Rider's debut was organized around the tension that has always been most productive in Celine's history: between the American and the French, between the casual and the precise, between the wearable and the unexpected. A skewed khaki blazer over pants as tight as leggings, worn with an armful of chains and charms. Tailoring that borrows from the house's couture vocabulary and deploys it in daywear proportions. Bright, practical ideas executed with the kind of quiet authority that comes from two decades spent in rooms where the standard is very high. The collection was praised as a seamless fusion of Celine's three most recent chapters — without being nostalgic about any of them. Rider does not look backward. He uses history as a material, the way a builder uses existing stone: not to rebuild the past, but to construct something new from what has proven to last.

Phoebe Philo's decade at Celine produced a design language so precise and so consequential that the rest of the luxury industry spent the following years attempting to replicate it — usually described, with decreasing accuracy, as "quiet luxury." Philo's Celine was not quiet. It was clear. The distinction matters: quiet suggests absence of statement, while clear suggests absolute precision of statement, every element chosen with full intention and nothing left ambiguous. The Luggage bag, the Trio, the Phantom — the leather goods that anchored the decade — remain among the most valuable pieces in the secondary market. Rider spent ten years inside that clarity. It is the foundation on which his current work is built — the knowledge of what Celine is when it is most fully itself, applied now to his own formal vocabulary.

Hedi Slimane arrived at Celine in 2018 from Los Angeles — his studio based in California, his aesthetic rooted in the indie rock and youth culture that had defined his most celebrated work at Dior Homme and Saint Laurent. He immediately brought what his predecessor had not: cool, heat, the energy of a generation. He unearthed the Triomphe logo, expanded the house into men's wear, couture, and fragrance, launched Celine Beauté — the first cosmetics line in the house's history — and built a complete universe of lifestyle objects around the fashion. Lisa from Blackpink walked in his collection films. BTS's V attended his shows. When Slimane showed his spring 2025 women's collection — via a ten-minute film three days before his departure was announced — it was considered among his finest work for the house. He left at the height of his success, as he always does.

Celine today is a complete wardrobe — women's and men's ready-to-wear, leather goods and accessories, couture, haute parfumerie, and Celine Beauté. The women's ready-to-wear is the house's creative center: the collection that defines the season's silhouette, the proportion, the color palette, the formal ideas that then filter through into the accessories and the leather goods. Under Rider, the wardrobe has a particular quality that reviewers have identified as "a human grace note" — a warmth and practicality within the architectural precision that distinguishes his Celine from both Philo's intellectual coolness and Slimane's rock-edged glamour. He is making clothes for a woman who wants to dress with authority but not effort — the same woman Celine has always dressed, encountered at a different moment in her life.

The Celine flagship at 650 Madison Avenue was the first boutique designed by Hedi Slimane, opened in February 2019 when he unveiled his new store concept to the world. Five thousand square feet of what the house described as "refined 21st-century Brutalism": basaltina Roman lava stone flooring, ginger and cream-veined black granite walls and shelving, Bianco Raffaello white marble from Italy, Grand Antique marble from the South of France, grey travertine, concrete, polished stainless steel, brass, and gold mirror. Furniture designed by Slimane himself — leather and wood benches, a brass side table. Commissioned site-specific artworks by British artist James Balmforth and Mexican artist Jose Dávila. The architecture is the setting within which Rider's collections are now shown to New York clients — a space designed by his predecessor, inhabited by his vision. The materials do not require change. They require a new presence within them.

Celine Beauté — the house's cosmetics line, launched during Hedi Slimane's tenure — was the first dedicated cosmetics offering in Celine's eighty-year history. Lipsticks, eyeliner, and beauty accessories positioned as extensions of the wardrobe rather than a separate product category: the same formal vocabulary as the ready-to-wear, applied to the face. The haute parfumerie collection, which Slimane launched in 2019 with a line of highly concentrated fragrances inspired by specific memories and materials, established Celine's olfactory universe alongside its visual one. Rider's direction of Beauté and fragrance — now under his creative responsibility alongside all collections — remains to be defined in its next chapter. The cosmetics are currently available at 650 Madison Avenue. The fragrance collection is among the most distinctive in French luxury perfumery.