Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello: Master of Control

PARIS — Saint Laurent unveiled its Autumn/Winter 2025 men’s collection on Tuesday night in a magnificent show at the Bourse de Commerce that landed right in the thick of couture week with a set composed of luscious parqueting and wrought-out chandeliers.

Insiders have long wondered whether Saint Laurent would relaunch its couture atelier, which closed in 2002 when Yves retired, but there was no hidden message in the show’s timing or set (though the chandeliers recalled the Intercontinental ballroom where the couturier used to present).

“We really wanted to use this space and, in order to do so, we had to make it happen in the demontage day between two exhibitions, hence the date,” explained designer Anthony Vaccarello backstage before the show. “There is nothing couture about this collection. I hate couture.”

Vaccarello, over the last two years, has succeeded in turning Saint Laurent’s menswear into a masculine proposition with a sharp identity: tailored and precise to the point of being fastidious, consciously repetitive, quite ambiguous and eminently elegant. This iteration, one of Vaccarello’s best, added erotic tension to the recipe, and all the better for it.

Inspired by both the duality of Robert Mapplethorpe — dandy by day and leather master by night — and the split personality embedded in the founding of the maison, this was a collection that explored the dark side. Actually, another character close to the founder came to mind: Jacques de Bascher, whose classy way with dressing was only matched by the sleaze of his leather forays.

Vaccarello attained the desired effect by pairing faultless tailoring, mostly double-breasted and worn with shirt and tie, with commanding leather waders and mirrored sunglasses. On a troop of clone-like models, the look was striking. The feathered pieces at the end were a little too much, but where Vaccarello was a clear winner, almost in an S&M kind of way, was in the way that he built erotic tension but didn’t release it. Such mastery of control gave even the most classic coats incredible power.