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• That day in march 2007
• Hedi’s legacy
• Fans galore
• Fashion without Slimane
• Hedi in the art world
• So what’s next?

Fans galore

While interviewing Slimane fans for this story, I was surprised to notice that many of them were drawn to his clothes, not through publicity, runway coverage or marketing baits, but by the clothes themselves. Many discovered them while shopping, like Tansipek, the Manilla architect, who first saw them on trips to Shanghai and Hong Kong. The designer Gilles Dufour, who was Karl Lagerfeld’s right-hand at Chanel for 15 years, remembers spotting a magnificent velvet jacket in the shop window of the Yves Saint Laurent boutique in the nineties. ”It was so well cut that I bought two of them. I even showed them to Karl, who liked them too”. At the time, he had never heard of Slimane, had no clue he was the menswear designer for Saint Laurent (from 1996 to 1999), and surely couldn’t foresee his forthcoming reign at Dior from 2000 to 2007.

Some fans were profoundly marked by Slimane. Take Dean Charbal. This 32-year-old French computer science consultant, who qualifies himself as a boy-next-door, discovered Slimane by pure fluke. “I got this new job last year, so I needed some suits. Being very, very skinny, (1,72 m, 50 kilos), I’ve always had trouble finding clothes that suited me”. So one afternoon, he ambled from store to store, pleased at times, but ultimately unable to find that prefect suit. Almost mechanically, he entered the Dior Homme store on rue Royale and saw a coat. He stood there for a while, transfixed. “It was so small. I just couldn’t take my eyes off it”, he said.
From then on, Charbal went into overdrive. “I was in a frenzy, he said. In just three months, I spent a humongous amount of money there. About 6000
Euros. My friends were stunned by my extravagance. But Dior Homme gave me confidence”. He then started doing a lot of online research on Slimane, but he soon discovered that the designer and the prestigious house had just parted ways.

Needless to say, Chabal is one of a new generation of men and women who now feel the frustration a child would experience if you abruptly pulled his pacifier out of his mouth. As a consequence, a strong pro-Slimane movement has arisen on the Internet. On Facebook.com, the popular networking site, one can find 13 Slimane support groups, some with eloquent titles like “Cause me pain Hedi Slimane” or ”Come back Hedi Slimane”. All these groups have around 2700 members. And they aren’t necessarily fashion professionals. Just people who, like Charbal, Tansipek, or Mkey, dig his work.
Slimane has 1926 friends on his official Myspace page, and his own website, hedislimane.com, claims 2 million visitors a year according to a spokeswoman.
But on fashion forums and private conversations alike, Slimane also has foes, ones who complain about his excessively skinny models and who accuse him of having copied Raf Simons. Whatever one’s camp, Slimane certainly leaves no one indifferent.