90s SuperModels Back with Balmain!

 

While creative director Olivier Rousteing is a fan of tapping his beautiful friends to liven up Balmain campaigns, the French designer has gone a different route for Spring 2016. Rousteing takes it back to the ’90s, calling on some of fashion’s most iconic supermodels — Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer — to star in the shoot.

 

Olivier chose the three veteran beauties because he says they are what made him love fashion years back and still do to this day. “I felt like I was dreaming as I was watching the photo shoot, because I knew it was going to be something iconic that I would never forget. You realize working with them, it’s another way than working with the models of today. 

 

They know so much about themselves. Their career is so strong. They know their bodies so well. They move at the same time that the camera is moving.”

 

The new spring campaign shoot reunited Crawford, Campbell and Schiffer, seeing them don Balmain’s latest designs, all shot in black and white.

 

When I say Balmain, who immediately comes to mind? Olivier Rousteing, Kendall Jenner, and Gigi Hadid, right? Anyone was going to break the mold and get back to the fashion basics we know and love, it really would be Balmain: Rousteing just has a way of giving the people what they never knew they wanted, you know? And in this case, what we didn’t know we wanted is a campaign featuring ’90s supermodels Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, and Claudia Schiffer. 

 

Shot by Steven Klein, the simple, black-and-white spread is everything we’ve always loved about the fashion world: it’s strong, stylish, and highlights bold clothes, and nothing BUT the bold clothes. Rousteing, of course, had nothing but good things to say:

“Those four singular talents have inspired me from day one. When I was a schoolboy in Bordeaux, it was their editorials that first made clear to me the amazing transformative power of fashion. Still today, many years on, their iconic images are often found amongst the jumble on mood boards in my (and almost every other designer’s) atelier. To say that working with them was a dream come true is no exaggeration.”

And how could these iconic models not still be influential? After all, they’re among the ladies who made supermodels household figures. Rousteing continued,

“There was never any doubt that the final images would be anything but perfect. Looking at them now, I like to think that perhaps someday these shots might also form part of some future designer’s mood board.”

 I don’t doubt that that might happen, though I’ll admit that it’s impossible to replicate anything Rousteing creates.