of Celine had to offer.
It offered nothing.
Though Slimane unleashed 
a whopping 96 looks for his 
inaugural collection, not one 
showed 
visible 
recognition 
of the house’s past. Rather 
than acknowledge any aspect 
of Celine’s rich, matriarchal 
heritage, Slimane used the 
platform it gave him to pay 
homage 
to 
himself. 
Look 
number 
one, 
a 
shoulder-
bearing, polka dot shift with 
a massive bow motif, was 
reminiscent 
of 
the 
heart-
shaped cape he designed in 
2016. Sharp-shouldered suit 
jackets and tapered slacks 
reproduced 
Saint 
Laurent’s 
favored menswear silhouette. 
Skirts 
were 
short. 
Boots 
were made of black leather, 
accented 
with 
buckles 
and 
zippers. 
Sequins 
and 
sunglasses 
abound. 
Models 
stomped through the venue 

to a throbbing techno beat, 
about as enthused as a crew of 
high school stoners forced to 
attend a pep rally. Objectively, 
everything 
looked 
fine, 
but this was not the Celine 
anybody knew or loved. It was 
simply Slimane, doing as he 
has always done.
Why was Hedi being Hedi 
suddenly 
offensive 
in 
this 
context? 
For 
starters, 
he 
entered a 73-year-old company 
with no regard for the legacy 
left by his predecessors, opting 
instead to mansplain his way 
through 
the 
Celine 
name, 
both literally by removing 
the 
accent, 
posthumously 
stripping 
founder 
Céline 
Vipiana of her power, and 
figuratively through his stale 
designs. Slimane doesn’t care 
what the 2018 Celine woman 
wants, or that what was cool 
in his Saint Laurent days can 
be 
interpreted 
completely 
differently 
in 
the 
present 
political climate. Philo’s Celine 
was a tribute to the wants 
and needs of a customer she 
deeply understood. Here was 
an 
overzealous, 
privileged 
man throwing that all by the 
wayside, shamelessly using his 
resources and clout to push 
forward a problematic agenda.
Sounds an awful lot like 
a 
certain 
Supreme 
Court 
nominee.
It’s a shame that an attempt 
to dismantle Philo’s legacy 
happened 
in 
tandem 
with 
the 
Kavanaugh 
hearings, 
but the parallels were clear 
as day. Tweet after tweet, 
thinkpiece after thinkpiece, 
has considered the collection 
within a feminist framework. 
Leandra Medine, founder of 
the fashion blog Man Repeller, 
titled her melancholic review 
“Why 
It 
Matters 
When 
Designers Ignore What Women 
Want.” 
Fashion 
journalist 
Booth Moore went so far as 
to brand Slimane “the Donald 
Trump of fashion” in a recent 
article for The Hollywood 
Reporter.
“To some people for whom 
buying a $4000 coat designed 
by a woman was somehow 

perceived to be a feminist act, 
the storyline may be familiar: 
rob a female of a job she seemed 
perfect for, and replace her 
with a man who burns down 
the 
house,” 
Moore 
wrote. 
“You almost have to wonder if 
LVMH, seeing the contentious 
landscape before them, knew 
this.”
Clearly, Dr. Ford’s testimony 
deserved 
more 
attention 
than 
Paris 
Fashion 
Week, 
but 
consider 
this: 
As 
we 
watched a posse of archaic 
senators dismiss a woman’s 
recounting 
of 
her 
assault, 
a 
Parisian 
clothier 
once 
viewed as the pinnacle of 
female 
empowerment 
was 
turned 
into 
a 
parade 
of 
white-washed models clad in 
slinky 
numbers 
remarkable 
only for their exposure of 
thighs. Fashion is political. 
Nothing is coincidence. Both 
the 
Kavanaugh 
hearings 
and 
Slimane’s 
tone-deaf 
Celine debut are signs of the 
times. We are living in the 
age of pervasive disregard 
for 
women’s 
experiences, 
whether they come in the form 
of artistic achievements or 
searing trauma.
“Ultimately, the clothes at 
Celine are a continuation of 
what Slimane was doing at 
Saint Laurent — a style that 
proved to be lucrative for the 
house,” wrote Robin Givhan in 
her review for The Washington 
Post. “During his tenure there, 
Slimane 
generated 
double-
digit, 
year-to-year 
growth. 
But nearly two years have 
passed since Slimane left Saint 
Laurent. In that short time, the 
fashion industry has changed 
and so has the broader culture.”
Hedi 
Slimane 
needs 
to 
wake up and smell the post-
apocalyptic roses. Like many 
of 
our 
current 
decision-
makers in American politics, 
he has soiled a sense of female 
liberation that generations of 
women have worked tirelessly 
to build up.
The 
worst 
part? 
Like 
Kavanaugh, Slimane is either 
lying or has no recollection of 
the harm he’s done. 

