Portraits by Annie Leibovitz. Fashion Photographs by Francesc Planes.

When Michael Rider isn’t working in his office on Paris’s rue Vivienne, there’s a good chance you’ll find him in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. The cloister-like park a few blocks south of Celine’s baronial headquarters—originally built as the home for the royalist firebrand Cardinal Richelieu in the 17th century—serves as a default break room for the house’s new artistic director, and it’s where Rider and I end up on a blustery weekday afternoon when the threat of rain scuttles our plans to bike around the city.

“I used to come here a lot during Celine part one,” Rider, 45, tells me as we wander through the rows of lime trees, beige gravel crunching under our feet. (“Celine part one” is shorthand for Rider’s first stint at the historic French label, the nine-year period when he worked as design director under Phoebe Philo before jumping continents in 2018 to oversee womenswear at Polo Ralph Lauren.) Rider has a compact, athletic build, dark and warm eyes, his hair a mess of brown curls with just a touch of silver. This afternoon, he is wearing a camel hair trench coat, a thick brown cashmere scarf wound in heavy folds around his neck, faded blue jeans, and sneakers. A pair of wire-rim glasses is perched bookishly high on his nose. Now, eight years later and with three acclaimed collections under his belt—his coveted spring line is in stores, and his fall collection received a rapturous reception when it was shown in March—Rider has certainly put a stop to any lingering questions as to how a curious kid from Washington, DC, ended up running one of the most quintessentially Parisian of fashion houses.

Founded in 1945 by Céline Vipiana as a small boutique in the 11th arrondissement, Celine has long been known for providing a uniform de rigueur for Parisian women, but by the end of the ’90s it had fallen into a kind of posh, matronly staleness before LVMH brought in Philo in 2008 (and then Hedi Slimane in 2018) to revitalize it. While Rider’s work has been celebrated for merging the wearable sophistication of Philo’s Celine era with the sportswear-inflected panache of his own time at Ralph Lauren, he’s actually created a new chapter entirely his own—one that feels joyous and (even in our current moment) wildly optimistic.

I had met Rider a few weeks earlier in Celine’s limestone neoclassical hôtel particulier. (One of Philo’s enduring legacies is her decision to completely rehabilitate the building to use as the label’s offices.) The interior is ice white and seemingly designed to intimidate—until Rider appears with a broad smile and a hug, wearing a blue sweatshirt with frayed cuffs and a mesh baseball cap with the message “so good to see you” printed across the front. All of which jibes with his new era of Celine: His spring ready-to-wear collection was steeped in playground-bright primary colors, while his latest It purse is nicknamed the Smile bag for the emoji-like curve of its zipper. (In Rider’s fall collection, sharply tailored black coats came decked with plastic pins on the chests reading “Bienvenue Chez Celine.”)

Today, in the Palais-Royal, we circle its shadowy colonnade before grabbing chairs by the park’s fountain. “I like coming here, even for just a few minutes—it’s nice and nothing like Washington, DC,” says Rider. He pauses. “Which is surprising, because DC was planned by a Frenchman, who based its boulevards and roundabouts on Paris.” Rider listens carefully to questions and seems to gather his thoughts with care before answering. Not once during our time together does he glance at his phone.

Since his return to Paris in the fall of 2024, Rider has been living in an apartment in the northern stretch of the Marais with his husband, the knitwear designer Emmanuel “Manu” Morlet, although they still haven’t fully settled in. “There’s stuff everywhere,” Rider says, “which can feel a bit chaotic.” He admits with a wry laugh that much of his life is organized by the photos and notes he tacks to his refrigerator. “I don’t know what I’d do without a refrigerator door—or a corkboard.”

He’s a tactile designer who likes to think in terms of fabric weights and textures, of how clothes feel on the body, rather than in abstractions or concepts. This love of physicality extends beyond fabrics as well: In his second-floor office at Celine, he’s hung a rope from the 13-foot ceiling and uses it throughout the day for “get-ups,” an exercise that involves lying on the floor and using his hands to climb the rope until he’s on his feet. Most mornings he bikes to work. (Bicycling has become a new touchstone for Rider: Celine-emblazoned bicycles lined the street outside the launch of his first show last July, and the most coveted accessory from his later October collection was a carbon-fiber bicycle helmet with a Celine logo.)

