By The Fashion Editorial Team
Anthony Vaccarello recently unveiled the Saint Laurent Winter 2025 Menswear campaign as a cinematic meditation on masculinity. Directed and lensed by Glen Luchford, the campaign portrays generational masculinity in contrasting stark and sensual monochrome.
An imagined conversation between youth and age, impulse and control, leading man Aaron Taylor-Johnson embodies the restless intensity of the former; provocative, physical, and emotionally unguarded. In contrast, the ever enigmatic Christopher Walken evokes the quiet strength of lived experience. Together, they form a diptych of masculine archetypes, shaping the Saint Laurent men's narrative with subtle gravitas.
The campaign reverberates with the spirit of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose 1983 imagery for Saint Laurent lent the campaign classical composition with a sensual eroticism. Luchford continues this aesthetic theme with his own visual style, charged with vulnerability and structure.
Taylor-Johnson’s portrayal is deeply corporeal in the film by Luchford where he echoes the spirit of Yves Saint Laurent’s 1970s portraits, recalling when sexuality and style were synonymous. Appearing in the house's signature sharp tailoring which oscillates between severity and seduction, Johnson moves through anguish, obsession, and eventual catharsis in the short film. At its finale, a brief smile feels revolutionary, suggesting that amidst darkness, cheeky gracefulness endures. In a second cinematic vignette, Walken shifts from cold detachment to wry softness. His presence is felt through stillness, through weight. In Walken, Vaccarello finds a protagonist with a different type of modern allure: the self-assured man who has nothing left to prove.
Imbued with seasonal fashion, the campaign transcends the temporal. Sharply tailored silhouettes, luxurious textures, and precise styling are quintessentially Saint Laurent, sure, but it's the metaphorical narrative tailoring in the campaign that stands apart. It's the stitching together of contrasting masculine identities, historical memory, and house codes into a coherent, emotionally living vision in Johnson and Walken. In Vaccarello's vision for Winter 2025, the Saint Laurent man becomes multi-faceted and pluralistic; seductive yet restrained, classical yet subversive, thoughtful yet provocative, and most of all, as stylish as ever.