Secrets and longing surface as Saint Laurent menswear parades at Pinault's art palace
PARIS (AP) — It-designer Anthony Vaccarello on Tuesday sent out a Saint Laurent men's collection that felt both sun-drenched and haunted, set not just in the heart of Paris, but drifting somewhere between the city and the legendary queer enclave of Fire Island in New York.
Staged at the Bourse de Commerce, the grand art palace and crown jewel of Kering 's Pinault family in the French capital, the show paid tribute to Yves Saint Laurent's own history of escape and reinvention.
Star power in the front row, including Francis Ford Coppola, Rami Malek, Aaron and Sam Taylor-Johnson, and house icon Betty Catroux, underscored the label's magnetic pull.
Oversized shorts, boxy trenches, and blazers with extended shoulders riffed on an iconic 1950s photo of Saint Laurent in Oran, but they were reframed for a new era of subtle, coded sensuality. Flashes of mustard and pool blue popped against an otherwise muted, sandy palette — little jolts of longing beneath the surface calm.
Yet what truly set this collection apart was its emotional honesty. Vaccarello, often praised for his control and polish, confronted the idea of emptiness head-on.
The show notes spoke of a time 'when beauty served as a shield against emptiness,' a phrase that cut deep, recalling not only Saint Laurent's own battles with loneliness and addiction, but also the secret codes and guarded longing that marked the lives of many gay men of his generation.
That sense of secrecy was everywhere in the clothes: ties tucked away beneath the second shirt button, as if hiding something private; sunglasses shielding the eyes, keeping the world at a careful distance. These weren't just styling tricks, they were acts of self-preservation and subtle rebellion, evoking the rituals of concealment and coded desire that defined both Fire Island and of closet-era Paris. For generations, Fire Island meant freedom for gay men, but also the risks of exposure, discrimination, and the heartbreak of the AIDS crisis.
Fashion rivalry and a famous venue
If the installation of artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's pool of drifting porcelain bowls spoke to the idea of beautiful objects colliding and drifting apart, so too did the models: together on the runway, yet worlds apart, longing and loneliness held just beneath the surface.
This season's blockbuster staging felt all the more pointed as Kering faces tough quarters and slowing luxury demand. The group leveraged one of its artistic crown jewels, Saint Laurent, and a dramatic museum setting to showcase creative clout, generate buzz and reassure investors of its cultural muscle.
The venue itself — home to the Pinault Collection — embodies that rivalry at the very top of French luxury. The Pinault family controls Kering, which owns Saint Laurent, while their archrival Bernard Arnault helms LVMH and its Louis Vuitton Foundation across town. This season, the stakes felt especially high as the Saint Laurent show came just hours before Louis Vuitton's own, throwing the spotlight on a Paris fashion power struggle where every show doubles as a declaration of taste, power and corporate pride.
If the collection offered few surprises and leaned heavily on crowd-pleasing shapes, it was undeniably salable, proving that when a house this powerful plays to its strengths, few in Paris will complain. A collection for those who have ever wanted more, and learned to shield their hearts in style.
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The lakefront stretch was a haven until the early 2000s, when it was demolished and refortified to prevent coastal flooding. '(The photos) document a way of life that I thought was very particular and also feared was, in a sense, doomed,' Ischar said in a video call with CNN. Pockets where gay men could be open and relaxed in the US were rare, and the disease, ignored by the government for years, only stigmatized the community further during a time of peril. 'I feared the life of gay men would be forced back underground and hidden away, as it was for centuries,' he added. At the time, Ischar, who made the series during his graduate studies at California Institute of the Arts, found there was little interest in his work. But, decades later, encouraged by gallerists, he began bringing them out of the archives. Now, some of those images, including of the unnamed couple, are included in the exhibition 'City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago' at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The expansive group show, which opens in July, positions the city as an underrecognized hub for LGBTQ+ art and social action. According to the show's curator, Jack Schneider, US cities beyond New York City and San Francisco are often overlooked in their contributions to queer history; 'City in a Garden' aims to broaden that scope. '('Marginal Waters') were some of the first artworks I thought of when I started to think of this exhibition,' Schneider said. 'I find them profoundly melancholic. They're bright, leisurely and romantic at times. But beneath this surface-level serenity, the AIDS crisis (had) ravaged this community.' In 1985, and four years into his presidency, Ronald Reagan had only just publicly acknowledged the epidemic for the first time, and effective treatments were still years away. As Ischar recounted, people within the community were dying every day. 'It was a really dark time, and yet, what Doug so beautifully captures in his images is how people at the Belmont Rocks still found time to just live their lives and to do so enthusiastically,' Schneider explained. What made the Belmont Rocks unique among gay beaches was its visibility, Ischar noted. He had traveled to others around the country and abroad and found that none were as centrally located and overt. In Chicago, a mix of sand, grass and concrete beaches stretch up and down the densely populated eastern side of the city, near an expressway that serves as a major artery. 'It was unmistakable. People drove past the place on Lake Shore Drive hundreds of times a day,' he recalled. 'Chicago's version was uniquely frank and open and in your face.' 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But other forms of intimacy were abound, too, in the casual ease of people sunbathing together, and the closeness of Ischar with his subjects as he moved in to snap each scene — intimacy that transfers to the viewer. Many of the days that passed that summer were unremarkable, Ischar said. But, visually, that was the point. Ischar set out to photograph images of gay men he had 'never seen,' he said — that is, out in the real world, going on about their lives. It was a departure from the staged, often dramatic studio portraits of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar, or earlier, George Platt Lynes and James Bidgood. In the 2010s and '20s, other queer archives of the 1970s and '80s have been discovered, rediscovered, or published anew, from Tom Bianchi's Polaroids of gay men summering at Fire Island, to Donna Gottschalk's images of a lesbian-separatist commune in California, to Patric McCoy's portraits of Black gay men in Chicago — the last of which is also featured in 'City in a Garden.' Ischar's own images languished for many years, he noted, but he hopes that is continuing to change. 'I really wanted to leave a hopefully beautiful and penetrating portrait of this time and these people,' he said.