It’s worth noting that inspiration from the Paris streets is encoded in the label’s DNA. The idea of the interlocking-C logo came to Vipiana in 1972 when her car broke down by the Arc de Triomphe and she took note of the pattern of the security chain encircling the monument. Et voilà: Celine’s new emblem was born. Pedestrian isn’t a bad word to Rider, who aims to create nothing less than a comprehensive, all-day wardrobe for his customer—a jacket or a dress that could be worn zooming down rue de Rivoli on an e-bike during the day or toasting to the evening at a cocktail party in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

The filmmaker and writer Miranda July, who took in Rider’s October show in Paris’s Parc de Saint-Cloud, echoes this sentiment. “The clothes seem simple or familiar, but they are very special,” she says. “The red wool turtleneck I wore to the show I wore again that night at the after-party—it went from rich-lady chic to club chic, but both very Celine.” When real life is your mood board, it seems, ideas jump out from everywhere if you’re paying attention. “Public transportation is full of ideas,” Rider says. “I’m always looking at everything—definitely at people—and I’m also a collector. I have a lot of stuff inside of me that somehow finds an outlet.”

“Ever since he was young, he’s been an incredible observer,” recalls Rider’s older brother, Jordan, who now lives on Martha’s Vineyard working as a community mediator and as a patient observer at the local hospital. The two grew up right by Rock Creek Park in Northwest DC, the sons of lawyers. Rider describes their upbringing as one infused with leftist politics and activism, in which the bookstore Politics and Prose served as a kind of polestar. “Curiosity was valued in our family,” Jordan says, “and Michael’s interests are quite broad. When he stopped working at Celine the first time, his idea was to make cider in Normandy; he wanted to take piano lessons. He wants to learn how to fly a plane; he’s learning Arabic—he can probably hold a conversation with just about anyone.”

The brothers have always been close. When they stopped sharing a room as kids, they slept on each other’s floors for months. But while Jordan was the captain of every sports team, the lead in the school plays, “I kind of became the yang to his yin,” Rider says. “I was a prankster—I liked tricks and jokes. I liked to draw and paint.” Rider can’t say when his interest in clothes first materialized, but Jordan remembers his brother taking an early interest in what people wore, possibly as a way of trying to understand where he fit into the larger world. “I loved clothes,” Rider says. “Not fashion per se, but I have always had an emotional attachment to garments.”

That love blossomed in his teenage years, when his wardrobe became an expression of identity as well as a creative outlet. He’d scour the racks of thrift stores for pieces that he could customize before going out dancing at DC’s legendary LGBTQ+ club Tracks. (“I’d look for the same things I’m still attracted to today,” Rider says: “Jeans, military parkas, a zillion blue oxford shirts.”) Still, the idea of art or fashion school never occurred to him. “Maybe because I was growing up around teachers and activists,” he says, “fashion didn’t seem like a way to contribute in [the way] that I wanted to.” Rider attended Brown University, majoring in education and Latin American studies, and after graduating in 2002 he found a teaching position at a progressive charter school in Oakland. “It was wild,” he says. “The kids were amazing, but there was abortion, violence, identity, tragedies, and hormones—it was a lot.” It was then that Rider slowly realized that, as much as he loved teaching, he couldn’t shake the desire to explore his creative side.

In 2004, he moved back to New York, and through his friend, the designer Trevor Ballin, he landed his first job apprenticing with the Garment District couture designer Rogelio Velasco. “It was just four sewers, two pattern-cutters, him, and me,” Rider says. “I would cut organza for him, or get pins, or sew for him, or manage a fitting.” Rider found a studio apartment—right next door to Ballin—on Christopher Street in the West Village, just above an adult video store. The West Village was a far more transgressive place in the early 2000s than it is today, and the streets, near the Hudson River, attracted a large share of gay, trans, and nonbinary youth, which made not only for an exciting sense of community but for a kaleidoscopic fashion show taking place right outside their windows. “It was an inspiring place to live,” Ballin recalls, “being surrounded by young kids who wouldn’t let other people’s style define them.” New York, however, proved only a quick step on the way to what Rider soon realized was his dream: to work for Nicolas Ghesquière in the Paris atelier of Balenciaga.

