Hedi Slimane

Two Educations: Art History and Tailoring

Slimane's preparation is unusual because it runs in two opposite directions at once. He studied Art History at the Ecole du Louvre, which is the academic, museum side of visual culture: looking at images and objects, placing them in periods, and learning how styles relate to one another across time. He was also educated as a tailor, which is the workshop side of the same field: how a garment is cut, fitted and constructed on a body. Most designers arrive with one of those formations in strength — the conceptual and visual, or the technical and manual — and have to borrow the other. Slimane is recorded as having both before his career began. That combination is a plausible foundation for a designer who would work in menswear, because menswear is a field where small decisions carry the design: the line of a shoulder, the width of a lapel, the length of a jacket. A tailor understands those decisions as construction, and an art historian understands them as references — as quotations from earlier periods of dress that a trained eye can read. Holding both kinds of knowledge in one person means the reference and the making do not have to be negotiated between two different specialists.

The order in which the account gives his training also matters. Art History is named first and given an institution, the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, his birthplace; the tailoring is named second and given no institution. Read simply, that presents the Louvre education as the formal credential and the tailoring as an additional, practical education layered onto it. Either way, neither part of his training was in fashion design as a named discipline. He came to design from the study of art and from the craft of making clothes, rather than from a fashion school, which is a route shared by a number of designers of earlier generations but less common for someone born in 1968.

From Yves Saint Laurent to Dior Menswear

His career is given in three steps, and each step is a narrowing of focus. First, he worked with Yves Saint Laurent — experience inside an established Paris house, under one of the defining designers of the previous generation. Second, in 2000 he became the chief designer for men's clothing for Christian Dior. That is a more specific and more exposed position than assisting: chief designer of a named division of a named house, responsible for what that division produces. The division is men's clothing, so from 2000 his recorded reputation rests on menswear rather than on the women's couture for which Dior was historically best known. Third, in 2002 he was named International Designer of the Year in New York. The award's location is part of its meaning. A Paris-born designer, trained in Paris and working for a Paris house, received the honour in New York, which is what the word international in the title is pointing at: recognition beyond his home industry.

The dates let the pace be measured. Born in 1968, he was about thirty-two when he took the Dior menswear post in 2000, and about thirty-four when the New York award followed in 2002. Two years between appointment and a major international award is a short interval, and it shows that the appointment was not a slow apprenticeship into prominence but an immediate public success in the role. Nothing in the account describes individual collections, garments or shows, so the record here is one of positions and honours rather than of specific clothes: an education in art and tailoring, work with Yves Saint Laurent, the chief designer's chair for Dior menswear in 2000, and international recognition two years later. Taken together those four facts describe a designer whose standing was established very quickly at the head of a major house's menswear, on the strength of a training that joined how clothes look in history to how they are made by hand.

Why the Menswear Chair Mattered

The Dior appointment deserves a closer look, because of which chair it was. Christian Dior is a house whose fame was founded on women's fashion, so its men's clothing division operated in the shadow of a much better-known women's line. To be made chief designer of that division in 2000 was to be handed the part of the house with the most room to define itself, and the least fixed idea of what it should look like. A designer in that position is not mainly maintaining an established image; he is setting one. That fits the speed of what followed. International Designer of the Year, awarded in New York in 2002, is an honour for a designer's current impact rather than for lifetime service, and winning it within two years of the appointment means the men's line he directed had registered internationally almost immediately.

There is also a generational point in the sequence of his employers. Working with Yves Saint Laurent placed him inside the working world of a designer who had himself reshaped French fashion in the previous century, and moving from there to a chief designer's post at Dior meant going from learning under a defining figure to being the defining figure for a division of another great house. No intermediate step of running his own small label is recorded, which distinguishes his route from designers who built a name independently and were then hired. Slimane's name was made inside houses, first as a collaborator and then as the named head of menswear.