Hedi-Boys & Their Hedi-Bags

Quick question: where in the world is Hedi Slimane?

Ever since he left his position as the creative masthead of Celine (sans that accented é, mind you), the demigod of twinkdom has been rumored to take up artistic directorship at everything from the Houses of Gucci and Giorgio Armani to maison Chanel (yours truly even made a convincing case for an eponymous label). Yet, irl he’s nowhere to be found.

Is he spending his days photographing the who’s who of Malibu? Is he partying in Paris with his celebrity compadres? No one can tell.

What we can tell, however, is that demand for Hedi’s designs have been seeing a steady uptick. On TikTok, skinny jeans appear to be trending and terrorizing the masses in equal measures, ladies in teeny leather jackets are back smoking angsty-looking cigs outside nightclubs, waists cinched so tight they can barely breathe, and artists like The Hellp, The Snow Strippers, The Dare, and others with “The” names are back in the zeitgeist.

Over at the resale-verse, Grailed saw a 50% spike in searches for “Hedi Slimane” over the last year. Bella Hadid made the pap-rounds in March with a gorgeous Sac de Jour from the Hedi-era. Heck, yours truly himself has been dawdling around in a pair of thrifted skinny leather pants like it’s 2006.

What we weren’t ready for, however, are the scores of men on social sites zipping themselves into skintight garbs and calling themselves the Hedi Boys.

Who is the Hedi Boy? Are you one? Am I?

Wait, Who is the Hedi Boy?

“If you or a loved one has come into contact with a Hedi Boy,” wrote Highsnobiety (only half-jokingly, I suspect), “you may be entitled to compensation. Symptoms include: skin-tight jeans, black leather overload, and an uncontrollable urge to chain-smoke outside galleries.”

In April, content-creator and fashion documentarian Emma Winder dropped a two-part TikTok titled, “What is the current Hedi Boy fit today?” and “The Hedi Boy UK Invasion.” The videos, which have since gone onto bag hundreds of thousands of views, capture this slew of new wave Slimane-loving menswearheads and their fit, that London-based designer (and self-anointed Hedi Boy), Yarden Dachut, describes as “less than just wearing Hedi but wearing all clothes as he would make and style them, like skinny jeans, pointy boots, band tees and a leather jacket. Flares if you’re feeling frisky though.”

Where can the Hedi Boy be found? In the early-aughts, they’d be found inside the club smoking (this is, after all, a time when smoking inside was allowed), jutting their guitars to the garage rock twang of the Libertines, Daft Punk, and the Strokes. Today, Winder explains, Slimane’s true believers can be found outside a The Hellp concert at south London’s Corsica Studios. She briefly alludes to all of them having lice (denied) and living on a steady diet of black coffee, cigarettes, and late-night parties in non-smoking nightclubs.

Most crucially, as Winder unearths, “among the Hedi Boys in line, there was a distinct lack of any clothing made by the designer himself.”

Huh, what?

A-Hedi of the Curve

Now, the timing of this trend is no surprise.

It comes right at the cusp of the electroclash revival, twenty years after the Tunisian-Italian designer was churning out ultra-skinny pants, fitted blazers and thin useless scarves styled like ties (all of which, coincidentally, are back en vogue) for the Dior Homme runways.

And Slimane himself is the pioneering presence of indie sleaze.

Back then, as Vogue reports, “If Kate Moss’s arrival in the 1990s signaled the heroine-chic era for women, Slimane passed the baton onto menswear in the 2000s.” In the modern day, Slimane’s foray into indiness came forth with his seven-year stint at Celine, where skinny pants, low-slung belts, faux-fur coats, giant bags, and even fedoras, were introduced as the signatures of the new Celine (in direct defiance of the nunnery of Phoebe Philo’s Old Céline) in a collection appropriately titled, The Age of Indiness.

Even when he isn’t designing, Slimane is still at it, lending his hand to the documentary adaptation of Lizzie Goodman’s 2017 oral history of the Y2K indie rock scene in New York, Meet Me In the Bathroom (after the The Strokes song of the same name, of course). Or he’s out and about in California, photographing the street scenes, smoothie runs, and really, anything that captures his fancy. Kaia Gerber quips, “There was kind of like, the legend of Hedi, like he’s somewhere around Malibu and he might cast you. There are people at my high school that were being photographed by him in a very similar way, just in their [own] clothes, capturing that culture.”

And menswearheads have adapted this indie sleaze look with unbridled glee.

While first generation Slimanians (including Karl Lagerfeld) wore slinky Dior suits and listened to the likes of Interpol and LCD Soundsystem, new-wave Hedi Boys draw inspiration from his work at Saint Laurent and Celine, mixed with that grungy, late-aughts artsyness of Tumblr, as artists like 2Hollis, The Dare and Suzy Sheer blare from their (wired, obviously) earphones.

Clearly, the man has always been doing his own thing, simply waiting for our cultural collective to catch up to him.

The Hedi Look, for Less

Yet, while the Hedi Boys that invade the internet name-check Slimane with veneration, actual Slimane pieces aren’t really a prerequisite to the Hedi Boy look. “He’s the influence behind it, he’s the mastermind of the look,” says Karsten Kroening, who posted a 30-minute explainer on Hedi Boys to YouTube in April, “But it sort of lives beyond him.” 

Instead, the Hedi Boy look is really about recreating that vibe, and the vibe is “ratty, slightly intimidating, and indulgent. These guys dress like they go out on Thursday and come back on Tuesday, like they can dance for hours in Cuban heels and survive on ciggies and black coffee and not much else.”

Now whether your descent into Hedi Boy-dom came from Reddit, where you turned to confirm the authenticity of your Dior skinny jeans, from your love for Eric Payne footwear, whose thick-soled sneakers are a favorite of Slimane’s, or simply from your desire to escape the postmodernism-on-Adderall hamster-wheel hellscape that is TikTok, there’s no escaping the Hedi Boy, and there’s no denying of the designer’s influence.

“It’s pretty amazing for a designer to still have an impact when they’re not releasing new collections,” said Payne, “It shows how influential he is.” 

Ultimately, while the duffle bag I may be bouncing around with may not be Slimane-era Saint Laurent (although it does look suspiciously similar) or the jeans I’m strapped into may not be Dior (or, for that matter, any of the other Hedi-coded designers like Rick Owens, Diesel and Ann Demuelemeester), being a Hedi Boy is a commitment to a look, a taste, that, while not distinctive, is still your own. Like Carolyn-Bessette’s Birkin, the biggest tribute you could pay to the designer is fishing out the look from the shards of your own closet.

Because it was the Hedi himself who proclaimed, “You can only be lucky enough to have one style, a style of your own that becomes a caricature of you.” He adds with pride, “This is the caricature I gladly own.”