“I remember clicking through a show of Nicolas’s online and never seeing anything like that before,” Rider says. “People thought of it as highly conceptual, but I didn’t. I thought of it as right and real and urgent—I was entranced.” Rider took a wild chance and traveled to Paris in the summer of 2004, somehow finagling his way into a series of interviews for a menswear internship with the house. “I didn’t speak French; I had to cobble together sketches, references, and mood imagery at an Office Depot—I mean, it was a complete farce,” Rider admits today. Finally, with summer almost over and Rider nearly out of money, he called the Balenciaga offices from a payphone on rue des Archives and learned that the internship had been offered to someone else. Despondent, Rider flew back home—stopping first to visit his family vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard—only to receive a call a few days later that the internship was his. His mother promptly fainted with excitement.

That internship turned into a full-time position that lasted four years—a dream job in more ways than one. Rider’s future husband, Morlet, worked as first designer under Ghesquière, and although Rider claims that Morlet was horrified by the long-haired American upstart amidst their hallowed French atelier—Rider showed up for his first day of work in shorts—the two soon started dating and never separated.

Rider’s learning curve under Ghesquière was steep. “I learned everything,” he says: “How people develop their work, how they push it and pull it back. I learned from a 70-year-old pattern-cutter who had worked with Cristóbal [Balenciaga] and a 22-year-old designer on the cutting edge—and how those two meet somewhere.” The design team, small and close-knit, became something of a surrogate family.

Rider’s close friend, the actor Dan Levy—the two met through Ballin around this time—describes him as having a “fear of affectation. He’s always been very much himself,” Levy says, “and it was never part of his story to place himself in the spotlight—yet when you know your friend is so talented, it was always a question of When are you finally going to be the boss?”

Rider takes a moment to retrieve coffees for both of us while I guard our seats in the Palais-Royal. When he returns, carefully balancing our cups atop one another, a group of children racing around the fountain nearly knock into us before sprinting off toward the rose garden. Rider takes it all in, laughing, and quickly downs his coffee. As he continues walking me through his résumé, it becomes more and more clear that if Balenciaga was his apprenticeship, joining Celine in 2008 as the design director of ready-to-wear, where he worked under Philo, was his coming of age. Rider stayed for nearly 10 years, traveling between the atelier in Paris and Philo’s offices in London, by which time his profile had reached the point where he could have chosen his own next step in fashion. Instead, he decided to stop.

In the year up to his decision to quit, Rider had been teaching French to refugees in Paris and had felt both overworked and disconnected from the evolution of the industry. “I had a blast at Celine,” he says. “But you have to know when something is special and unique and leave it at that. I wanted to breathe.” He left in 2017, right before Philo did, and three days later married Morlet at the City Hall of the 2nd arrondissement.

The break didn’t last beyond a couple of months. Few would have anticipated that Rider’s return to fashion would see him outside of a chic label in Paris, let alone back in his home country, but when he was offered the position of womenswear creative director at Polo Ralph Lauren, he saw it as an invaluable expansion of his repertoire. “I tell anyone in Paris who works in fashion: Go work in the United States for a couple years. Parisians think they breathe holy air, and they aren’t wrong. But there’s a huge beating world out there full of different ways of doing things.”

Rider, who had a love of vintage Polo dating from his childhood, flew to New York to meet with Lauren in his offices on Madison Avenue, and the two had an instant rapport. (The wire-frame glasses Rider is wearing today were a gift from Lauren.) Intrigued by the idea of a more democratic form of fashion, something “really big but meaningful,” as Rider puts it, he took the job. (Morlet, who was then designing knitwear at Loewe under Jonathan Anderson, visited often from Paris.) “Ralph’s a merchant—he won’t tell you he’s a designer—but he’s a fabulous dreamer and storyteller,” says Rider, who credits his six years working for him with renewing his excitement for making clothes. “Had I never left [Celine],” he continues, “I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.”

