Hedi Slimane has left as artistic director at Celine, the French fashion house said on Wednesday, amid speculation the 56-year-old may fill Karl Lagerfeld’s empty chair at Chanel.
Slimane and Simon Porte Jacquemus — the young French designer who made tiny handbags and other accessories a must-have — are being talked about for the Chanel job after Virginie Viard bowed out in June.
Celine hailed the company’s performance since Slimane’s 2018 appointment.
“Under his creative and artistic direction, Celine has experienced exceptional growth and established itself as an iconic French couture house,” the company, part of the LVMH luxury goods group, said in a statement.
“The extraordinary journey taken together over the last seven years has made Celine a house with a formidable foundation for the future.”
He will be succeeded by Michael Rider, who had worked at Celine, before joining Balenciaga.
Slimane’s holistic vision and rigour had, the statement went on, reaffirmed Celine’s “feminine and Parisian roots”.
With his signature slim trousers and narrow black jacket, Slimane is considered one of the most influential designers in men’s fashion. Lagerfeld bragged that he lost 40 kilograms (88 pounds) in the early 2000s to fit into Slimane’s clothes.
The son of a Tunisian accountant and an Italian seamstress, born in Paris and educated at the Ecole du Louvre, he was the first designer of men’s collections to receive the sought-after International Designer accolade from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2002.
The prize, dubbed the “Oscars of fashion”, was presented by late singer David Bowie, whom Slimane regularly dressed for his tours.
Slimane was artistic director of menswear at Yves Saint Laurent until 2000, when he moved to Dior Homme until 2007. In 2012 he returned to Saint Laurent as creative director but left in 2016.
Between then and his arrival at Celine, Slimane had devoted himself to photography, his other passion.
At Celine, he replaced Phoebe Philo, a British designer who over a decade had introduced a sporty-chic look at the French house.
Slimane shook up this bourgeois look with a rock’n’roll spirit that at first was poorly received in some media.
For his first Celine show in 2018, he turned Paris’ Invalides military museum into a nightclub before sending models down the runway in short black dresses and ankle boots.
“I worked a lot on black effects, lacquered, satin, glossy, coppery as opposed to matte,” he said in an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro, where he explained that he invented his famous skinny silhouette because as a teenager he “floated in everything”.
In February 2020, Slimane stopped showing during Paris’ official fashion weeks, saying they were “obsolete”. Instead, he shot films on the French Riviera or at Chateaux.
He returned to Paris Fashion Week in February 2023, holding a show at the Palace, an historic Paris nightclub where Yves Saint Laurent, Serge Gainsbourg and Mick Jagger partied during its heyday.
Tom Ford, John Galliano and Carine Roitfeld have also been spoken about as candidates for the Chanel post.