BEHIND THE SCENES: Saint Laurent, which has paraded its menswear in Berlin, Marrakech and Los Angeles in recent years, has not yet scheduled any destination show or Paris event for its spring 2025 collection.
Meanwhile, the brand is making a cheeky appearance during Paris Fashion Week by unveiling its winter 2024 men’s campaign, each image featuring a naked figure viewed mainly from, ahem, behind. It is to debut later Friday on Saint Laurent’s social channels.
Saint Laurent creative director Anthony Vaccarello collaborated with British photographer Glen Luchford on the still pictures and a short film.
The house describes the highly stylized compositions as “tableaus that pay homage to scenes created by masters, from Michelangelo and Caravaggio to Édouard Manet.”
Indeed, there’s something of Manet’s 1863 masterpiece “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” in the mix of fully dressed models, mainly in Vaccarello’s languid tailoring, coupled with nudie dudes. And one of the curly haired models is nearly a dead ringer for the “Boy With a Basket of Fruit” as painted by Caravaggio.
Vaccarello built his fall men’s collection with strong shoulders, but executed his suits in languid, feminine fabrics like georgette bonded to satin.
Some female models also appear, wearing looks from Saint Laurent’s mostly sheer fall 2024 collection.
According to Saint Laurent, the allusions to famous paintings echo founder Yves Saint Laurent’s “lifelong embrace of art, a pursuit he compared to chasing ‘aesthetic ghosts.’”
But the house flagged a “contemporary playfulness” in Luchford’s images that “undercuts the campaign’s classicism, each picture is suffused with a brazen sensuality distilled from influential 20th-century directors such as Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini.”
“Their audacious works were deemed controversial by those who failed to understand their intention, in actuality the auteurs were intelligently addressing troubling events of the recent past to help avoid history from repeating itself,” Saint Laurent, now deeply involved in film production, added.