Cher is in a very good mood. Not only because she had so much fun in Paris walking the runway at Balmain’s big show in September (she’s the current face of the Balmain Blaze bag), but because in the shadows during that trip was her new boyfriend, and not a new boyfriend ago. that everything is fresh and exciting? Is he the person in those recent photos of her holding someone’s hand that have gone viral? She confirms that yes, music producer Alexander Edwards is the guy, and yes, he does have starry eyes.
The midterms are a few days away and we’re talking on Zoom. Cher is off camera, but I’m visible because I want to make sure she remembers me as the person who met her at a fashion week party in Paris. and we chat with her about politics, a passion we both share. As others at the party milled around us, exchanging innocuous pleasantries in French, we had a brief but intense conversation about Mar-a-Lago, classified documents, special teachers, and the 11th circuit court. But today we put aside our fears and hopes for tomorrow’s elections to talk about other things: her life, her loves and hers, Balmain and the Blaze bag. “He’s in my hands right now,” Cher tells me. “You have to feel a bag, you have to touch the shiny parts. When my hand went between the handle and the leather on the front, I thought I can do this, I can feel this bag. I would open it, play with it, I like the different colors of the metal. I don’t usually like small bags, I feel silly with them. But I like this bag.
Although she had never met Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing until the night of the show, they had spoken on the phone and Cher says, “I just connected with him. And that night when I saw the clothes I felt like, oh my God. I was very poor when I was young, going to a dime store was like heaven to me. Anyway, I thought the clothes were very exciting and we had a great time. Olivier was beautiful and I loved what he wore, he wanted it for my son, because my son dresses like that. Many models in other shows were good models…but these models had life to them! They walked with power, they were gorgeous, and the clothes looked like the Wizard of Oz to me.”
Now you can buy just about anything you want, but the memories of your early days still linger. He still remembers the first significant bag he bought. “Sonny and I had worked our way up from the skating rinks and the bowling alleys, and I think we were doing a show in Oakland, we were at the bottom of the list, and Tina and Ike were at the top. Then we went down to Sausalito, which was heaven for us, because there were all these different-looking people there. You have to realize, when Sonny and I went out, a lot of people didn’t love us… they kicked us out of places, they wouldn’t let us into Disneyland, once they kicked us out of church. It was hard when we started.