Ultimately it all goes back to Yves Saint Laurent, as Anthony Vaccarello cleverly demonstrated with his simply sublime winter men’s collection. It brought down the curtain on the fall 2024 shows on a cold, damp evening in Paris – and also reminded us that his menswear has truly become a tour de force in recent years. Vaccarello was backstage at his show venue, the Pinault Collection, a contemporary art museum, but before that at the site of the Beurs, the French stock exchange, and gave a preview of the collection – just as he did just a week ago when he presented his women on the other side of the city, on the Left Bank, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. The closeness of the timing, Vaccarello said, came down to the date when he could actually use the museum for tonight’s presentation.
Vaccarello’s men’s look for the coming winter, subtly outlined and enhanced by the way he laser-focuses his stories with remarkable individuality, is focused on great, languid suits. They were as bulky as they come, usually double-breasted, and so soft, light, and flowing that you felt like they were going to exhale at any moment with the softest sigh. That, he explained, was because the customization was based on flow, the historic haute couture term for making things as fluid as possible. Saint Laurent himself was the king of the flowjust as good as he is from the tailor– tailoring – the guiding principles of French fashion: Vaccarello’s clever, skillful trick here was to blend them together beautifully.
“I wanted this collection to be more formal, classic and masculine,” he said, “perhaps in response to what I did the previous season. I have the flow previously for men, but I liked the idea of having this traditional suit in these flowing, almost feminine fabrics, like the georgette and the satin.” Over the past few seasons he’s bounced back and forth between his men’s and women’s collections, but his approach has always been to keep the relationship between the two as subtle as possible.
You could see it in the way some of his men’s color choices (mauve, brown, chocolate, rose du bois) mirrored those of the women’s, though he in turn contrasted them with the gray flannel or chic pinstriped wool you may have seen in men who were at work. at the time on the Stock Exchange. Where Vaccarello played up the connection between men’s and women’s clothing was in his suits – he had a few interspersed in his women’s clothes – and his renewed look at the black rubber cabans and enveloping wool coats with their voluminous cocooning. He gave another nod to their early 1960s inspiration by redoing the shiny, leathery caps that Saint Laurent first showed in 1963.
