It was the perfect finale to a show-stopping two-week extravaganza, all conducted on the chic streets of Paris. The star of the show? Celine Dion, who shone first at the couture shows – crowned ‘Paris Couture Week’s most adventurous’ by Vanity Fair – then parading the City of Light in a series of head-turning outfits, culminating in shimmering Balmain outside the Plaza Athenee Hotel, where she’d been filming her debut L’Oréal ad campaign.
Never has there been a more appropriate time to have a bit – make that, a lot – of Celine in your life. I’m not surprised the world has finally caught up with Celine. I have been a fan since she won the Eurovision Song Contest for Switzerland in 1988, beating the UK by one point. (No, she is not Swiss, she is French Canadian. You don’t have to be a citizen of the country you represent. And besides, Celine is beyond such fripperies as nationality.) On that occasion, she was already developing her signature style: tulle skirt, boxy jacket, massive shoulder pads. Goddess, basically.
Nowadays, the multi-award-winning singer has a finely tuned sense of theatre and is not afraid to camp it up to the max. Whether she’s channelling Dynasty’s Krystle Carrington in a shoulder-padded cerise power dress, mixing a multitude of caramel tones, or working an Alexandre Vauthier Haute Couture jumpsuit cut in a severe V to the navel, Celine’s your girl.
So what’s behind Celine 2.0? It might be linked to last week’s news of a 2020 biopic of her life,The Power Of Love, touted as the new Bohemian Rhapsody, where Celine will be portrayed by French actress Valérie Lemercier. And it can be no coincidence that tickets for Celine’s only European tour date in London in July just went on sale.
But 2019 also heralds a year of personal transformation: it’s the second anniversary of the death of her husband, René Angélil, with whom she spent 36 years of her life. She’s also finishing a seven-year residency in Las Vegas. Her stylist, Law Roach, has the answer to Celine’s style resurgence. Speaking to Grazia last year she said, ‘Celine is such a fashion girl if I’ve ever met one. She loves it! The world is such a scary place, to have even a moment of something to take your mind away from that and make you smile and chuckle a bit is powerful. We do need that.’
Celine herself acknowledges her fashion reinvention. ‘I’m doing this for me,’ she has said. ‘You don’t have to always be the same and you cannot please everyone all the time... I want to feel strong, beautiful, feminine, fierce and sexy.’ Meanwhile, at the time of going to press, L’Oréal was remaining tight-lipped about its new star, other than to say, ‘We can confirm we definitely think Celine Dion is “Worth it”.’ Ain’t that the truth.