Cher is in a good mood. Not only because she had a great time walking the runway at the Balmain event in September – she’s the current face of Balmain Blaze bags – but because in the shadow of that trip it was her new boyfriend, not her new boyfriend. Boyfriend makes everything fresh and exciting? Is he the one who recently went viral online that she was holding someone’s hand? She confirmed that, yes, music producer Alexander Edwards was that person, and yes, she was star-studded.
We are chatting via Zoom with a few days until the midterms – Cher is not on camera but I’m visible because I want to make sure she remembers I’m at Paris Fashion Week The people who meet her at parties and talk politics with her is our shared passion. While the rest of the banquet circled around us, offering innocuous greetings in French, we had brief but heated conversations about Mar-a-Lago, classified documents, special masters, and the Eleventh Circuit. But today, we put aside the fears and hopes of tomorrow’s election and talk about other things—her life, her loves, and, well, Balmain and Blaze bags. “It’s in my hands now,” Cher told me. “You have to touch a bag, you have to touch the shiny part. I think I can do this when I get my hand between the handle and the leather on the front, I can feel the bag. I open it , I’m playing with it, I like different colors of metal. I don’t usually like small bags, I think they’re silly. But I love this bag.”
Although she didn’t until show night Met Olivier Rousteing, Balmain’s creative director, but they talked on the phone, and Cher said, “I just got connected with him. When I saw my clothes that night, I was like, oh my gosh. I Really poor when I was young – going to the dime store was like heaven for me. Anyway, I found the clothes exciting and we had a lot of fun. Olivier is beautiful and I love what he wears – I want to dress my son because that’s what my son wears. A lot of the models on other shows are good models…but these models are alive to them! They walk with strength, they’re gorgeous, Clothes are like The Wizard of Oz to me.”
Now she can buy almost anything she wants, but her early memories are lingering. She still remembers the first important bag she bought. “Sonny and I went all the way up from the roller rink and the bowling alley, and I think we were doing a show in Oakland – we were last, Tina and Ike were first. Then we went to Sausalito , it’s our heaven because there’s a lot of different looking people out there. You have to realize that when me and Sonny came out, a lot of people didn’t love us…we got kicked out of some places – once they Throw us out of church and they won’t let us in Disneyland. We had a rough start.
