“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,
