At Tuesday’s Saint Laurent males’s present in Paris, a handful of items on the runway had lengthy been designed and completed. They have been plucked immediately from YSL inventive director Anthony Vaccarello’s most up-to-date womenswear assortment, like an inky leather-based trench coat which closed that girls’s outing in September. Final night time, a mannequin wore it along with his personal model of her draped hood. “I actually need to put the person and girl on the similar stage,” Vaccarello mentioned backstage, about ten minutes earlier than showtime. “I do not need to make them totally different…there’s an evolution [here] into a brand new assortment, however I might like to begin with what he may have worn from the lady final season, and the way he can reinterpret that in his personal manner.”
The garments have been offered with the beautiful cinematic flourish that’s quickly turning into a Vaccarello signature. “After I consider doing the gathering, I all the time consider that man or that girl in a movie,” Vaccarello mentioned. “It is type of a fantasy I must have to begin the gathering.”
This season, Vaccarello’s set was the Bourse de Commerce, a former commodities buying and selling ground, which after a painstaking Tadao Ando renovation now homes the artwork assortment of Kering majordomo François-Henri Pinault. Simply over 100 visitors—a very intimate scale for a model recognized for extra—have been organized on what appeared just like the world’s longest De Sede Snake couch round a round runway in Ando’s poured-concrete core.
When his solid emerged, it turned clear that this manufacturing can be a darkish, sensual drama. Costumed in Stygian floor-grazing overcoats with jutting shoulders and show-stopping night put on—an exaggerated Le Smoking tuxedo jacket over exact trousers, a slinky shirt with a cagoule hood, a knee-length, tunic-like sequined turtleneck knit—these characters have been mysterious and ineffably cool. A lot of these seems that didn’t raid the ladies’s assortment wholesale closely echoed it, like these lengthy knits, which for males are barely shorter and thicker and styled over trousers. “I feel it was extra fashionable for a man to decorate like that,” Vaccarello mentioned. As designers throughout the luxurious spectrum try to barter the shifting terrain of clothes and gender with blended outcomes, Vaccarello’s shared wardrobe idea is a refreshing and actual method: trade stylish concepts between classes till each side of the shop look equally engaging. When a journalist requested if he imagines the Saint Laurent man and girl as pals or lovers, Vaccarello has a completely fashionable reply: “They do no matter they need.”
Vaccarello is clearly on the most assured second of his profession. “For me, menswear began final season, I’ve to say,” he added, referring to his breakthrough Spring-Summer time 2023 assortment unveiled in Marrakech. Earlier than, he mentioned, he made too many compromises, and put his man—a rock star, not a number one man—too intently in dialog with the second. There was no sense of compromise on the round runway from this auteur: the palette was restricted to black, white, and brown, however principally black, to focus the attention on the balanced silhouettes. By my rely, it’s Vaccarello’s smallest assortment, at 47 seems. (A earlier males’s runway assortment pushed 70.) “I feel increasingly more I’m modifying. Possibly I’ll find yourself with 10 seems,” he mentioned with amusing. He credit the start of his son final yr with serving to him think about the essential issues in life, and let go of distractions. “That is why it is actually extra simple and one standpoint and one message,” he mentioned. “I feel it is him.”
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