Saint Laurent’s Summer Detour: Loosening the Grip, Holding the Gaze

Yves Saint Laurent once said he’d leave boring suits to the others. It sounded cocky in 1969. Now, over half a century later, it reads more like a dare. The suits have survived — but at what cost? And more importantly, in whose image?

Anthony Vaccarello doesn’t answer directly. He never does. But in this latest menswear show for Saint Laurent, he hints at an answer: the suit is still here, but the rules have shifted. This isn’t about discarding formality — it’s about dissolving it, slowly, at the seams.

Set inside the quiet, echoing vastness of Bourse de Commerce, the collection opened not with spectacle but with serenity. The space was overtaken by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s Clinamen — a shallow, circular pool where porcelain bowls float and collide in soft, accidental rhythms. That imagery lingered: quiet disruption, accidental choreography, friction without noise. A fitting metaphor for what Vaccarello seemed to be doing with the garments themselves.

The collection opened with a saffron shirt and brown microshorts — a combination that felt almost deliberately offbeat, refusing the usual Saint Laurent polish. It said summer, but not vacation. Instead: sweat, memory, skin, self-awareness. The silhouettes that followed held onto the brand’s tailored backbone, but added a certain transparency — literally and emotionally. Ultra-fine nylon shirts clung to the body, blazers draped like suggestions rather than statements, trousers hung low with a sort of post-dandy indifference. No ties, or if they existed, tucked deep behind buttons — like a formality half-forgotten.

There was a certain push-and-pull running through the collection. Between restraint and exposure. Between a desire to show up clean and the temptation to let go completely. This Saint Laurent man doesn’t shout. He doesn’t even explain. He leans. He breathes. He leaves his shirt unbuttoned because why wouldn’t he?

References to Yves are embedded, but they don’t scream homage. They’re more like echoes. Yves, who escaped to Marrakech in 1974 to reset. Yves, whose own studio photos show him pulling his tie into his shirt, almost as if rejecting the image he helped create. The new collection gestures to those moments — a kind of unlearning of the uniform, a loosening of the narrative.

What makes this chapter feel alive isn’t just its emotional restraint — it’s the awareness underneath it. Vaccarello isn’t trying to break the code. He’s shifting the rhythm. Letting the tension linger between pieces that conceal more than they reveal, between a past that’s too iconic to ignore and a present that needs to breathe.

So no, this isn’t the Saint Laurent revolution. It’s not even a reinvention. It’s a slow, careful re-reading. The kind that asks: what happens when you stop styling power — and start wearing vulnerability instead?