Saint Laurent has occupied the opening slot of Paris Men’s Fashion Week for several seasons now, and the decision to place the house first on the calendar is not arbitrary; it sets the tone for everything that follows. Anthony Vaccarello has consistently delivered shows worthy of that responsibility. For Spring/Summer 2027, the house returned to the Tadao Ando-designed rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, where Fujiko Nakaya’s Cloud #07156 installation transformed the space into a landscape of fog, a work that does not depict fog so much as sculpt it, turning one of Paris’s most architecturally significant interiors into something atmospheric and almost disorienting. The fog was not merely theatrical; it was a conceptual extension of what Vaccarello was doing with the clothes, which were built around the idea of things half-revealed, half-withheld.
The Concept
Vaccarello’s starting point this season was a question he posed to himself about the house’s founder: “I was thinking about how Saint Laurent was one of the first to take everyday, ordinary clothes and elevate them. Back then, sportswear wasn’t the street-style staple it is today. So I wondered how he would have interpreted or worked with sportswear now.”
The answer he arrived at was characteristically precise, not a sportswear collection, but a collection that takes the gestures of sportswear and runs them through the house’s language of sensuality and restraint until they become something entirely different.
Vaccarello described his mood as thinking about restraint as seduction, turning away from the constant need for drama and noise, writing in the collection notes: “Nobody is trying to seduce you.” The paradox embedded in that statement, that the most seductive thing is to withhold, is what the show was built around.
The Collection
Featherweight knits traced the line of the body with precision, arms were exposed in shrunken waistcoats, and classic men’s underwear was reimagined in leather, each piece arriving at its final form through a process of deliberate reduction rather than addition.
Typically broad-shouldered tailoring, a Vaccarello signature that has defined his men’s work across multiple seasons, arrived with jewellery-like buttons, while the windbreaker returned in colourful technical taffeta, giving a functional garment the kind of surface finish that makes it feel like something worth coveting.
Cape-back blousons and T-shirts were cut in fluid, hammered satins, giving everyday shapes an inimitable dressy quality that is entirely Vaccarello’s own.
The finale delivered the season’s most unambiguous statement: a series of looks in lamé that appeared to be dipped in gold, a trenchcoat, a suit, and a snug ribbed-knit sweater, all in molten gold fabric, closing the show with a visual flourish that earned its place precisely because everything before it had been so restrained.
The Verdict
The show married heritage, sensuality, and restraint into one cohesive argument, and what lingered after the fog cleared was a sense of effortless power, the understanding that the best fashion seduces precisely because it never tries too hard.
In a week full of grand gestures and spectacular environments, Vaccarello opened Paris by doing what Saint Laurent has always done best: making the male body look extraordinary through the specific quality of the clothes placed on it, and trusting that to be enough.
