Yves Saint Laurent Fall 2012 Menswear Collection on Style.com: Runway Review

Yves Saint Laurent

PARIS, January 20, 2012

By Tim Blanks

Power—who has it? who's losing it?—is an international obsession. This season, it's also a fashion preoccupation, possibly because there hasn't been a time in living memory when so many people had so little of it. Stefano Pilati's latest show for Yves Saint Laurent focused on power's fashion-friendly handmaidens: sex and money. Pilati managed to weave his themes into the heritage of the house. Back in the days when sex ruled the underground, it was, according to Pilati, more powerful than money. Now there's no more underground, but there are still photos of Saint Laurent in the seventies, looking and feeling transgressive in his big black coat. So that was where Pilati took his collection.

The setting he created was the place where sex and money came to play—the art world. A huge Twombly-esque chalkboard backdrop was actually a smudgy transcript of a Warhol interview. The staticky electronica of Scanner on the soundtrack was collaged with art-world legend Sam Wagstaff discussing the mechanics of collecting. And the style of Wagstaff's boyfriend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, slowly insinuated itself into the show.

Half of the collection was founded on precise military-influenced tailoring, like the peacoats and cavalry coats, some with luxuriant fur trims, and the double-breasted jackets. In this context, they were the lingua franca of wealthy men, but Pilati perverted their authority with black leather, the currency of fetishistic sex. He started stealthily with a leather trim, a lapel, a collar, then added quilted shoulders, tees, waistcoats. Money may talk loudest now, but Pilati allowed it to be overwhelmed by sex. Mapplethorpe's self-portrait in a biker jacket set the tone. The key details were buckles and straps. Shoes were cased in metal. Picture the clothes on Mapplethorpe's models and you saw how close to the bone Pilati had gotten. He had a brigade of unthreatening male models instead, but a sweater with a razor-blade motif (another Mapplethorpe element) suggested a sinister subtext: the unthreatening surface concealing the lethally hard edge.

See all from Yves Saint Laurent › Timeline

A.P.C.	Acne	Adam Kimmel
Agnès B.	Alexander McQueen	Alexander Wang
Alexandre Plokhov	Alexis Mabille	Ami
Andrea Pompilio	Ann Demeulemeester	Antonio Azzuolo
Assembly

Balenciaga	Bally	Balmain
Band of Outsiders	Belstaff	Berluti
Bespoken	Billy Reid	Bottega Veneta
Brioni	Burberry Prorsum

Calvin Klein Collection	Canali	Carven
Christophe Lemaire	Comme des Garçons	Costume National

Damir Doma	Diesel Black Gold	Dior Homme
DKNY	Dolce & Gabbana	Dries Van Noten
Dsquared²	Duckie Brown

E. Tautz	Edun	Emporio Armani
Ermenegildo Zegna	Etro