Saint Laurent transports from ‘Paris to Fire Island’ for escapist S/S 2026 menswear collection

Since the beginning of June, the circular rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection gallery in Paris has been taken over by an installation by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. Comprising a vast circular pool – its shape echoing Tadao Ando’s 29-metre-wide, nine-metre-tall concrete cylinder which sits inside the original 19th-century domed rotunda – the artwork features hundreds of porcelain bowls which serenely float across its surface. As they do so, they gently clatter against each other, the effect akin to a meditative sound bath.

On Tuesday afternoon in Paris – marking the start of this season’s men‘s fashion week in the city – the installation served as a striking runway set for Anthony Vaccarello’s latest menswear collection for Saint Laurent. At 5pm, the rotunda was flooded with light – a rare occurrence for a Saint Laurent show, which usually take place in the shroud of darkness – a gesture that the designer said was purposeful. Via the collection notes, he said he was seekeing ‘the clarity of the afternoon light... a deliberate rupture... no artificial glow... just dry light’ (as such, there was a parallel to Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ latest Prada show set, where the pair spoke of a desire to to let the light in).

It set the stage for a collection of ‘ease’ and ‘escapism’ – ‘a suspended moment, somewhere between Paris and Fire Island, where escape becomes elegance, and desire becomes a language.’ In this context, the installation became an abstract daydream of Fire Island – a longtime queer haven off the coast of Long Island, New York – and its shimmering blue beaches and swimming pools. Along its edges looped the cast of models in the wistful S/S 2026 collection, which saw abbreviated shorts and pyjama sets meet diaphanous layers of silk and nylon, wide-shoulder shirts, blazers and ties.

In the latter, there was a reference to the corporate uniform Vaccarello has riffed on in recent seasons in his menswear collections, though here the look was loosened-up and languid, evoking what the designer called a ‘subtle sensuality’ through gently crumpled surfaces and folded-over waistbands. ‘Everything feels light; shapes float rather than cling,’ Vaccarello elaborated via the collection notes, calling a colour palette of sand, ochre, moss green and piscine blue ‘hushed’.

On each seat was a photograph of a young Yves Saint Laurent on holiday in Oran in a pair of short shorts, and the idea of escapism took on a more potent meaning when Vacarello evoked other queer artists of the era – among them Larry Stanton, Patrick Angus and Darrel Ellis – who sought refuge and kinship in Fire Island’s liberated dunes, and would later be lost to Aids.

’This collection pays tribute to a lost generation, to the artists – Stanton, Angus, Ellis – who gave a face to silent desires,’ he said. In the collection, subtle gestures of exposture – the line of a boxer short above the waist of a tailored trouser, sheer fabrications which revealed the body beneath – spoke of a time of queer semiotics, of communicating through clothing and codes.

‘[It is] inspired by a time when desire was style, when beauty served as a shield against emptiness,’ said Vaccarello, a reference, perhaps, to Yves Saint Laurent’s personal struggles with depression and addiction beneath his glamorous facade. ‘The collection explores this subtle sensuality, that fragile moment when one dresses as much to reveal oneself as to conceal.’

ysl.com