Celine

Celine is a French fashion house founded in 1945 by Céline Vipiana, who opened the first boutique with her husband Richard at 52 rue Malte in Paris as a made-to-measure children’s shoe business.

The brand altered its positioning in 1960, focusing on a ready-to-wear fashion brand for high society Parisian women, and the trench coat and Céline handbags became chief products of the house, with the label becoming known through the 1960s for the quality of its leather. Vogue would later define the Phoebe Philo years as the “cool minimal trend”, a label that fixed how the house was read for a decade.

Menswear arrived late. It was not until 2018, with LVMH’s appointment of Hedi Slimane as Artistic, Creative and Image Director of Celine, that the House’s offering was extended to men’s couture collections, and in January 2019, Slimane presented his first stand-alone menswear show for Celine.

The design language drew directly from his earlier work, the skinny, cool, New Wave-inspired silhouette he pioneered at Dior Homme, translated into black and white tailoring, skinny ties, leather jackets, and sharp suiting.

By spring 2025, the vocabulary had widened to include three-piece suits, fancy waistcoats and straw boaters, comparable in spirit only to Dunhill that season, placing the house in conversation with Saint Laurent and Dior Homme, the two labels Slimane had previously shaped. His credentials were already established. At Saint Laurent, his collections drove stellar financial results, with the brand more than doubling annual sales revenue to €707 million in 2014, up from €353 million in 2011.

Ownership and direction have shifted several times. Celine was acquired by LVMH in 1996, and the creative chair has passed from Michael Kors to Phoebe Philo to Slimane. During her ten-year tenure, Philo turned the once-middling label into a fashion authority with her minimalist designs, was behind hit bags including the Phantom, Trapeze and Trio, and helped lift Celine’s annual sales from around €200 million to more than €700 million.

Michael Rider has been creative director of the brand since 2025 after the departure of Hedi Slimane in October 2024, and Rider arrived from Ralph Lauren, where he was creative director from 2018 to May 2024, having previously worked as a design director at Celine during Phoebe Philo’s tenure.

Today the house dresses a wide menswear customer, from the rock-leaning younger buyer Slimane cultivated to the tailored client Rider is now addressing, operating 178 boutiques worldwide and stocked at Bergdorf Goodman, Harrods, and Galeries Lafayette.