OLIVIER GETS UNFASHIONABLE IN NEW FILM
‘WONDER BOY’ IS ABOUT A DESIGNER TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE SECRETS THAT SURROUND HIS BIRTH
Lately it is starting to seem a truth universally acknowledged that any fashion brand in possession of a good story must be in want of a documentary.
Dior has one. So do Valentino, Vogue, Tiffany & Co, Manolo Blahnik, Gucci, Dries Van Noten and Zac Posen (to name a few). Ferragamo is getting one. Ralph Lauren is too.
So it wasn’t really a surprise when rumours began to surface that a feature on Balmain and its social-media friendly, celebrity-magnet designer, Olivier Rousteing, 34, known for his ability to strike a pose and his aesthetic embrace of a highoctane power maximalism, was about to get the same treatment. Everyone thought it would be a carefully stagemanaged film about his fabulous life. Everyone was wrong.
Wonder Boy, directed and produced by Anissa Bonnefont, 35, premiered in Paris on Saturday, the day after the Balmain show. And although it contains shots of Rousteing striding down a runway surrounded by a bevy of models as well as pinning and plucking preshow, and navigating the flashbulbs, it isn’t really about fashion at all. It isn’t about the birth of a collection.
It’s about a designer trying to understand the secrets that surround his own birth. And by making it — or allowing it to be made — Rousteing isn’t just trying to change his own image, he’s trying to change the image of what is possible in France.
The outlines of Rousteing’s story are pretty well known. Adopted as a baby by a French couple in Bordeaux, he always believed he was of mixed-race parentage. At 25 he burst into fashion consciousness as creative director at Balmain, one of the youngest ever at the helm of a major French brand, and began crafting his carefully filtered image; his Instagram profile picture features him, shirtless, head cocked moodily to the side, taking what seems to be a selfie. The more famous he became, however — he has 5.5 million followers on that platform — the more he felt like he was faking it.
After all, fashion is about offering people a way to express their identity, so how can you be a fashion designer if you don’t understand your own?
“This guy — mixed race, gay and orphan — he didn’t start out at zero,” said Massimo Piombini, chief executive of Balmain. “He started at minus 10.”
Bonnefont understood what that meant: Her family had been left by her biological father when she was 3. In 2017, she asked Rousteing if he had ever considered finding his parents. (She had tracked down and confronted her father when she was 23.) He said he had thought about it when he was 16
“I want people to see this as a movie about a fighter who faced the world. There is a real crisis of identity today; it’s hard to be yourself.” OLIVIER ROUSTEING | Balmain creative director
but wasn’t ready. Maybe now he was. “There’s all this talk about inclusivity and diversity, and I’m the first to fight for it, but how could I fight for it without knowing myself where I was from?” Rousteing said.
Bonnefont approached Balmain with the idea of making a film about the search, but with three caveats.
First, Rousteing had to be honest. “No posing,” she said. Second, she had total access to Balmain. And finally, she had the final cut. Rousteing talked it over with Piombini, who was in favour. Bonnefont, who was also the film’s producer, raised all the money — €1.1 million ($1.2 million, Dh4.4 million), from a variety of sources, including the French government. The only financial contribution from the brand came at the end of production, when it helped pay for the rights to some of the soundtrack music.
Filmed over the course of 18 months beginning in 2017, the movie follows Rousteing from home to atelier to government office.
He is shown visiting his adoptive grandparents at their home in Bordeaux, pulling his grandmother onto his lap; in the car talking to his driver as if the man were a cross between a confessor and a shrink; in tentative conversation with the psychologist/ social worker who guided him through the lengthy bureaucratic process to access and read his adoption file; worrying about what he would find; working out with his trainer; and weeping uncontrollably, snot running down his face, when he finally discovers the basic facts of his birth: his mother’s age when he was born, her difficult circumstances, that she barely knew his father. “She was a kid,” he says, in anguish.
It’s a scene that is as raw and far away from the carefully managed polish of the runway as it is possible to get.
In the end, Bonnefont had 160 hours of film, which she edited to less than two. The contrast between the glitz of Rousteing’s perceived life at Balmain and his reality: alone, in his grand apartment, eating cereal at a long empty table, is palpable.
“The solitude is quite disturbing,” Bonnefont said. “We have this idea of him always surrounded by people, but he is very alone.”
The film does not have a neat, happy ending, laced-up corset-tight and dripping in diamante. Although the social worker was able to pass Rousteing’s file to another office, which searched for and found his birth mother — and learned that she was still in France — it could not legally reveal her name. Instead, he was offered the chance to write a letter that the social workers would deliver to her, giving her the opportunity to decide if she wanted to meet him and reveal herself.
Rousteing, still unsure whether his fear of another rejection outweighs his need to understand that rejection in the first place, has not decided what he will do.
In the meantime, he had been forced to revise his own origin story and assumptions about himself. Rousteing had always hoped his birth parents were “two young people who were very in love with each other but couldn’t stay together.”
He had always assumed he was of mixed race because of his skin colour. Both ideas were wrong. “She was Somalian, and he was Ethiopian, which means I am African-African,” Rousteing said. “I’m black.”
It’s discombobulating discovering, in your 30s, that the myths you told yourself your entire life were all wrong. But, “I don’t want anyone to have pity for me,” Rousteing said. “I want people to see this as a movie about a fighter who faced the world. There is a real crisis of identity today; it’s hard to be yourself. But maybe the people who see it will understand me more.”
Rousteing is also hoping he never has to make the decision about contacting his mother. Because he is hoping — sitting in his town car, preparing for a beauty collaboration with Kylie Jenner made for social media — that instead she may go to the movies sometime in the next few weeks or turn on Canal Plus (the film is scheduled to be shown on the French premium television channel on October 16; then be in theatres in November). And that she will see the man her son has become and contact him herself. If she does, the next part will stay off the screen.