“For me, the men’s and the women’s, they are kind of like one entity. I really want the men and women to be able to talk to each other.” Antonin Tron was riffing as we riffled the rails of his first pre-spring collections for Balmain, including his first-ever menswear collection for the house. “I don’t necessarily think of them as a couple,” he qualified: “but I think at Balmain the women are quite sexy and out there. And if I was to do something very different for men, it would be weird.”
Looking at his rails simultaneously, that relationship was manifest in substance as well as spirit: “We have a lot of overcrossing material,” Tron confirmed. The same embroidered surfaces, treated denim, and snakeskin jacquards traveled between the two wardrobes, but in womenswear their expression was differently calibrated. This was a more relaxed continuation of the luxuriously louche and wanton glamour of his last runway collection, which itself had been informed by the Californian desert. “With pre-collection I can explore a bit more the casual side of Balmain,” he said.
That meant injecting a dose of dishevelment into Balmain’s appetite for decoration. Sensuously draped dresses in snakeskin and beautiful, borderline-hallucinogenic florals came with cropped flight jackets, while satin tailoring, sheer lurex blouses, and embellished animalier were countered by washed denim and biker leathers. There were micro cardigans over exposed bras, skirts that succumbed into flowerings of asymmetric ruffle, and lavishly embellished pieces whose surfaces seemed weathered by weeks of sun exposure. What blurred in the haze of Tron’s gaze was much distinction between dressing up and down.
This dissolved tension was more than a styling proposition. Tron has little patience for the idea that luxury dressing must conform either to bourgeois standards of propriety, or fashion’s customary cringe of faux-intellectual snobbishness. “For me, this thing with sexiness is also a class thing,” he said of the physical ideals through which notions of elegance are policed. Balmain, in his view, offers a space to articulate sexuality rather than apologize for it.
He recalled meeting a client in Los Angeles while shooting the collection in Joshua Tree. When he mentioned his last show’s desert-and-hallucinogenics theme, she cheerfully volunteered that she had a house there and used to do exactly that. She was accompanied by her muscular husband. “They both wanted to be hot, and that’s it,” Tron observed. This seemed a pretty good expression of the collection’s carefully direct hedonism. Super-long leather boots and Lucite-heeled wedges provided the strut, while the tasseled Zabriskie bag offered easygoing swing.
His instinct is that luxury should enable freedom rather than impose rules. The filament that connects this new Balmain woman and the new Balmain man, in spirit as much as substance, is Tron himself. “I think slowly, I’m finding that line: I’m finding the woman and the man, basically.”
