Ultimately, all of it goes again to Yves Saint Laurent, as Anthony Vaccarello ably demonstrated together with his completely chic winter males’s assortment. It lowered the curtain on the autumn 2024 run of reveals on a cold, damp Paris night—and likewise reminded us that his menswear has actually turn into fairly the tour de power these final couple of years. Vaccarello was backstage at his present venue, the Pinault Assortment, a recent artwork museum, however earlier than that the location of the Bourse, the French inventory trade, giving a preview of the gathering—simply as he did solely every week in the past when he confirmed his ladies’s on the opposite facet of city, on the Left Financial institution, within the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. That the timing was so shut got here all the way down to, Vaccarello mentioned, the date when he may truly use the museum for tonight’s presentation.
Vaccarello’s males’s search for subsequent winter, delicately sketched, and amplified by the best way he laser focuses his storytelling with exceptional singularity, is concentrated on terrific, languid fits. They had been as louche as they arrive, largely double-breasted and so mushy, and light-weight, and undulating, you felt that at any minute they may exhale with the gentlest of sighs. That, he defined, was as a result of the tailoring was primarily based on flou, the historic high fashion time period for making issues as fluid as humanly attainable. Saint Laurent himself was the king of the flou, simply as a lot as he was of the tailleur—tailoring—the guiding rules of French trend: Vaccarello’s intelligent, skillful trick right here was to superbly meld them collectively.
“I wished this assortment to be extra formal, extra basic, extra masculine,” he mentioned, “maybe in response to what I did the earlier season. I’ve by no means accomplished the flou earlier than for the boys’s, however I favored the concept of getting this conventional suiting in these fluid, nearly female, materials, just like the georgette and the satin.” These previous couple of seasons have seen him oscillate between his males’s and girls’s collections, but his method has all the time been to maintain the connection between the 2 as refined as attainable.
You possibly can see it in the best way a few of his males’s colour selections—mauve, tan, chocolate, rose du bois—echoed the ladies’s, although in flip he contrasted these towards the grey flannels or spiffy chalk striped wools you might need seen on guys working on the Bourse again within the day. The place Vaccarello performed up the connection between the boys’s and girls’s was together with his fits—he’d peppered just a few by way of his ladies’s sheerfest—and his revisiting of the black rubber cabans and enveloping wool coats with their voluminous cocooning. He gave an additional nod to their early ’60s inspiration by redoing the gleaming, leathery caps Saint Laurent first confirmed in 1963.