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, October 3, 2018 — 5A

I am in a group chat with two 
of my fellow fashion enthusiast 
friends. 
Despite 
harboring 
interest in what’s consistently 
touted as a shallow industry, 
each of us is an avid believer in 
the intersection of the personal 
and the political. We’re also all 
staunch Democrats.
When Dr. Christine Blasey 
Ford 
took 
the 
stand 
last 
Thursday to testify against 
Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme 
Court 
nominee 
who 
she 
says sexually assaulted her, 
we stopped what we were 
doing and tuned in from our 
respective 
locations. 
Every 
time 
the 
Senate 
Judiciary 
Committee called for a break, 
we 
reconvened 
via 
text 
message.
Through our discussion of 
Ford’s remarkable composure 
and 
Kavanaugh’s 
boyish 
temper, 
one 
particular 
comment shone through. “I 
can’t imagine being at Paris 
Fashion Week right now,” one 
of my friends wrote. “With all 
of this happening, the shows 
seem so unimportant.”
At the time, I felt the same 
sense of disdain for the fashion 
set, those I would have admired 
in any other circumstance. “I 
couldn’t agree more,” I replied 
without a second thought. 
Clothes were significant in 
their own right, but nothing 
they could convey was worth 
shifting my attention away 
from the American political 
sphere, even for a moment.
The very next day, I was 
proven wrong. On Friday, Sept. 
28, day five of Paris Fashion 
Week’s 
Spring-Summer 
2019 season, Hedi Slimane 
sent his debut collection for 
Celine 
down 
the 
runway. 
Everything about it was cold, 
hard evidence for fashion’s 
role in representing a singular 
moment 
within 
the 
global 
moral 
landscape. 
In 
this 
case, that moment was sad, 
demeaning and, in the eyes of 
some, downright hopeless.
Slimane served as creative 
director 
at 
Saint 
Laurent 
from 2012 to 2016. He is often 
lauded as the brains behind the 
house’s revival; he introduced 
an epoch of heroin-chic, all-
black-everything, 
sending 
emaciated rocker boys and 
girls down catwalks season 
after season, outfitting them 
in minidresses, trim leather 
jackets 
and 
Chelsea 
boots 
emblazoned 
with 
glittering 
stars. During Slimane’s tenure, 
Saint Laurent embodied an 
unattainable 
effortlessness 
that made the fashion industry 
swoon. After his first few 
collections at the label, the 
consensus 
rang 
out: 
This 
would be known as the era of 
the tasteful ’90s resurgence, 
of club kids with legs like baby 
deer and cigarettes poking 
through plump crimson lips.
The United States political 
climate was perfectly poised 
to embrace Slimane’s Saint 
Laurent. These were the days 
of the Obama administration 
and the rise of Instagram stars 
like Emily Ratajkowski, whose 
simultaneous sex appeal and 
political activism proved to 

the American public that the 
human body could serve as 
a platform for liberation. It 
made 
perfect 
sense, 
then, 
that Slimane would choose to 
relocate the brand’s operations 
to sunny LA, where critics and 
admirers alike expected him to 
grow Saint Laurent for years to 
come.
But nothing in fashion is ever 
that simple. On Apr. 4, 2016, 
just two years after the move 
to Los Angeles, Saint Laurent 
announced that Slimane would 
be leaving the house, succeeded 
by 
former 
Versus 
Versace 
designer Anthony Vaccarello, 
who promptly began a quest 
toward 
maintaining 
the 
brand’s reputation as the go-to 
atelier for those who live fast, 
die young and have the means 