Rider insists that he didn’t pay close attention to Hedi Slimane’s Celine during the interim—a period where the famously territorial French designer expunged the accent on the first e of the label’s name; introduced menswear, couture, fragrance, and makeup; and imparted a sleeker, harder-edged aesthetic. Slimane not only grew the audience of Celine; he grew its revenue, almost tripling sales.

Returning to Paris was a homecoming, not least of all because it reunited Rider full-time with Morlet, who currently designs knitwear at both Celine and Dior. The couple now spend their weekends at their 17th-century country house in the Perche region of Normandy riding bikes, listening to the radio, and watching old movies. (The house’s former owner, a renowned set decorator who worked on Apocalypse Now and Evita, installed a screening room, which Rider and Morlet have incorporated into an evening ritual.) Rider runs, cooks; at the moment, he’s immersed in a new biography of James Baldwin written by a childhood friend from Washington. Every morning, he reads the newspaper in print—he refuses to read on a phone, one of many small protests against ceding life to the digital. “Everything important in my life,” he says, “happened through encounters that never, ever would have happened had I had a phone, because I wouldn’t have been paying attention.” Paying attention—participating in the here and now—is vital to Rider’s creative work.

Rider admits to a fetishistic relationship to clothes. His personal collection of pieces—many from his own life, each imbued with a specific memory—fills multiple storage units scattered around the globe. At the fountain, he waves in the direction of the Marais, indicating one of his often-visited units is only a few blocks away. “It’s a mess right now,” he admits. “I’m not even sure of everything that’s in there. I have thousands of pieces I will never get rid of.” Among them are what he calls his “good-time shirts.” When I ask for a definition, he simply replies, with a laugh, “a shirt in which one has had a very good time.” He gives as an example a green fatigue shirt with a hole in one elbow—the piece is simply filled with memories, he says, and when he puts it on it takes him places. To Rider, tears and rips, sweat stains, and frayed collars are considered loving embellishments rather than signs of damage. “Most people who are sensitive have deep relationships with things they wear,” he says, “and those people tend to have a lot of style. I wish I got that feeling more from fashion.”

Backstage at his March show alongside the Seine at Paris’s exquisite Institut de France, Rider said that he began his design process by thinking about the “complex, slightly messy inner lives of the people under the beautiful clothes.” Out on the runway, models wore necklaces overloaded in seashells and tusks, mismatched chunky earrings, and multiple rings. A black leather belt didn’t match its leopard-print coat; maybe only one pant leg was tucked into a pair of boots; and Rider proved once again his mastery not just in the art of le flou, loosening the cut on knits and silks into softer silhouettes, but with razor-sharp tailoring as well.

Actress Natasha Lyonne, who sat front row, noted afterward, “The show’s curation and creativity felt deeply personal—like the decisions were made with intellect and heart.” Ballin, who joined the design team soon after his friend arrived, thought Rider was “showing his sense of humor and having a little bit of fun.” Case in point: a series of shimmery dresses, one constructed out of silver chain mail, with giant letters scattered haphazardly across it spelling out “CELINE PARIS”; another was made entirely out of soda-can tabs; still another was embroidered with silver sequin beads the size of drink coasters.

Back in the park, I mention that Rider’s March show had a potent feeling of a community gathering—the interior stage set was built to resemble a community center, and those plastic pins on the coats held a distinct resemblance to political buttons. And I can’t help but ask him: If, as a teenager, he didn’t see how fashion could make a meaningful contribution to the world, has his immersion in that world done anything to change his mind?

“Yes, of course,” he says, seemingly with his whole heart. “Fashion can make people dream, and it can make people’s realities more functional and more exciting at the same time. I think it can also change the way we see the world, the way we see each other. And—profoundly—the way we see ourselves.”

For Annie Leibovitz portraits of Michael Rider: grooming, Jillian Halouska. Produced by AL Studio. Set Design: Mary Howard.

For Francesc Planes fashion photographs: hair, Karim Belghiran; makeup, Karin Westerlund; manicurist: Magda S; tailor, Alami Fatim-Zahra. Produced by NILM.