An Office Romance
Review of Ludovic de Saint Sernin Fall 2025 Fashion Show
By Mackenzie Richard
THE COLLECTION
THE VIBE
Boardroom Seduction, Refined Provocation, & Quiet Evolution
At its core, Ludovic de Saint Sernin’s work has always been about power—who holds it, who desires it, and how it manifests in clothing. His signature aesthetic, with its unapologetic sexuality and body-centric silhouettes, has long played with ideas of dominance and submission, confidence and exposure, attraction and control. But when a designer’s vision is so clearly defined, the challenge becomes evolution: How do you move the conversation forward without losing what made it compelling in the first place? L’Entretien, his Fall 2025 collection, provided one possible answer. It wasn’t a radical departure from his previous work, but a recalibration—a shift in focus from the boudoir to the boardroom, suggesting that power and seduction are not opposing forces, but two sides of the same coin.
By integrating workwear into his vocabulary, de Saint Sernin poses a direct challenge to the traditional notion that professionalism must be synonymous with restraint. Instead, he proposes that confidence and allure are not only compatible but that they inform one another. The opening look—a sharply tailored suit worn over a barely-there sheer top—embodied this tension. It asked: Is she stepping out of a late-night encounter and into a meeting, or is she arriving at the club straight from closing a deal? The ambiguity wasn’t just playful; it was a statement. Power is about perception, and de Saint Sernin’s client—commanding, self-possessed, and entirely unbothered by outdated notions of propriety—understands that better than anyone.
While the collection felt firmly within de Saint Sernin’s established vocabulary, it raised an important question: How does a brand that thrives on sensuality expand its world without becoming repetitive? The designer’s exploration of workwear offered a new lens—one that reframed eroticism not as something to be compartmentalized, but as something that can exist in professional spaces as well. Yet, the collection relied heavily on familiar codes—lace-up details, sheer fabrics, and cutouts—which, while core to the brand’s identity, risk feeling like a formula if not continually reimagined. The challenge moving forward will be balancing these signatures with the need for progression, ensuring that each season brings a fresh perspective rather than a refinement of the past.
THE DIRECTION
THE QUOTE
L’Entretien is about presenting yourself to the world with confidence and getting exactly what you want from it. The collection plays with that duality—blurring the line between work and play, power and allure. You don’t have to choose between looking strong and looking sensual—you can be both, and that’s something I wanted to push forward this season. You should be able to dress how you want and still be taken seriously. That’s something a lot of people in the community relate to—the way we’re judged for how we present ourselves, when really, it should be about what we bring to the table.
THE WRAP UP
Yet, L’Entretien wasn’t a reinvention of de Saint Sernin’s brand. It was, rather, an evolution—a quiet recalibration of his existing language. For those looking at the collection in its entirety, the connection between sex and power may not always be immediately apparent. Some looks spoke to these ideas more explicitly, while others translated their intent by association. The key was in the styling, the interplay of drape and structure, the way the collection blurred the boundaries between daywear and eveningwear, between dressing to seduce and dressing to command.
In a season where designers across the industry are revisiting tailoring as a symbol of authority, de Saint Sernin’s approach felt distinctly modern. He reframed power dressing not as an erasure of sensuality, but as an embrace of it. He rejected the notion that to be taken seriously, one must first strip away allure. Instead, he proposed a future in which confidence and sexuality exist in tandem—where a woman’s ability to seduce is not a liability, but an advantage. And in doing so, he ensured that his vision of power dressing is not just about aesthetics, but about agency.
Rather than discarding his signature eroticism, de Saint Sernin recontextualized it, demonstrating that seduction and authority can coexist in a corporate setting just as easily as they can in nightlife. This wasn’t a reinvention on the scale of his Mapplethorpe-inspired Fall 2024 collection, nor did it radically alter the DNA of the brand. Instead, L’Entretien proposed a quieter, more strategic expansion of his universe, one that suggests de Saint Sernin is considering the long game—how to make his aesthetic resonate beyond the club and into the broader reality of his clientele’s lives. Looking ahead, his continued success will hinge on his ability to evolve his signature codes—lace-ups, sheer silhouettes, metal mesh—while maintaining the honest, provocative spirit that first set him apart. This collection proved he is willing to take that step, refining rather than repeating, adapting without losing the tension that makes his work compelling.
