The Heat Was On: The Showstoppers from Paris Men's Fashion Week SS27

Paris sweated through its hottest June on record last week, with thermometers nudging forty degrees and the Eiffel Tower shutting its doors to tourists. But inside, and in some cases, spectacularly outside, the venues that housed this season's menswear shows, the temperature was altogether different. It was precise. Controlled. And, at its best, genuinely exciting.

Saint Laurent: Restraint as the Ultimate Power Move

Anthony Vaccarello opened the week on Tuesday evening inside the fog-shrouded Bourse de Commerce, Tadao Ando's reimagined rotunda, which was made ethereal by Fujiko Nakaya's Cloud #07156 - a water vapour installation that turned the entire space into something halfway between a dream and a sauna. On the hottest day Paris had seen in living memory, it was the most apt opening act imaginable.

But Vaccarello wasn't just playing with the weather. He was making a philosophical point. His SS27 collection was built around what he calls ‘the luxury of absence’, the idea that seduction, true seduction, is achieved through what you leave out rather than what you pile on. Unlined jackets in featherweight fabrics moved like a second skin. Fluid trousers swept the floor. V-necks were worn without undershirts, exposing the kind of studied ease that takes real effort to achieve. Even the leather pieces - a narrow belt, a shrunken waistcoat - felt like punctuation rather than statement.

The finale referenced Alber Elbaz's legendary Autumn/Winter 2000 collection, a tribute that landed without sentiment, because the clothes on the runway already justified it. This wasn't nostalgia. This was continuity. Saint Laurent SS27 was, without much question, the defining moment of the week: the show you'll be referencing next spring when your client asks what the mood is.

Louis Vuitton: Pharrell Brings the Ocean to Paris

Pharrell Williams has never done anything quietly, and his SS27 outing for Louis Vuitton was no exception. The Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris was transformed into a beach: sand underfoot, a boardwalk runway, and, most dramatically, an eight-metre-high artificial tidal wave, 37 metres wide, pumped through with real Parisian water. Guests were lightly misted. Models walked carrying surfboards.

If that sounds like pure spectacle for spectacle's sake, you'd be partly right. But Pharrell has always understood something important: the set isn't separate from the collection. It *is* the collection. And this one was about California - surf culture, skate culture, the particular kind of nonchalance that comes from people who genuinely spend their lives outdoors and happen to also be sharply dressed.

The clothes themselves were sharp. Wetsuit silhouettes were reengineered as tailoring. Board shorts arrived in Vuitton monogram, weighted with enough house DNA to keep them from reading as costume. Chunky post-surf knits, technical gilets and embellishments drawn from the sea, shells, scales, tidal textures, ran through the collection like salt through seawater. The shoes, broadly referencing the classic Vans boat shoe, were the kind of thing you'd wear to a dinner in Malibu with people who've never had to try to be cool.

Dior Men: Jonathan Anderson Finds Balance

By now, Jonathan Anderson's Dior Men tenure has shaken off whatever residual surprise it generated on appointment. He is at home here, and SS27 was perhaps the most confident and cohesive collection he's shown so far.

Presented at the grounds of the Musée Nissim de Camondo, the collection pursued a kind of wilful anachronism. Anderson's Dior man lives somewhere between the nineteenth century and the rave, between Beau Brummell and a Berlin club at 4 AM. The references - Barry Lyndon's melancholy dandyism, a certain dissolute English aristocracy - were worn lightly, never as costume. Checked, plain and semi-transparent suits appeared almost deconstructed, paired with deliberately loosened ties and shirts worn open or not at all. Shawl lapels borrowed from smoking jackets turned up on canvas and distressed denim, while floor-length redingotes arrived in cotton so lightweight they barely registered in the heat.

The disco references were there too: sequins, a certain looseness in the hips of a trouser, the shimmer of a fabric - but Anderson is too precise a designer to let anything become one-note. The tensions he sets up between the historical and the hedonistic, between exquisite tailoring and studied undress, are what make Dior Homme consistently worth watching.

Part two of our coverage looks at the quieter conversations happening at Givenchy, Celine and Hermès.

Images courtesy of Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton and Dior.