Anthony Vaccarello’s decision to show Saint Laurent’s SS24 menswear collection in Berlin last night made total sense. The Grey city was where the late Yves Saint Laurent would hang out with close friend and collaborator Helmut Newton and his cohort of creatives late into the night. Vaccarello himself might have Berlin as part of his own personal milieu – when studying in Brussels, he would hit up the city’s no-sleep nightclubs – but this wasn’t just about the hedonistic home of Berghain, Brutalism and Bratwurst; it was a stripped down exploration of structural precision, silhouette and androgyne.
The collection was called Each Man Kills The Things He Loves; a tragic device, a pleasing paradox. The title was, by way of Oscar Wilde, the song sung by French new wave icon Jeanne Moreau in a movie adaptation of one of the writer’s renowned novels, Querelle de Brest. It was later filmed in 1982 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of Berlin’s most legendary directors, simply as Querelle.
It was a poetic rhapsody of unified opulence unfurling within the hallowed halls of Neue Nationalgalerie, the only building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Europe in the ‘60s after his emigration to the USA. A temple of art, the steel and glass structure’s pared-down classicism and grid frame, was punctuated by prosaic black curtains as a singular flood light suffused the pavilion like a rising sun over a concrete jungle.
An unencumbered dialogue between dress elements considered to be distinctly masculine or feminine played the protagonist. Tuxedos were worn with body-skimming satin décolleté tank tops, baring the hairless chests of Saint Laurent’s men. Sharp-shouldered tailoring was undercut by attenuated high-waisted flute pants and interspersed with yet more shoulders, but these ones weren’t emphasised in a tailored jacket, they were left bare, nakedly fragile and stripped of nostalgia. Stark skin or framed by gossamer silk and sleeveless mousseline shirting sensually wrapped around the torso or slung over a single shoulder, with their trailing bow-tie necklines the tops were blatantly androgyne chichi. Echoes of Vaccarello’s last women’s collection came through in fresh configurations for the male figure; think concise draping and powerful prints (for RTW it was tartan, here it was leopard, re-proportioned polka dots and confidently mixed stripes). It was sublime.
Photography courtesy of Saint Laurent.
