Is Fashion Done With Inclusivity, Instagram and Kardashians?
Olivier Rousteing’s departure from Balmain suggests the answer may be yes.
When Balmain announced last week that it was parting ways with Olivier Rousteing, the designer responsible for its particular power glam aesthetic of the past 14 years, it was not exactly a surprise.
Rousteing’s departure, after all, was merely the latest in a string of more than 20 – 20! – designer turnovers that have taken place in the last year and a half. Most of the peers who were working when he took the helm of Balmain in 2011 are now gone, or at least in new gigs. And last year, Balmain named a new CEO, which often heralds further change.
But Rousteing was almost sui generis in fashion. When he got the top job at Balmain at 25, he was the youngest designer ever to take over a French heritage house. For years he was the only Black designer in that position.
His leaving Balmain, and perhaps the industry – he has not said what he is doing next, and Balmain has not yet named his successor – may reflect a shift in the culture that goes deeper than mere economic trends. One that it is worth pausing a moment to consider because the implications are greater than simply creative change at a brand.
More than any other designer, Rousteing was associated with three era-defining elements: the Kardashians, Instagram and inclusivity. He understood their potential and importance long before almost anyone else in fashion, and embraced them at a time when most of the industry turned up its nose. That, rather than any one look or style – which, in my sometimes harsh opinion, was often too tight, too trussed, too too – was what set him apart.
He was fashion’s sharp end of the spear when it came to social media and its creations, seeing from the start that Kim Kardashian and social media would offer him a way to speak directly to his audience. He created a gang of “Balmainiacs” and then the #BalmainArmy as a bulwark against the slings and arrows of critics (like me) and the hoity-toity fashion establishment from which he – and his followers – felt excluded. Whether because of his youth, his race, his lack of pedigree or his refusal to kowtow to New Look orthodoxy, no matter.
As he told The New York Times in 2017: “Sometimes I feel like fashion tries to put everybody in the same box – if you fit, then that is the industry’s view of success. And to me, that is elitist. Who wants to be in the same box as everybody else, anyway? Not me. And I don’t really want to talk to those types of people either.”
He met Kardashian at the Met Gala in 2013 – her first time there and his second. She was pregnant with her first child with Ye and still the reality TV star who got famous because of a sex tape and who wasn’t taken seriously by the haute crowd. He was an upstart with a romantic view of the 1980s and an aesthetic rooted in Dynasty and diva-dom. They bonded over their outsiderness, ambition and love of a tight dress and how good crystals looked on the smartphone screen.
In short order, Kardashian and Ye were starring in a Balmain ad campaign. This was after Rousteing dressed her in a pearl-festooned mini for her bachelorette party and a matching bodycon look for her wedding after-party. Next came an ad campaign with Kylie and Kendall Jenner. (Rousteing was one of the first designers to book Kendall as a model, at a time when Avenue Montaigne was still treating the name Kardashian as démodé.)
Little wonder that a few years later, Kris Jenner told WWD that “Olivier is like one of my kids.” His taste was their taste (at least back then); his weapon of choice – Instagram, on which he documented his own fabulousness – their weapon. What some dismissed as ego and unseemly self-promotion, he saw as democratisation, and in that principle at least, he never wavered.
He collaborated with H&M in 2015 and championed diversity on the runway in race, size and age, long before it was an industry buzzword. It’s why stars like Rihanna and Beyoncé gravitated to him and his work, as Beyoncé attested in a letter she wrote and recorded for the opening of his 10th-anniversary “festival” – you couldn’t call it a fashion show – held in 2021 in front of 6000 screaming fans and featuring Naomi Campbell, Carla Bruni Sarkozy, Precious Lee and Doja Cat.
“Once you made it through that door, you made sure that it did not shut behind you,” Beyoncé read. “You knew from Day 1 that you had the singular power to help push for a new mindset.” Rousteing’s clothes, she said, “made me feel powerful”. (Rousteing also designed the costumes for her Coachella appearance in 2018, and later they collaborated on a special Renaissance-inspired “couture” collection.)
That show proved something of a flexion point for both Rousteing and Balmain. Since then, TikTok has replaced Instagram as the conduit to a new audience, and though he has almost 750,000 followers on that platform, the number pales in comparison to his 9.7 million on Instagram.
In 2020, Rousteing suffered terrible burns in a domestic accident, and the experience, along with a documentary about his search for his birth mother (he had been adopted as a baby by a French couple) released in 2019, changed his relationship with sharing in public. Efforts to move away from his love of glitzy armour to a softer, more enveloping style never really gelled into a convincing new Balmain identity.
Meantime, the Kardashians moved on to reinventing themselves as business moguls, and Kim is now in what appears to be her high-concept Margiela period. And fashion itself is in dramatic retreat from many of the commitments it made to change. Famously, of the 13 new designers who made their debuts during the last round of ready-to-wear shows, 12 were white men.
That may have made Rousteing and the variety of bodies he championed seem … well, out of fashion. But as Balmain searches for a new designer, what he stood for is worth honouring. Without it, the world will be a duller place.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Vanessa Friedman
Photographs by: Nina Westervelt and Getty Images
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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