Inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe, Saint Laurent’s surprise menswear show captured ‘a menacing, seductive elegance’

At 9pm sharp yesterday evening (28 January 2025), Anthony Vaccarello staged his latest menswear show in the monolithic Tadao Ando-designed concrete rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection art gallery. Eschewing the traditional menswear calendar, which concluded in Paris this past Sunday, he instead chose to show during Haute Couture Week – a suggestion of the status that Vaccarello has brought to the house’s menswear line during his nine-year-tenure at Saint Laurent, which here drew Steve Lacy, Zoe Kravitz and Charlotte Gainsbourg to its starry front row.

Darkened save for a number of low-hanging chandeliers – a nod to the ballroom of Paris’ Intercontinental Hotel, where Yves Saint Laurent would house his couture shows from 1975 to 2001 – guests sat around the edges of the vast circular space, reminiscent of the secret menswear show the house held at the gallery in March 2024 (this season, the show was a less guarded secret, though was still a surprise until a week or so before). A worn-away parquet floor, meanwhile, was designed to evoke the ‘opulent salons of the past’, with Vaccarello saying he enjoyed the juxtaposition with Ando’s ‘minimalist lines and cool surfaces’.

Saint Laurent Menswear A/W 2025

Indeed, the idea of juxtaposition ran through the collection, epitomised by a fantasy mash-up of two ‘distinct personalities’, ‘an aesthete hungry for new experiences and a steady literary mastermind’. In the looks, this meant wide-shouldered bookish blazers, striped shirts and ties – reminiscent of a particular kind of bourgeois Parisian dress – worn with contrasting leather trousers and jackets, even thigh-high wader boots, which lent a suggestion of fetish and kink.

The American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, known for his sensually charged portraits of men taken during the 1980s, was one of Vaccarello’s inspirations. The designer said he imagined Mapplethorpe’s countercultural wardrobe clashed with Yves Saint Laurent’s classic Rive Gauche uniform of the same era. He called the collection one of ‘menacing, seductive elegance’ led by contrasts between ‘sombre and light, soft and firm, voluminous and tapered’.

In typical Vaccarello style, there was a powerful singularity to the collection’s look, which largely saw 1980s-inflected double-breasted tailored jackets on the top half, and leather trousers or boots on the bottom. Towards the end, he introduced flourishes of feathers, which crept around the necklines of overcoats or made up voluminous jackets, giving the illusion of fur.

As with the rest of the collection, they trod a masterful line between the classicism of Parisian menswear and something strange and seductive, a mood of carnal desire which has come to define Vaccarello’s vision for the house. Or, in Saint Laurent parlance, ‘a productive tension between temperamental opposites’ – a fantasy meeting between Mapplethorpe and Yves Saint Laurent, two men who defined the 1980s.

ysl.com

Follow our coverage of Haute Couture Week S/S 2025.