Slimane, Hedi

Hedi Slimane, (born July 5, 1968, Paris, France), French fashion designer and photographer who was known for shaking up the menswear fashion industry by introducing an androgynous skinny silhouette at the turn of the 21st century.

Slimane dabbled in both photography and fashion as a teenager. He graduated with a degree in art history from the École du Louvre in Paris in 1992, after which he worked as an assistant to fashion consultant Jean-Jacques Picart. From there he moved on to work at the Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) fashion house in 1996 and soon became the artistic director of its menswear division. He introduced the menswear skinny silhouette on the runway in his “Black Tie” line in 2000, and it became the prevailing style for more than a decade. He left YSL and went to work at Christian Dior, where he immediately rebranded the Dior menswear line as Dior Homme (from Dior Monsieur) and launched a new men’s fragrance called “Higher.” His skinny silhouette quickly found followers in fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld (who famously lost 90 pounds in order to don Slimane’s designs) and among rock stars such as David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Jack White. Music was an integral part of his runway shows, for which he sometimes commissioned original music from (often up-and-coming) rock bands. In 2002 he became the first menswear designer to be named International Designer of the Year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

Slimane pursued photography alongside his design career. He published several books of photographs, including Intermission (2002) and Berlin (2003), Stage (2004), London Birth of a Cult (2005, about rock musician Pete Doherty), and the four-volume Anthology of a Decade (2011), which documents a 10-year period spent in Berlin, Moscow, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles, and London. He also began a personal photography blog called “Diary,” which he launched in 2006. The following year Slimane left his position at Dior, moved to Los Angeles, and concentrated on photography. “California Song,” an exhibition featuring Slimane’s black and white photographs of musical artists, was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, California, in 2011.

Slimane returned to fashion design and to Yves Saint Laurent as its creative director in 2012. Under Slimane’s leadership, Yves Saint Laurent became known as “Saint Laurent,” and the design operation was relocated from Paris to Los Angeles. Though he proved a commercially successful force for the Saint Laurent brand, Slimane left that position in April 2016. In January 2018 it was announced that he would become artistic, creative, and image director of Céline, effective the following month.