Inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe, A/W 2025’s best menswear captures a ‘menacing elegance’

An imagined meeting between photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and couturier Yves Saint Laurent – two men responsible for honing the aesthetic of the 1980s – provided the inspiration for Anthony Vaccarello’s A/W 2025 menswear collection for Saint Laurent, presented in the Tadao Ando-designed rotunda of Paris’ Bourse de Commerce earlier this year. Hanging chandeliers – lowered to just a few feet from the floor – lent the space a moody half-light, inspired by those which hung in the ballroom of Paris’ Intercontinental Hotel, where Yves Saint Laurent held his couture shows from 1976 onwards.

Out of the darkness emerged his protagonist for the season: part-Yves Saint Laurent in ‘bookish’ houndstooth and flannel tailoring, a recreation of his distinctive Parisian uniform, part-Mapplethorpe in the thigh-high leather boots worn atop, inflected with the suggestion of kink that ran through his photographic oeuvre (Mapplethorpe remains best-known for his homoerotic male nudes, which often featured elements of fetish and BDSM-wear, from leather boots, chaps and harnesses to gimp masks and latex). Vaccarello described the collection as capturing ‘a menacing, seductive elegance’, further figured in hefty leather overcoats and flourishes of ‘fur’ (in fact, these pieces were constructed from thousands of meticulously placed feathers).

Dangerous elegance: A/W 2025’s new menswear mood

This feeling of ‘menacing elegance’ ran through the season, with 1980s-inflected designs capturing a mood of dangerous sensuality through moments of leather, denim and western-wear, often clashed with classical tailoring or corporate attire. At MM6 Maison Margiela, tasselled leather gilets and pants looked to have stepped out of a Karlheinz Weinberger photograph; at Versace, slick leather tailoring was worn with silk shirts adorned with animal prints and baroque motifs; while at Prada, an influence of western-wear came in cowboy boots tweaked upwards at the toe, and tailoring made from a patchwork of leather. Playing out amid a scaffold show set designed to evoke the intimacy of a nightclub, co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons called it a collection of ‘instinct and passion’.

Here, taken from the cover shoot of the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, a series of these looks is captured by French photographic duo Melanie + Ramon and Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes. Together, they encapsulate the A/W 2025’s dangerous, sensual mood – an invitation to embrace a sense of risk when dressing for the season ahead. Our short film of the shoot, above, plays out to the voice of a young Marlon Brando, as recorded in an early screentest for Rebel Without a Cause (the part later went to James Dean).

Model: Colin O at Tomorrow Is Another Day. Casting: Noah Shelley at Streeters. Hair/grooming: Michael Harding at Blend Management using Davines. Digi tech: Grzegorz Stefanski. Photography assistants: Joe Conway, Jason Colledge. Fashion assistant: Anna Sweasey. Production assistant: Danielle Quigley. Retouching: Courtoisie.

A version of this story appears in the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today