Steamy was the word for it. In the middle of the Paris Bourse, during the city’s hottest-ever recorded June day , Saint Laurent men walked through clouds of water vapor, an artwork by Fujiko Nakaya which was intermittently emanating from a vent in the floor.
That was after the extra pre-heat stoked by the sight of Madonna and Charlie XCX, walking to their ring-side seats clad in miniscule flaming red and hot pink lace silicone smothered dresses from Anthony Vaccarello’s show in October.
A wisp or two of Nakaya’s fog lingers in the pictures, acting as Vaccarello’s metaphor for a distantly-glimpsed quality of “restraint as seduction” and the seeming simplicity of some of the barely-there color treatment he’d wanted to infuse into the collection. He’d decided “to strip away, lighten things. Especially in the summer with the heat wave, you want something that’s very easy, very very light,” he’d said beforehand, gesturing to the unlined construction of his jackets, cut narrower and higher, and to the thinness and softness of fabrics “that you can put in your luggage without being worried they’ll wrinkle.”
At first sight, coming through the mist, the impression was almost Armani-like, what with the subtle, pale contrasts of putty and beige suiting, and the fluid trouser silhouette. Clean and quiet. “I find [that] more fascinating than someone trying too hard to seduce,” Vaccarello asserted. “I’m always attracted to when it’s just in your veins, in your blood, in your way to be.” Saint Laurent, he added, is a house that “doesn’t try too hard to be trendy or to be fashionable or all those kinds of things.”
Yet the devil’s in the details. Vaccarello’s use of the word “restraint” took on a whole other meaning when bandana-like silk scarves appeared wrapped as tightly as chokers at the throats of shirtless jackets and waistcoats, and in the neck of a slick black trench coat. A glance down at the models’ feet showed far-from-classic see-through Derbies. And then, well, one or two of these guys were walking nonchalantly trouser-less, in their knitted briefs. One had a leather pair. “I couldn’t help myself!” Vaccarello laughed.
The fetish-y tension between bourgeois Frenchness and eroticism is classically Saint Laurent too, of course. “It’s a brand that should not be trendy, should be classic, but always with a twist. Not boring-classic. It’s not like a menswear classic brand, it’s that fine line between classic and kinky.”
The ownership of a certain quality of opulence is quite Saint Laurent, as well. That glinted from the jeweled buttons on two- and three-buttoned jackets, and from the molten gold finale that emerged from the mist.
Vaccarello has played a long game at Saint Laurent over a decade, succeeding in menswear by fluently transferring notes from his women’s collections to men’s. It’s a question of respecting the heritage while not being suffocated by it. The jewel-buttons idea originated in his admiration of Tina Chow, who legendarily had her brooches and earrings made into tuxedo buttons. The gold, slightly antiqued fabric he’d used in an outstanding trench coat was replicated from material Alber Elbaz used in his tenure at the house. “I always like to take something from the past to put it in the current collection, but it’s always like a continuation.”
Some of that comes from looking at Yves Saint Laurent’s vast archive of the ’70s and ’80s. “Yves was the first to play with the stereotypes of the wardrobe: the perfect suit, the perfect trench,” he said. In a couple of the looks he’d added bright nylon blousons with curved built-out very ’80s shoulderlines. “Sportswear wasn’t so big then, but I think he’d be doing that now.” Vaccarello had paired them with belted super-high waisted tailored trousers inspired by photos of how France’s President Jacques Chirac dressed in the ’70s and ’80s. “Kind of Daddy,” he shrugged. Quiet, balanced, and wearable as Vaccarello has made this season look, it’s the coded fashion flashes that make his menswear shows hot.
