Transformation. That’s the word that floated — invisible yet palpable — throughout Céline’s Spring-Summer 2026 collection, the first by Michael Rider. Not a spectacular, garish rupture, but a slow, precise mutation, like that of an organism that knows it can no longer survive in its previous form.

Because while everyone else is selling you quiet luxury as though it were some biblical revelation, Céline SS26 by Michael Rider spills your coffee all over the beige banquette. And it’s no accident. It’s a strategy

Rider works structure of the clothes like a passionate entomologist: he observes, dissects, and reinvents. And with him, tailoring becomes a chrysalis. Loosening a rigid system, handed down by the old powers, and infusing it with new ideas — or rather, with a lucid disenchantment.

He doesn’t flee from Phoebe Philo, nor from Hedi Slimane. He incorporates them. Philo for the thought, Slimane for the line. If he invokes the legacy of Phoebe Philo, it’s to inject it with controlled tension. Less the garment as refuge, more as frontline. And Hedi Slimane? Present, but sublimated. Gone is the romantic teenager in Saint-Germain; in his place, a mature figure whose seduction lies in intellect.

The details are signals. White Céline-branded boxing boots: elegance for dancing in the ring. Gold-colored wheat brooches: ornament as couture memory. Oversized black sunglasses: to overplay the star. And those rigid handbags, held like classified dossiers.

What Rider proposes isn’t a look. It’s a shedding of skin. A clean yet elevating transition. A metamorphosis.