Seven collections from the S/S 2027 men’s shows to return to.
Paris closed the men’s season with the usual collision of large houses, smaller presentations and enough competing narratives to make instant verdicts fairly useless. A little distance helps.
At Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello’s clothes were the least elaborate thing in the room. Michael Rider’s Celine made room for several different silhouettes at once. Julian Klausner continued to find his footing at Dries Van Noten, while Jonathan Anderson treated Dior’s history as material to work with rather than something to preserve behind glass. Willy Chavarria kept refining proportion; Auralee concentrated on fabric; and Studio Nicholson finally put sixteen years of consistency on a runway.
Saint Laurent
Anthony Vaccarello put the show inside Fujiko Nakaya’s Cloud #07156 at the Bourse de Commerce, with models emerging through fog and disappearing back into it. The staging was elaborate. The clothes were much less so.
Broad tailoring remained, but around it came ribbed knits, small waistcoats, lightweight windbreakers and pieces with the economy of an actual summer wardrobe. A gold trench was the obvious exception: an ordinary category of clothing made strange almost entirely through its surface.
Marguerite Duras, Tina Chow and Mr. Ripley were among Vaccarello’s references. They make an unlikely but convincing group, each associated with a kind of attraction that depends as much on withholding as display.
Saint Laurent has spent several seasons pursuing a tightly controlled silhouette. The development here was quieter: Vaccarello kept its authority while removing much of what had previously been required to sustain it.
Celine
Michael Rider’s first standalone menswear runway for Celine allowed several versions of the same wardrobe to coexist.
Very narrow trousers appeared alongside drawstring styles with considerably more volume. Tailored coats sat close to the body while trenches moved further away from it. Shetland sweaters, Fair Isle tanks, leather and oversized knits belonged to the same collection without being forced into one governing silhouette.
That breadth is becoming one of Rider’s more persuasive ideas for Celine. Rather than designing a uniform and repeating it until it becomes immediately identifiable, he is assembling characters.
The skinny trouser therefore registered without looking like a declaration that the wide trouser was finished. Both could exist. Celine looked more convincing for allowing the contradiction.
Dries Van Noten
Julian Klausner’s summer collection for Dries Van Noten asked how light a piece of clothing could become without losing its character.
Translucent shirts, silk cargo trousers, loose coats, parkas and embroidered tops gave much of the collection an almost temporary quality. Beige, dusty rose and brown eventually gave way to stronger colour, while embroidery and animal motifs kept the softness from becoming overly polite.
Klausner drew partly from Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un faune, which explains the languor, camisoles and sense of somebody dressed somewhere between waking and going out.
The more important continuity with Dries Van Noten is structural. Under Van Noten, print and colour rarely had to compensate for an unremarkable garment underneath. Klausner is beginning to show the same understanding without simply reproducing his predecessor’s clothes.
Dior
Jonathan Anderson’s second summer menswear collection for Dior worked with recognition.
A tuxedo was loosened. Houndstooth was printed rather than woven. Polka dots became sequins. A silk shirt returned to a scarf motif from Dior’s 1979 haute couture archive, while historic references migrated onto shoes and accessories in less expected forms.
The Musée Nissim de Camondo was an apt setting. Its rooms are filled with eighteenth-century decorative arts, a world Christian Dior himself admired, but Anderson’s approach to inheritance is rarely reverential.
He seems happier when an archive can be disturbed. The strongest pieces retained enough of the original code to register at first glance, then became increasingly odd the longer they were examined. Dior’s history was present, but it was being used rather than displayed.
Willy Chavarria
Willy Chavarria called the collection Comunión and showed it inside Oscar Niemeyer’s former French Communist Party headquarters in Paris.
Rosaries appeared against bare skin. A string quartet played. By the end, the models assembled together instead of completing the conventional procession and disappearing backstage. The language of communion carried religious, social and political associations, but the clothes did not need slogans to make the point.
Chavarria’s familiar high waist, broad trouser and abbreviated tailoring remained at the centre of the collection. His work is often reduced to the word oversized, which explains its dimensions while missing its construction.
The waistband begins higher. The jacket stops sooner. The shoulder extends. Those decisions reorganise the body before the width of the trouser is even considered. Chavarria’s scale is not arbitrary; that control is precisely why the exaggeration works.
Auralee
Auralee required considerably less spectacle.
Ryota Iwai began with the anticipation of a summer holiday and let the wardrobe relax as the collection progressed. Dark tailoring opened into lighter fabrics, brighter colour and clothes with less obvious formality.
As usual with Auralee, the differences were in the materials. Wool and linen made tailoring unusually light. Shirts appeared close to weightless. Familiar-looking trousers changed character once the fabric was considered.
Auralee’s clothes rarely depend upon inventing a new category. Iwai is more interested in improving an existing one until the difference can be felt in how it hangs, folds or moves. In a season built to produce images, that insistence on the physical object remains unusually persuasive.
Studio Nicholson
Studio Nicholson waited sixteen years before holding its first runway show.
Nick Wakeman had spoken about wanting people to see the clothes in movement and at closer range, but the show also served a larger purpose: putting the accumulated identity of the company in front of an audience accustomed to brands announcing reinvention every six months.
There was very little reinvention to announce. Trousers remained central. The Sorte pant returned in bonded gabardine; the Alwyn jean used Japanese denim; the Taunton trouser came with a long rise and slightly dropped 1980s proportion. Outerwear moved through washed cotton, nappa leather and pieces developed with Mackintosh.
That continuity is the point. Studio Nicholson has spent years altering fabric, proportion and construction around categories its customers already want to wear. Repetition sounds conservative only when nothing is being learned from it. Here it has produced greater precision.