Cher is in a very good mood. Not just because she had a great time in Paris walking the runway at the Balmain extravaganza in September—she is the current face of the Balmain Blaze handbag—but because in the shadows during that trip was her new boyfriend, and doesn’t a new boyfriend make everything fresh and exciting? Is he the person in those recent pics of her holding someone’s hand that have gone viral? She confirms that yes, music producer Alexander Edwards is the guy, and yes, she is starry-eyed.
It is a few days before the midterm elections, and we are chatting over Zoom—Cher is off-camera, but I am visible, because I want to make sure she remembers me as the person who met her at a fashion week party in Paris and chatted with her about politics, a passion we both share. While others at the fete swirled around us, trading innocuous pleasantries in French, we had a brief but intense conversation about Mar-a-Lago, classified documents, special masters, and the eleventh circuit court. But today we are putting aside our fears and hopes for tomorrow’s election to chat about other things—her life, her loves, and ok, Balmain and the Blaze handbag. “It’s in my hands right now,” Cher tells me. “You have to feel a bag, you have to touch the shiny bits. When my hand went between the handle and the leather in the front, I thought I can do this, I can feel this bag. I was opening it, I was playing with it, I like the different colors of metal. I don’t usually like small bags, I feel silly with them. But I like this bag.”
Though she had never met Balmain’s creative director Olivier Rousteing until the evening of the show, they had chatted 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 really poor when I was young—going into a dime store was like heaven for me. Anyway, I thought the clothes were so exciting, and we had such a good time. Olivier was beautiful, and I loved what he was wearing—I wanted it for my son, because my son dresses like that. So many models in other shows were good models…but these models had life to them! They were walking with power, they were magnificent and the clothes—it felt like the Wizard of Oz to me.”
Now she can buy virtually anything she wants, but the memories of her early days linger. She still remembers the first significant bag she ever purchased. “Sonny and I had worked our way up from roller rinks and bowling alleys, and we were doing a show in Oakland, I think—we were on the bottom of the bill, and Tina and Ike were on the top. Afterward 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 came out a lot of people didn’t love us… we got kicked out of places—they wouldn’t let us into Disneyland, once they kicked us out of church. It was rough when we started.
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