Wonder Boy

Olivier Rousteing became creative director of Balmain at twenty-five. Nobody knew who he was then; within a decade he had taken the house somewhere entirely different. The documentary follows two things at once. One is the work: preparing a collection, fittings, shows, social media, millions of followers. The other is quieter: Rousteing was adopted and knows nothing about his birth family. He is trying to have the records in Bordeaux opened. Both run through the same film, one of them bright and the other hesitant. Anissa Bonnefont directs the French documentary; ninety-nine minutes. The camera stays beside Rousteing, in the atelier and through the search. There is no shortage of documentaries showing the inside of fashion; what separates this one is that the search itself was filmed.