Framed by the Modernist architecture of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, Vaccarello presented the Saint Laurent Men’s Summer 2024 Collection, which has been titled, “Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves.” The almost intimidatingly gorgeous glass and steel space itself, designed by architect Ludwig Miles van der Rohe in 1968, is softened with a perimeter of undulating curtains. This simple balance between harsh and soft seems to be the springboard for which the collection was built off of.
The show commenced with a host of suited looks; shoulders were big, trousers were slim, shoes were sharply pointed at the toe, and bowties were pulled at the sides, elongating them just over the lapel of suit jackets. As the procession of suits continued into the space, there is a kink in the repetition via an extremely low-slung scoop necked satin tank top, revealing almost the entirety of the model’s chest peeking out from underneath the suit jacket. Aha! There it is! This is the moment where Vaccarello just ever so slightly begins to inject a breath of femininity into his view of menswear.
From that point on, there is a consistent dance between notions of what could be considered as traditionally feminine and masculine dress codes. The template of the suit is further supplemented with light and airy blouses, often constructed out of sheer fabrics that reveal the entire upper half of the body that lies beneath. Where models are not wearing jackets, their shoulders are often left barren, resulting in pieces that are so carefully laid on the body and specific in their silhouette that they feel like a portal to the draped garments of Ancient Greece.
The key here is context. What do canonically feminine fabrics, silhouettes, ideas mean when they are put on a man? Blurring the lines between gendered clothing is no novel concept in recent years, yet there is a je ne sais quoi to Vaccarello’s menswear in the past few seasons that has placed Saint Laurent as a house that is acutely aware of this shift in the zeitgeist.
When we think of menswear, a suit is quick to come to mind as a set of clothing that is associated with power, the modern man’s armor, if you will. So as Vaccarello disrupts this armor, he is, in a way, disrupting the man’s protective nature. This subversion of menswear through the use of carefully curated feminine design touches is a dismantling of not only traditional forms of men’s dressing, but a suggestion to rethink what it means to be a man.
“Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves,” is an immensely powerful statement, yet it is one that Vaccarello has no problem elaborating upon within the clothing presented. The quote is plucked from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a poem written by an exiled Oscar Wilde, who was sentenced to two years of prison after being convicted of indecency with two other men in 1895. Considering Wilde’s legacy of toying with themes of masculinity, it’s clear that through the title of the show alone, Vaccarello sets the stage to offer his own modern commentary on similar themes.
If the title of the collection, which gives this hypothetical man the power to kill what he loves, is the problem at hand, then the collection is the answer by means of dismantling said power. The clothing here is a vessel to speak to the harshness and coldness that society has instilled into young men, with Vaccarello suggesting that the solution, or at least a part of it, is to rethink the way men dress from the ground up.
Scroll through the gallery below for every look from Saint Laurent Spring/Summer 2024 Menswear.
