Michael Rider sharpens the house codes through character, proportion and the quiet charge of the everyday. For Hiver 2026, CELINE trades spectacle for the suggestive rhythm of a life already underway. Photographed by Zoë Ghertner and accompanied by a brief film from Massimiliano Bomba, the campaign presents Rider’s third runway collection for the house, first shown at Paris’s Institut de France on March 7. Its defining image for the coming winter? A pair of heels dribbling a basketball, setting polish against play.
Rider’s vocabulary is becoming precise. Close cut coats and tailoring trace the body, while cropped kick flare trousers sharpen the ankle. Leather jackets, layered knits and reworked peacoats give the wardrobe its practical intelligence. The disruptions arrive in the styling: stacked collars, sweaters knotted over jackets, scarves drawn into extravagant volumes and headpieces pitched just off center. French bourgeois polish meets an American instinct for ease, giving familiar clothes a more individual cadence.
That image clarifies the collection’s central contrast: discipline loosened by spontaneity. Ghertner’s naturalism gives it room to breathe, moving between grainy monochrome and warmer color to make elegance feel inhabited rather than imposed. The achievement lies not in announcing a new CELINE at full volume, but in letting personality emerge through gesture, proportion and use. Available in stores and online from August 27, Hiver 2026 finds Rider shaping the house’s authority quietly, one sharply chosen layer at a time.
