentic.”

Which brings us, finally, to Rider’s vision for his current gig. Céline Vipiana founded her boutique, specializing in made-to-measure shoes for children, in 1945, but made her real mark on Parisian fashion two decades later by branching out into practical separates—what we now call sportswear. “Celine makes strong fashion out of real clothes and doesn’t need to distract or push into the realm of abstraction in order to excite,” says Rider. “Strangely, despite all the talk of timelessness and practical wardrobes in fashion today, very few Parisian brands have decided to make that into capital-F fashion.”

Rider hasn’t gotten around to store design, or even deciding whether he’ll reinstate the accent that Slimane famously removed from the name Céline. But he says his clothes are meant to be worn for a long time by men and women, mixed with pieces of different price points and eras—his debut included menswear, womenswear, and couture. At a moment when hierarchies and old systems are breaking down throughout the fashion industry, it is this lack of pretension that might explain why audiences have reacted so favorably to Rider’s approach.

It strikes him as somewhat humorous that everyone now seems eager to define him as one thing—preppy, bourgeois, respectful, audacious—since he’s never been seen that way before, especially by himself. “At Ralph Lauren, no one would accept that I was American—I was French to them,” he says. “And my whole life in Europe, I have always been the most American person in the room.” It’s the same thing with his designs. He’d rather leave it to the customer to decide what to make of them and how to wear them, rather than fall back on what labels are meant to signify. Perhaps that is what he was getting at with a dress fabricated from hundreds and hundreds of little black Celine tags: Make of it what you will.

“What scares me most is the lack of possibilities,” says Rider. “I like things that feel open-ended.”

Hair by Claire Grech for La Bonne Brosse at Streeters; makeup by Satoko Watanabe for MAC at Artlist. Models: Alexia Moutou, Fama Cissé, Iona, Rose at Storm Management; Yahne Bâ at 16PARIS Management. Casting by Midland Agency. Set design by Félix Gesnouin at Total World.

Produced by Holidays Productions; Location Scouting by La Mirada Studio; Photo Assistants: Laurent Chouard, Romain Jouvie; Retouching: Studio RM; Fashion Assistant: Audrey Petit; Production Assistant: Lou Cabeceran; Hair Assistant: GEORGIA RAMMAN; Makeup Assistant: PAULINE SCANNAPIÉCO; Set Assistants: Elfried Gratas, El Mehdi Largo, Joseph Hoffman.