Saint Laurent Spring 2023 Menswear Collection

Come for the spectacle, stay for the clothes. Thats the best way to think about Anthony Vaccarellos tour de force spring 2023 menswear show. He wisely knew when to turn things up to high drama leveland when to turn them way down so that what he showed, his best mens collection yet, felt intimate and real and strong. Of course, the settings helped. Vaccarello had decamped to the Agafay desert, an hour or so out of Marrakech. Its a city with real significance to Yves Saint Laurent the man (he had two homes here, most famously Villa Oasis, nestling beside the Majorelle Garden) and the brand (Marrakech is the location of the Muse Yves Saint Laurent). And then factor in the shows mise en scne: an epic and haunting circular light show installation designed by artist and set designer Es Devlin, which rose up from a mirage pond, and was erected atop the moonlike terrain.

Still, a cinematic setting doesn’t mean a whole lot if the clothes can’t live up to it. And here was Vaccarellos master stroke: Present a collection which he said, just before the show, was, for the first time, my most personal. Its maybe less, lets say costume-y, than it could have been in the past. Vaccarello looked back 20 years to when he was a student in Brussels at the La Cambre art school, a time when the tautly drawn lines of Belgian noir were omnipresent in fashion. It gave a defined tailored silhouette, to be sure, but one with a softness and a crumpled sense of being loveworn. Vaccarello took his own sartorial impulses from his earlier yearsIt was how I dressed in 2000. It was a look that I loved, and I wanted to recreate that spirit; I was missing thatand married them beautifully to the classic codes of YSL.

Trenchcoats came sharply shouldered but with a beguiling fluidity to their silhouette, cut with a barely perceptible flutter to them, in black wool or pliable glove-like leather. Lanky pants started high at the waist then fell into an easier, wider stride, some with a satin-y tux stripe running down the leg, or styled like jeans but cut from the most luscious of velvets, both often partnered with delicate gauzy tops that clung to the torso. (Surely the only time we could ever say fragile masculinity and mean it in a good way.)