For the Balmain Fall 2019 RTW collection, these thousands of studs were exploring in his articulation of the Balmain woman today.

“She’s got attitude; she is a troublemaker, and she doesn’t care. She’s defiant, but she is a paradox: She can be sweet and romantic too; she can be an angel… or she can be a devil. She cannot be categorized,” said Creative Director Olivier Rousteing.

This collection spoke directly to his preoccupation with the expression of self-determination through clothes. Rousteing saw the codes of an uptown bourgeois Parisienne—with her fragranced wardrobe stuffed with hand-me-down couture bouclé and evening dresses in dramatically ruffled ’80s shapes—smashed against a punky, rock-y, leave-your-clothes-on-the-floor, highly anarchic sensibility articulated in those bikers as well as apparently picked-apart bouclé on denim outerwear, chainlink Alice bands, and long, embellished, frayed fishnet dresses in mohair.

The collection featured menswear codes colonized by the ostentatiously feminine. Fierce vs. flou, sharp vs. soft, and rebel vs. princess, this was both a Balmain-expressed cartography of the extreme outer reaches of the feminine archetype.

The Balmain Army takes you behind the scenes of the Balmain Fall 2019 Women’s Show.