Anthony Vaccarello chose to present his Saint Laurent Spring 2027 men’s collection inside a cloud. Not metaphorically. On Tuesday afternoon, Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya filled the rotunda of the Pinault Collection museum in Paris with a dense, shifting mass of water vapor – her fog sculpture, Cloud #07156, which is currently on view as part of the Clair-obscur group exhibition. The tourists who had been flocking to the museum for weeks to disappear into the mist were absent. The models were. And they looked considerably better.
Saint Laurent and Vaccarello had been thinking about seduction – specifically, how it works through restraint. “Nobody is trying to seduce you. What makes them seductive is that they don’t need to,” he wrote in the show’s press release. This idea was evident from the opening looks to the last. It is worth taking seriously because Vaccarello has been with this fashion house for a decade and has earned the right to be heard.
The first silhouettes emerged from the mist in a muted pearl gray. The suits were narrow at the trousers and had shoulders structured just enough to be definitive. A gray, three-button suit defined the now unmistakable silhouette of the Saint Laurent man: a heavily structured shoulder, a relaxed-fit torso, and a tapered leg. Then things shifted. A vest was worn against bare skin. A scarf was wrapped around the throat like a choker. Two buttons on a jacket instead of three – a small displacement with an outsized effect on how the torso is perceived. Vaccarello understands that menswear is often driven by these kinds of incremental decisions, which register on the body before the mind.
Some moments were less subtle. For Spring 2027, Vaccarello and footwear design director Corrado de Biase introduced elongated dress shoes made of translucent material that reveals the foot. This aesthetic had no precedent in menswear. Several models wore jackets over leather briefs, trouserless. “I couldn’t help myself,” Vaccarello said backstage with a grin. The tension between bourgeois restraint and outright provocation is a constant in the world of Saint Laurent. It was present in full force here.
The collection’s sportswear was its most surprising aspect. Pastel windbreakers with high collars softened the look of sharp, tailored trousers paired with transparent shoes. Vaccarello noted that Yves Saint Laurent didn’t design much sportswear during his lifetime, but he believes it’s exactly what the founder would be designing now. Colorful nylon anoraks with superhero shoulders and ruched, couture-like sleeves came in sugary pastels and were paired with high-waisted gray trousers. Vaccarello said backstage that the latter were inspired by photographs of former French President Jacques Chirac in the 1970s and ’80s. “Kind of daddy,” he shrugged. There was something genuinely funny and sharp about that.
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The collection also referenced the house’s own archive. The jeweled buttons on the suits originated from Vaccarello’s admiration for Tina Chow, who famously had her brooches and earrings made into tuxedo buttons. The gold finale – a trench coat, a suit, and a ribbed sweater – all in a lamé that seemed dipped rather than woven, referenced Alber Elbaz’s tenure at the house in the late 1990s. These golden silhouettes directly echoed Elbaz’s legendary Fall-Winter 2000 collection, in which a gold skirt suit was etched into fashion history. Vaccarello is not the kind of designer who ransacks the archive for borrowed authority. He is precise about what he takes and why.
Nakaya has spent more than five decades working with fog as a sculptural medium, creating environments that dissolve the boundaries between objects, spaces, and perceptions. For this collection, the pairing was apt. Both the installation and the clothes encourage you to closely examine what seems simple because simple things are rarely simple. A seemingly Armani-quiet jacket carries a sexual charge Armani would never have intended. A gray suit becomes something genuinely desired rather than merely correct in Vaccarello’s hands.
Vaccarello has shaped Saint Laurent’s voice for a decade, and he is one of the few designers who can hold classicism and organic virality in the same collection without visible strain. The Spring 2027 men’s show may not have the shock value of his early seasons at the house. But it had something rarer: conviction. The fog helped. Or perhaps it was just that, amid a Paris heat wave, these beautifully crafted clothes looked all the more persuasive.
