At Paris Fashion Week, a return to normcore, ties and tailoring
From Louis Vuitton to Dior and Saint Laurent, the editors of Esquire review the Paris Fashion Week Men's shows for the autumn/winter 2025 season

FASHION IS IN a funny place at the moment. With all the creative shake-ups and designer musical chairs taking root, the autumn/winter 2025 season has taken place during a period of limbo, as some mainstays (Loewe, Gucci) opted to sit out in favour of presenting co-ed shows during ready-to-wear in February. But with some key seats at marquee houses now secured – just this morning, Glenn Martens, former Diesel creative director and founder of Y/Project was named the new creative director of Maison Margiela – and others rumoured, fashion week might soon settle back into more of a rhythm.
But until then, what do designers have to say? If Milan Fashion Week was all about instinct and seduction, the Paris shows that happened throughout the past week showed a steady hand to give the fashion world some feeling of permanence. Dior Men’s by Kim Jones was a tour de force in the studied elegance and minimalism of the house’s roots. Cool kid on the block Auralee now ascends a new rung in the mainstream as normcore fetishists clamour for their pieces and New Balance sneaker collab. But it wasn’t Paris Fashion Week without a headliner, and that would be Louis Vuitton, with creative director Pharrell Williams collaborating with menswear legend Nigo. Scroll on for more of our thoughts and opinions on the standout shows from the autumn/winter 2025 season.
Saint Laurent

When we think of Saint Laurent’s founder, we think of Yves Saint Laurent, the visionary French designer who gave the brand its name. But alongside Yves every step of the way was Pierre Bergé, his partner in work and life. While Yves was a textbook aesthete, whose taste in hedonism knew no boundaries and a thirst for new experiences was always looking to be quenched, Bergé was level-headed, an intelligent businessman whom, beginning in the 1960s, was responsible for shaping Saint Laurent into a commercial and critical success.
For autumn/winter 2025, Saint Laurent creative director Anthony Vaccarello mined the dynamic between the co-founders of the Parisian house, delivering a collection of looks built on contrast, duality. Vaccarello referred to some of his ensembles as ‘counterintuitive’ – perfectly draped blazers reached down to severe, thigh-high boots, while hard leather jackets with strong shoulders gave way to feathered stoles, which gave way to feathered coats.

Personally, I felt the collection tended more towards the structured and concise than the fluid and floaty, which I really enjoyed. The jewell-toned turtlenecks worn beneath herringbone jackets felt aristocratic, almost equestrian-like. There was something American Psycho-esque about the trench coats, especially that leather one. Come to think of it, Austin Butler, our new Patrick Bateman, is a Saint Laurent guy. Surely, the remake’s costume designer was taking notes. – Amy Campbell
Louis Vuitton
Before Pharrell Williams was offered the job of Men’s Creative Director at Louis Vuitton, he had “been pushing” his longtime friend and creative collaborator Nigo for the role. Nigo, who is best known as the founder of cult Japanese streetwear label A Bathing Ape (BAPE), had his hands full as the creative director of Kenzo, another LVMH-owned brand, which he continues to lead today. Apparently unaware that he was being propositioned, in February 2023, Pharrell got the top job, and has since presented no less than seven collections for the house (including pre-collections and resort). But the biggest Pharrell heads – those who’ve followed his comeuppance and kept tabs on his key accomplices along the way – have been waiting for the arrival of the collection that was unveiled in Paris overnight: Pharrell x Nigo for Louis Vuitton.
Fashion history nerds will be quick to point out this isn’t the first time the streetwear titans have co-designed for Louis Vuitton; in 2004, while Louis Vuitton was under the creative directorship of Marc Jacobs, Pharrell and Nigo collaborated on the now-infamous Millionaire sunglasses. But that was one product, designed and released 20 years ago. This is an entire collection, built around 25 years of friendship, and the references, lore and synergy that comes with knowing and working with someone for that long.

At 84 looks strong, the collection gave those heads plenty of Pharrell x Nigo easter eggs to nibble on – cartoonish side profiles of their heads featured across sweaters, bags and gilets – yet it avoided feeling too nostalgic. The interplay between Pharrell’s signature dandy aesthetic and Nigo’s love of functional 20th century workwear resulted in some excellent pieces, such as a chore jackets in sakura pink (and a damier print suit in the same cherry blossom tones), ornamental brooches pinned to breast pockets. There was plenty of Japanese denim, a new skate-style sneaker silhouette called the ‘ButterSoft’ (Pharrell unveiled it on his @skateboard finsta days ago, and it’ll sell tremendously well), and a final chapter full of tailoring; the collection’s progression from street-leaning looks to formalwear felt representative of Nigo and Pharrell’s own aesthetic journeys, as well as the broader vibe shift menswear has undergone since they first began working together.

