Reviewing the recent Jacquemus & Saint Laurent runway collections for the Paris Fashion Week menswear fall winter 2025 season.
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What a one for the ages movie scene this would have been: A meeting in the very early 1980s between Yves Saint Laurent, the undisputed (if oftentimes dissolute) king of Paris haute couture, and Robert Mapplethorpe, the prince of the New York art world—and its hardcore Meatpacking District sex clubs. Did this encounter ever happen? Who knows? Maybe, maybe not. But it makes for a great story: two cultural titans of different generations, locked into their own addictions and dependencies, then bringing their individual brilliance, shadowed by roiling darkness, into contact with each other. It’s this narrative which sparked Anthony Vaccarello’s quicksilver imagination for his fall 2025 Saint Laurent men’s show. “It was interesting to imagine what two favorite people of mine might have said to each other back then,” said Vaccarello. “Yves Saint Laurent was trying to hold onto his respectability while tearing it apart, and Robert was very chic but you can feel a toughness in his attitude.”
Like the rest of us, Vaccarello’s none the wiser to the veracity of any meeting. But certainly, some evidence of a coming together of sorts exists: A catalog of a 1983 YSL men’s collection which Mapplethorpe photographed, with chiselled features sitting atop double breasted blazers, natty three-piece suits, and ties knotted with a firm hand. All of this led to this exceptional collection of Vaccarello’s, an ode to sobriety and sexuality in one gorgeous tailored form, offset by the longest leather wader boots worn by any man ever. (Well, in daylight, at least.) It’s a look, said Vaccarello, laughing, “where you’re respectable on the top, but dirty on the way down.”
The narrative of a move to a post quiet luxury yet still monied and more classical wardrobe has been a thread throughout the recent run of men’s shows. Vaccarello’s YSL crowns that season, even if he sidestepped the usual schedule and decided to show slap bang in the middle of the couture. To be sure, there were plenty of very desirable and impeccable clothes here which would work across ages: swaggering coats; terrific suits, their new shoulderline sloping ever so slightly, the body cut with a controlled ’80s boxiness, and worn with wide pants; striped shirts adorned with substantial ties; and weathered leather aviator blousons cut to accommodate the physique of an ’80s GQ model.
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Simon Porte Jacquemus did a 180-degree turn for his spring show. Instead of traveling with hundreds to one of his far-flung destination shows—lavender field, salt-flats, cornfield, art foundation or palace—he chose a near-flung “intimate” location in Paris this season. Not that the “masterpiece” art deco apartment designed by the great Paris architect Auguste Perret (made for him and his wife Jeanne Cordeau to live and entertain in) was any less of an experiential destination. Just a very small one, buzzing with convivial chat, in which some rather famous people such as Pamela Anderson, Carla Bruni, Audrey Tautou, Stefon Diggs and Central Cee perched in Perret’s sitting room to watch Christy Turlington, Liya Kebede, Doutzen Kroes and Eva Herzigova super-modeling what looked very like a Jacquemus haute couture collection.
Very surprisingly grown-up it looked, too: cocooning cabans creating bubbles over ultra-swishy circle skirts, a paneled poplin hourglass fit-and-flare dress, a black dots-on-white tulle stole swathing a voluminous sweatshirt and pencil skirt. Various jersey draperies with open sides and dramatic knotted back-views walked through. There was a giant tiger-patterned opera coat. Menswear too: three white suits, one with a sweeping polka-dot lined couture coat on top, seemed aimed straight at the steps of the Met on the first Monday in May.
And indeed, part of the reasoning that Porte-Jacquemus related afterward did have to do with America. “I was thinking about opening my stores in New York and LA,” he said. “And about how Coco and Christian [Dior] went to America.” He started watching a lot of old French couture salon shows, and looking at Marilyn Monroe (hence, surely, the 1950a bullet-bra under the lemon yellow sweater). It was “a back-and-forth between America and France.”
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