Saint Laurent spring/summer 2026 was all leg and shoulders

EVERY COUPLE OF SEASONS, a fashion item du jour emerges from the biannual fashion weeks. A few years ago, passed around like a mean blunt, was the itty-bitty Miu Miu skirt and jumper set from the womenswear shows. (It got shared around the guys too.) Or Loewe’s uber-plushy balloon bomber, an autumn/winter piece that was sweated through by several celebrity ambassadors attending the Spanish brand’s show in the middle of June. More recently, that title has belonged to Saint Laurent’s thigh high over-the-knee boots.

That this is a metric for success is interesting on two fronts. For one, it exemplifies how fashion has embraced the meme making machine, further entwining it with unlikely pockets of culture. But more crucially, these viral items always seem to hone in on a section of the population – or a section of the body. In the case of the Saint Laurent boots, at a neat $6,660 retail, it was seen on just about every celebrated It daddy (Alexander Skarsgard, Pedro Pascal, Brad Pitt) since it debuted earlier this January, elongating them to leggy king status. (I hope they didn’t all share the same boots.) And if Saint Laurent wants to keep its crown, there were a few worthy bids at designer Anthony Vaccarello’s spring/summer 2026 menswear presentation this week.

If we’re keeping to the lower half of the body, there were short shorts by the dozen. Pleated in volume, models walked around the centre of the Bourse de Commerce (Kering CEO François Henri Pinault’s, who owns the brand, museum in the middle of the city) in swishy shirts with safari shirts and ties tucked into the gaps. It was something your quirked up lawyer would wear for a day out in Jurassic Park. One for a throwback, Vaccarello’s show notes were provided with a photo of the brand’s namesake, circa 1950, in a pair of similar shorts playing tennis.

Lately, Vaccarello has been acutely aware of the iconography of Yves Saint Laurent, the man; his models are often styled in a similar image of neatly combed hair and thick specs. But the namesake’s eye for colour has been a heritage sensibility the Belgian designer has been injecting into his work. Painting with a broader palette this season, there were saffrons and ochres in monochrome sets; billowy trench coats in pale jewel tones worked as colour blocking top layers. It was enough of an invocation of the spice and opulence of Monsieur Saint Laurent’s lifelong interest in Marrakech.

Moving up the body, Vaccarello is leaning all in on shoulder pads. This style of ’80s power shoulder was introduced back into the Saint Laurent vocabulary a year and half ago for autumn/winter 2024, getting broader and stronger ever since. Associated as a feature of outerwear, blousy shirts this season were just as padded up – you need not wear a jacket to strengthen your shoulders. Vaccarello also doesn’t want you to work on that dorito-ratio; the broad shoulders taper nicely into a cinched waist. 

Whatever the next viral fashion item will be is for the algorithm to decide. But right now, with all the ‘boom-boom’ and return to ’80s tailoring defining our moment, our money’s on the shoulder pants. You heard it here first: everyone’s embracing the shoulders.

Scroll down for some of our favourite looks below.