One look at Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent pre-collection for spring, with its major emphasis on the tie in all its myriad glory, and all I can think is: Can I even remember how to tie one? It has been years since I did. Actually, that’s not all I am thinking, to be honest. I am also marveling at how Vaccarello has made formality (of a sort; he has given it his own distinctive spin) feel so fresh and effortless and just right for 2025. And how—subtext here—part of that is making a case too for the kind of wardrobe pieces that last and last…and last. Given how stringently we’re all thinking about what, if anything, we need to add to our wardrobes now, this sly reinterpretation seems like the correct intuitive move on Vaccarello’s part.
Back to those ties of Vaccarello’s—and how they’re not always about getting tied in knots. There are classic ties firmly knotted at the neck, worn with crisp double-breasted jackets with a natural shoulderline, and high-waisted, ever-so-slightly-cropped trousers, this update on suiting of his worn with shoes so highly polished you could virtually see your face in them. Don’t even think about sneakers: It’s business all the way here.
Other times, those ties of his are morphed in skinny, sinuous strips of silken fabric nonchalantly entwined. They match the shirts they’re worn with—in stripes, in paisleys, in polka dots—with the shirting unfastened a few buttons less than you might be currently used to. Sometimes the scarves, shirts, and pants are all in the same pattern—in Prince of Wales check, it’s the new suit!—or the shirting and scarfing combo is coupled with faded, distressed, lived-in jeans, or belted sarongs, which are back.
So too, it seems, is Big Night dressing, and it has its own tie too—a floppy, poetic, romantic even, bow shaped like a Great Admiral. It provides the final flourish to black suiting cut with the same slimmer silhouette as his daytime tailoring. Vaccarello underscores here his knack of rethinking the le smoking, which house founder Yves Saint Laurent singlehandedly brought into the fashion conversation decades ago. In fact, it’s Monsieur Saint Laurent himself who stands over this collection, with Vaccarello tapping again into the house founder’s own personal style; the ties, the tailoring, the insouciant, ever so slightly eroticized and louche vibe: It’s all pure YSL.
It’s an interesting—and fruitful —line of thinking to pursue, because the truth is that while Yves Saint Laurent was radicalizing fashion for women, his own style was just as reflective of shifting attitudes and mores for and about men. Look at the images of him from the late ’60s through to the early-ish ’70s and while the way he put himself together is perfection itself; it also reflected how the world was changing—loosening up, rejecting trad masculinity, embracing individual sexuality. That’s the thing with Vaccarello when he looks back: It’s never just stylistic appropriation of the past, ever. Whatever he brings to the present has to look and feel exactly right for today. And all of this most definitely does.