The whispers of a secret Saint Laurent show came to fruition on Tuesday evening (5 March), as Anthony Vaccarello staged his latest menswear collection in the Tadao Ando-designed rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, closing out Paris Fashion Week A/W 2024.
Saint Laurent’s secret menswear show
As most of the British press whizzed off into the night on motorbike taxis to make the final Eurostar back to London after Nicolas Ghesquière’s ten-year anniversary show for Louis Vuitton at The Louvre, a select few joined a group of carefully selected attendees a five-or-so minute walk away at the contemporary art gallery, which opened in 2021. A former corn store – hence its circular design – the building was rebuilt in the late 19th century to become the city’s stock exchange.
Ando’s intervention to Bourse de Commerce’s central room – which sits under the vast original cast-iron dome – also provided the backdrop to Vaccarello’s A/W 2023 menswear show in January of last year. The Japanese architect’s stark, cylindrical concrete wall, reflects the monumental rigour of Vaccarrello’s collections – often defined by a singular repeated silhouette – as well as the interplay between past and present at the heart of Saint Laurent.
‘It was about regenerating the historic monument: honouring the memory of the city inscribed in its walls, and inside, placing another structure,’ said Ando at the inauguration of the gallery, which houses the collection of Francois Pinault, the founder of the Kering group (Saint Laurent is part of the luxury conglomerate’s portfolio). 'A composition establishing a living dialogue between the new and the old, creating a space full of life as a place dedicated to contemporary art should be.’
For this latest show, models emerged from one of the rotunda’s openings, here edged in calla lilies, anemones and orchids (a nod, said Vaccarello, to the shows of Yves Saint Laurent) and into the deep-pile carpeted space. Looping the circular runway, the silhouette was louche and double-breasted, with wide-shouldered tailoring, trench coats and variously coloured ties recalling 1980s office wear. The only real diversions from the look were a series of high-neck silk tops and enormous rubber jackets and hats.
As such, it felt a stricter proposition than Vaccarello’s recent menswear collections, whereby elements of glamour – pussybow fastenings, wrapped and draped silhouettes – set a more romantic tone. Here, there was a different sensuality at play, the loose cut of the tailoring reminding of Giorgio Armani’s 1980s collections, which represented a newly liberated mood in menswear (epitomised by Mr Armani’s costumes for Richard Gere in American Gigolo). Vaccarello talked about the formal silhouettes of the opening looks ’dissolving’ as the show goes on – ’fluid, with an intentional slouch, an illusion of fabric turning liquid’.
The show follows Saint Laurent’s S/S 2024 menswear show, which took place in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, the modernist art museum designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in one of his final commissions. Vaccarello’s travelling menswear presentations – which tend to run for one season in Paris, the next somewhere further afield – have also taken place in the Moroccan desert and a beach in Malibu, California.