to shop designer. Meanwhile, 
the switch left Slimane in 
fashion’s 
no-man’s-land 
of 
designers 
departed, 
joined 
by the likes of Alber Elbaz, 
former creative director of 
Lanvin, and Peter Copping, the 
successor to Oscar De La Renta 
at his eponymous label.
Saint Laurent’s switcheroo 
was no doubt dramatic, but 
it was nothing compared to 
the tail end of 2016, when the 
fashion industry experienced 
what may have been its most 
seismic shift in recent history: 
Phoebe 
Philo, 
the 
illusive 
creative director of Céline, 
would be stepping down after 
nearly a decade at the Parisian 
label’s helm.
Worn and adored by everyone 
from the Kardashians to the 
women of Wall Street, Phoebe 
Philo’s Céline was smart over 
everything else, equal parts 
aesthetic and function. Her 
tenure turned the brand into a 
reigning authority on garments 
made by a real-life woman, 
for real-life women (albeit 
rich ones). The “glove shoes” 
from 
her 
spring-summer 
2015 collection balanced the 

grandeur of a chunky block 
heel with the security and ease 
of a ballet flat. Season after 
season, her slip dresses landed 
impeccably on the curves of 
every body, offering wearers a 
glimpse into a world in which 
beauty was truly effortless. She 
redefined the “it” bag with the 
inimitable Luggage tote. She 
ushered older women back into 
the fashion spotlight when she 
cast author Joan Didion, then 
80 years old, in a 2015 eyewear 
campaign.
Everything Philo rolled out 
felt intimate and relatable, 
perhaps due in part to the 
fact that, after convincing 
parent company LVMH to 
build a studio for Céline in her 
native London, she essentially 
worked from home. According 
to notorious fashion journalist 
Cathy 
Horyn, 
Philo 
was 
known for her insistence that 
“all her design choices were 
personal.” When dreaming up 
a collection, she took not only 
her own artistic vision into 
account but expressed concern 
for how her garments would 
fit into the lives of those who 
wore 
them. 
Whether 
such 
consideration was conscious is 
not the point; it happened, and 
it revolutionized the way the 
21st century woman wears her 
clothes.
“Look around this winter, on 
subways and buses — wherever 
there’s a woman in a camel 
coat, gray pants, and white 
boots — that’s Phoebe Philo 
who did that,” wrote Sarah 
Mower, Chief Critic for Vogue.
com, in an article following 
news of the departure. “Even if 
the wearers have never heard 
of Céline, it was Philo who put 
together the uniform which 
holds working women together 
today.”
Who could replace a woman 
of such stature, so acutely 
in-tune 
with 
the 
modern 
meaning of femininity?
On Jan. 21, 2018, LVMH 
officially appointed Slimane 
as artistic, creative and image 
director 
of 
Céline, 
along 
with 
announcing 
that 
the 
label would be extending its 
reach 
into 
menswear. 
The 
proclamation was met with a 
healthy mix of excitement and 
apprehension from fashion’s 
best and brightest. Why enlist 
Slimane, purveyor of bourgeois 
glamour, to follow up one 
of the greatest minimalists 
fashion has ever seen? Why 
add menswear to a brand 
known for its resonance with 
women across contexts? Writer 
Haley Mlotek said it best 
in an interview for Fashion 
Magazine: “I don’t think the 
next designer of Céline had to 
be a woman necessarily, but I 
had hoped it would be someone 
with a demonstrated interest in 
making what women wanted.”
After months of anticipation 
fueled by media buzz and a 
shiny new logo — Slimane 
dropped the accent, rebranding 
as “Celine” — it came time 
for fashion’s favorite bad boy 
to present his latest venture 
to the world. Last Friday, 
hordes of industry insiders and 
Slimane’s closest pals (read: 
Lady Gaga) gathered at the 
Hôtel des Invalides in Paris, 
eager to absorb, or perhaps to 
judge, what the reimagination 

When Celine met Kananaugh: Does 
nobody care about women in 2018?

