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The world might not be ready to move on from the Saint Laurent thigh-high leather boots that have celebrities (and fashion designers) in a chokehold, but Anthony Vaccarello is.

“I saw it so much,” he said backstage before his men’s spring 2026 runway show on the first afternoon of Paris Fashion Week. He had designed a new version of the kinky waders—made especially famous by Pedro Pascal and Alexander Skarsgård on the red carpet—for this collection, but cut them from the lineup. “I was like, no, let’s move on.”

So what’s Vaccarello’s big statement piece, the latest viral manifestation of his cinematic men’s style universe?

At the opening of the show, held around Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s melodic floating ceramic bowl installation in the rotunda of the Pinault Collection, it looked like it might be the Saint Laurent short shorts. The first pair was tailored in rusty brown wool with a roomy pleat and beefy cuff, worn with a bright orange wide-shouldered shirt and matching tie. A dark navy short matched the tint of another model’s retro oversized sunglasses—a bit smoky, yet undeniably summery for Vaccarello’s first daytime YSL men’s show.

Vaccarello was inspired by the idea of Fire Island in the ’70s, and borrowed his saturated pastel palette from the paintings of Larry Stanton, Billy Sullivan, and other artists who escaped from New York to the gay enclave and cultural haven. Yves Saint Laurent never visited, and Vaccarello has never been, either, but like the auteurs who pack his front row (Francis Ford Coppola among them this time around) Vaccarello has an exquisite command of romantic fantasy. With their ties twisted under the buttons of their lightly rumpled shirts, the models looked like they had just tumbled off the last train East on a sweltering Friday in the city.

“The way people lived there, and the way Yves Saint Laurent lived in Paris, I wanted to do a mix of those two periods of time, which was very important for Yves and very important for art in general,” Vaccarello explained.

Vaccarello’s other directorial strength is in generating desire by withholding rather than revealing. The shorts, pulled from a picture of Yves Saint Laurent playing tennis on holiday in the ’50s, were basically perfect—and a total tease. After only three looks, they were replaced by silky trousers that ballooned at the pleats and tapered to the roughly rolled cuffs at the hem.

“I thought maybe it was nice to do shorts for men, but I don’t need to do a statement, to do only shorts,” Vaccarello said. (It sounded to me like Vaccarello stopped himself from mentioning last week’s Prada show.) “Something like a few shorts here and there was nice.”

The pants were the real key to the show. Bouncing and rippling like water, the bottoms captured the indelible YSL edginess but in the lightest, most sensual manner. A number of trench coats, which Vaccarello is fond of presenting with a villainous intensity, were, like most of the tops, lightly padded at the shoulders, a leaner expression of the designer’s signature masculine line. But they were also so gossamer that the afternoon light pouring through the dome of the Bourse de Commerce went right through them. Same with the translucent nylon tops—a sporty plot twist for Vaccarello—that floated enticingly around the skin.

Vaccarello’s customers and fans are some of the most loyal in the biz because of just how much nuance Vaccarello can find in the drama of the male silhouette. He might do Patrick Bateman power suits one season and pajamas the next, but the darkly glamorous attitude is totally clear in each idea. You can bet the high-cheekboned actors in the crowd (and on the red carpet) will be clamoring for those shorts once they put their leather waders in storage for the summer.

As for how he intended to translate the boots for the beach, Vaccarello described a gladiator sandal that climbed up the leg. They could have been an obvious hit, as the thigh-highs have almost sold out, he acknowledged. But that’s not the point. “I don’t want to repeat myself,” Vaccarello said.

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