Nobody understands French guys’ style like Gauthier Borsarello. Since his appointment in 2021, the designer – and avid vintage collector, just check his ReSee selection! – has worked relentlessly to redefine Fursac’s position in contemporary menswear. This season he presented the brand’s first runway collection: an utterly chic mix of great tailoring with seductive nonchalance (dialed up with unexpected details like yellow leather gloves or crotchet ties), so natural to Parisian men. Executed with the styling help of Imruh Asha, the collection plays with the style images of renowned Frenchmen: think Jacques Dutronc, Alain Delon, and the boys of Nouvelle vague.
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“The gesture allows the clothes to exist,” said Hed Mayner backstage at his autumn-winter 2025 fashion show a week ago. How true this sentence is. You can have the most finely made garment in the universe, but if it just hangs in the closet, does it even matter? Clothes need a person’s gesture to be alive. But some clothes work harder, and once they are given life, they in return transform the wearer’s body language.
Of all contemporary menswear designers, Mayner balances utility with beauty of clothes in the most supreme way. And his new season perfecto jackets, leather pants and fringed shawls not only make you want to wear them, but also gesticulate in them – a lot. The fit of his over-sized wool-felt coat is so graphic and bold it creates a real silhouette. Same can be said of the sharp, yet round-edged plaid tailoring and meaty-velvet culottes. I can totally confirm what I’m saying, as I had the utmost pleasure of trying some of these garments in the label’s showroom. They truly transform your stature, give confidence, but at the same time seamlessly convey this “don’t bother me” attitude, just like Yohji Yamamoto’s designs.
In Paris, once you had to stand in a long line to enter a Christian Louboutin or Chanel boutique. Today, those stores are relatively empty, and the (even longer) lines are now shaping in front of Lemaire and Buly 1803 stores. That’s really telling about the contemporary customers. And honestly – they’ve got taste.
Lemaire, the product of Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran‘s highly-coherent creative dialogue, is a brand that although makes big numbers, still feels like a safe, intimate space for people who feel their best in soft minimalist sensibility. For the autumn-winter 2025 co-ed show, the duo delivered what they do best: chic layering, no-nonsense outerwear, witty accessories, and body-skimming silhouettes inspired by Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham’s post-rehearsal outfits. Tran said that the clothes sum up “the intensity of living nowadays.” Strokes of Almodovar-esque scarlet red made the offering feel exciting and livid. The Lemaire designers know what they’re doing.
Let’s be honest: this haute couture season was brief and left you feeling hungry. Maybe it wasn’t a famine for beauty, as Andre Leon Talley liked to say. There was way too much beauty – of the conventional kind. Hundreds of metres of tulles, thousands of hours of handwork, millions of digital impressions. But to me, this couture signalled one thing: it’s a growingly archaic commodity. Gone are the days when Raf Simons at Dior presented absolutely contemporary-looking vision of eveningwear. Or Karl Lagerfeld showing couture sneakers at Chanel. This season painfully missed true fashion moments. There was absolutely nothing close to a spectacle like THAT last John Galliano collection for Maison Margiela. Demna shows couture for Balenciaga only once a year, in July, but I really wished he saved this season. In the meantime he wore a T-shirt while being awarded with the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. And a plastic bag to Alessandro Michele’s debut Valentino couture show. I feel him.
Speaking of that debut, it was a brief moment of high this season, but as Angelo Flaccavento very rightly observed, this was a parade of great, convincing costumes, but not that great clothes. In the end, haute couture is a form of very precious, very costly applied art that’s being worn – at least once in its lifetime.
Michele really showcased all the possibilities of the Valentino artisan savoir-faire. To such extremes it felt dizzying (as the show’s title, “Vertigineux”, suggests), even nauseous. Huge ball-dresses dipped in embroideries and embellishments, meaty lace, massive crinolines, sumptuous excess all over: this certainly could be a separate costume department for a Fellini film. Unfortunately, as it’s the case with costumes, they wear the wearer. This isn’t very couture.
So, if Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’s Bronwyn Newport ever wears anything straight from that runway, Britani Bateman has full right to question it as costume.
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Yesterday in Paris, a flock of Saint Laurentséducteurs marched down a chandelier-ed runway. These men looked as if they teleported themselves from early 1980s to 2025. Anthony Vaccarello reimagines YSL menswear just the way he does in case of womenswear: via narratives and tropes connected to Yves’ life. A catalog of a 1983 YSL men’s collection which Robert Mapplethorpe photographed, with chiselled features sitting atop double breasted blazers, natty three-piece suits, and ties knotted with a firm hand, was the starting point. Mapplethorpe’s hardcore-leather-dom spirit was all over the wader boots and black trench coats. But another man in Saint Laurent’s life seemed to be omnipresent in this collecion: Helmut Newton and his vision of masculinity, often overlooked when compared to his women. Just look at the broad-shouldered suits that walked the runway, and then at the super-confident Parisians and cold-eyed Berliners captured by Newton for the pages of Vogue Paris.
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