TESS GARCIA
Daily Style Editor

CELINE

Though Slimane 
unleashed 
a whopping 
96 looks for 
his inaugural 
collection, not one 
showed visible 
recognition of 
the house’s past. 
Rather than 
acknowledge any 
aspect of Celine’s 
rich, matriarchal 
heritage, Slimane 
used the platform 
it gave him to pay 
homage to himself

Anger becomes activism 
in ‘Rage Becomes Her’ 

BOOK REVIEW

I grew up in a world where 
women were socialized to be 
silent and polite, to not speak 
too much or too loudly. I grew 
up thinking that I too needed 
to close my legs, my lips and 
consequently my 
emotions too. I 
thought 
it 
was 
just a “me” thing, 
that I suppressed 
my emotions. My 
anxiety and anger 
were internalized 
rather 
than 
expressed. 
Clenching 
my 
teeth as I slept, 
clenching 
my 
wrists as I paced 
back 
and 
forth 
in a torrential downpour of 
thoughts. 
Everything 
was 
constrained inward and no 
worries, no frustrations, no 
emotion were let out. I was 
angry. I have always been 
angry. I just never knew what 
to do about it.
Reading Soraya Chemaly’s 
“Rage Becomes Her” was far 
more than a sign of relief — it 
was enlightening, insightful 
but mostly enraging. Does it 
not bring you to tears that “in 
the United States a person is 
sexually assaulted every two 
minutes,” a majority of which 
are women? Or that “ ... 32,000 
US women” are impregnated 
through rape each year? Or 
that fewer than three percent 
of rapists are ever prosecuted? 
Because it turns my blood to 
high heat.
This book could not have 
come out at a more pertinent 
time given today’s political 
climate. With the hearing for 
Brett 
Kavanaugh’s 
multiple 

assault 
accusations 
this 
week, every inch of my skin 
is crawling. The hierarchy of 
superiority and privilege that 
coddles white men in power 
from facing the repercussions 
of their actions is infuriating, 
to say the least. But more than 
the inclination of Kavanaugh, 
the president and multiple 
other male senators to ridicule 
and 
doubt 
Dr. 
Christine Blasey 
Ford sheds light 
on the stomach-
wrenching 
victim-blaming 
that 
permeates 
our 
political 
culture. 
People 
often 
don’t 
want 
to 
accept 
the 
world 
and 
their place in it 
so instead they 
“up the ante on 
gaslighting, 
victim 
blaming 
... and adamantly defending 
the 
status 
quo.” 
These 
manipulative 
tactics 
often 
shame and silence victims 
of 
assault 
who 
may 
take 
years gathering the courage 
to publically speak on such 
personally disturbing topics.
Dr. Ford’s hearing echoes 
the 1991 Anita Hill case against 
Clarence Thomas, in which she 
boldly confronted an all-white, 
all-male council of senators 
and had her credibility torn to 
shreds. Anita Hill was never 
heard then, and Dr. Ford is 
definitely 
not 
being 
heard 
now. By not believing women 
and victims of assault, we are 
not only taking away their 
voice, but also suppressing 
their humanity. And this is 
something 
worth 
getting 
angry about.
If movements like #MeToo 
or #TimesUp have made men 
feel vulnerable or attacked 
by the women who decided 

it was their turn to speak the 
truth, then, in the words of 
Chemaly, “Welcome to our 
world.” I will never be sorry 
that 
Kavanaugh’s 
“family 
honor” and reputation have 
received a two-week bad report 
card when his actions have 
demolished the life, mental 
health and psyche of the 
women he assaulted. Nothing 
will ever equate to the years of 
pain and trauma these victims 
endure, or the number of “dick 
pics, cannibalistic rape porn, 
racist gore” and even death 
threats that get sent to women 
who come forward about their 
assault. Too many people are 
focused on safeguarding the 
“honor” and prosperity of men 
rather than valuing the rights 
and dignity of women.
“Rage 
Becomes 
Her” 
provides more than fume-
filled statistics — it is a self-
help manual for transforming 
rage into action that will have 
lasting political and social 
implications. 
Some 
tips 
I 
find helpful for dealing with 
personal (or political) anger 
are cultivating communities, 
developing self-awareness and 
challenging binaries, among 
others. 
No 
more 
standing 
aside, allowing power-hungry 
men to silence the voices of 
women and assault victims 
alike. 
Revise 
your 
anger 
to make it something you 
embrace, a tool that pushes you 
forward into the world with 
wisdom, passion and freedom. 
In Chemaly’s words, “Anger is 
the demand of accountability. 
It is evaluation, judgment and 
refutation. It is reflective, 
visionary and participatory. 
It’s a speech act, a social 
statement, an intention and a 
purpose.”
I am a woman, and I am 
liberated by my rage. You 
should be too. 

TESSA ROSE
Daily Arts Writer

“Rage 
Becomes 
Her”

Soraya Chemaly

Atria Books

Sept. 11, 2018

STYLE NOTEBOOK