There was a lot to this collection, but the eclecticism of it all felt exciting. No doubt, items from it will command well above their original RRP’s on luxury resale platforms in years to come, given this is such an iconic team-up under the roof of the world’s biggest luxury house. Another cool component of this very anticipated collab: after posing as reference points for the collection, from January 24, pieces from both Pharrell and Nigo’s archives will go up for sale on Pharrell’s auction site, joopiter.com. To give you a calibre of the pieces on offer, among them is the vintage military helmet worn by Williams on the cover of N.E.R.D.’s 2010 album Nothing. You can sign in to bid now. – Amy Campbell
Dior Men

Word on the street is that Kim Jones, who has been the creative director of Dior Men’s since 2018, is flying the coop. Yet you wouldn’t know it, looking at his latest autumn/winter collection.
For the past couple of seasons, Jones has become fascinated with Christian Dior (the man) when designing his couture-inspired menswear. If you recall, autumn/winter 2022 – with his life-size recreation of the Pont Alexandre III inside the Dior-grey tent – was his largest aesthetic shift, giving his tailoring a streetwear-friendly slouch. Autumn/winter 2024 saw sharper cuts and balletic elegance in what was spoken about as his greatest leap into making couture for men.

Now, for autumn/winter 2025, in an imposing grey box on the grounds of the École Militaire, the absence of his regular beat of fine artist collaborations and logos gave way to an austerity worthy of a king’s ransom (as far as couture prices go). Jones’ take on the bar jacket has seen a few iterations over his tenure (mostly double-breasted without all the buttons and a slight nip at the waist), but he presented it this time in evening jackets of ivory and black with gentle pleating and upturned buttoned peak lapels for full closure. These were clean lines for the minimalist aristocrat. This feeling continued into noble fabrics – in a tight edit of light pink, grey, black, white, and browns – of silk, vicuna wool and nappa leather that were treated so tenderly that they either draped or acted as shells on the body. Most appealing were his undershirts and knitwear that exposed the clavicle. This is again that balletic influence, that tender show of strength, but this time showed off this body part du jour as something to be worn for the day and evening.
For all the nobility and minimalism – in what Jones described backstage as a feeling of permanence in our fast fashion world – Dior is still the place to dream. Towards the show’s end, coats and military parkas were dusted off in crystals that sparkled like rolling raindrops. Trousers, so ambiguously voluminous that one would think they were skirts, sashayed like evening gowns. The finale, a floral silver-embroidered belted kimono coat. Dior Men’s has ascended a new rung of sophistication for menswear; for the male customer envious of the splendour of the couture shows that will follow after the men’s shows wrap up. – Tyler Dane Wingco

Hermès

Longevity in fashion is rare to come by. But to highlight a milestone this season, Véronique Nichanian is celebrating her 37th year as the men’s artistic director at Hermès, officially surpassing the 36 years Karl Lagerfeld spent at Chanel. Designing the men’s universe at Hermès, a brand famous for its leather goods and equestrian heritage, is an interesting spot to be. During her tenure, Nichanian has not only used colour and print, but created a whole vocabulary around it. It’s not just blue at Hermès, but something like petrol blue; colours are nuanced under her hand. Considering the heritage of the brand’s famed Birkin and Kelly bags, where aspirant customers delight in the idiosyncratic names of its colour catalogue, Nichanian treats naming shades like a botanist might flowers.
For autumn/winter 2025, where other designers kept to a strict regimen of colour palettes, Nichanian played to her strengths of her endless eye for how colour interacts with fabrication. Grey and brown raincoats and parkas in drape-y leathers were glossy. Pale yellow shirts cheekily peeked out of putty-brown cardigans. Take this as a lesson in layering: how these pieces work in service as full, coherent looks, and not something haphazardly thrown on because it may rain this afternoon. – Tyler Dane Wingco

Auralee

What is the hottest brand to know this season? That would be Japan’s Auralee. The brand, founded and designed by Ryoto Iwai, has been making a name for itself in the normcore, elevated basics space since its founding in 2015. (It’s only since autumn/winter 2024 that Auralee has been presenting on the Paris calendar.) Though ‘basic’ is the brand anything but. What makes Auralee so wearable and, indeed, what makes it sell, are the fabrics Iwai develops in-house each season. The wool-y anorak, for instance, is actually made of silk. So luxuriously made, yet quotidian in its appearance, it’ll make your Patagonia fleece wilt. That trompe l’oiel sounding treatment is nothing new (like making a flannel shirt out of leather), though Iwai’s process is without the novelty or gag. Auralee’s pieces exist to be the very best versions of themselves. Again, a nylon anorak is washed to airy confection that it eschews, even turns its nose up at, the crunchy, scratchy sound that the synthetic is known for.
Fashion people who make a fetish out of elevated minimalism are besotted by what Iwai is doing. But it’s Auralee’s sneaker collaborations with American footwear brand New Balance that has opened it to another conversation in fashion. This season, Iwai chose to revisit the T500 sneaker in two colourways: a powdery dark mocha and creamy off-white. The T500 – first released in 1982 as a tennis shoe – has been making a comeback since Aimé Leon Dore released its collab pair last year. More recently, a special edition version was released in time for the Australian Open. Now, the model is set to be one of the year’s sneakers to wear. Though for the sneakerheads reading this, fashion release schedules run differently to regular sneaker drops. Expect to cop the Auralee x New Balance T500 around November/December, the same time that the collection arrives in stores. – Tyler Dane Wingco


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