Saint Laurent Men's Winter 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Saint Laurent Men’s Winter 2025 Ad Campaign by Photographer Glen Luchford with models Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Christopher Walken

For Saint Laurent’s Winter 2025 menswear campaign, Creative Director Anthony Vaccarello collaborated with Glen Luchford to craft a visually striking exploration of contrasts between youth and experience. Featuring Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Christopher Walken, the campaign presents a compelling dialogue across generations. Through Vaccarello’s focused direction and Luchford’s evocative visuals, the house adds another chapter to its legacy of elegant provocation.

Shot in evocative black-and-white, the campaign conjures a moody, stylized world. Taylor-Johnson’s scenes are charged with erotic immediacy and emotional volatility, recalling the sensual intensity and emotional edge of Saint Laurent’s 1970s imagery. In contrast, Walken exudes enigmatic calm, offering a quieter, more internalized performance that anchors the scenes in a deeper register. The visual storytelling draws on the legacy of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose 1983 Saint Laurent campaign remains a touchstone.

The campaign succeeds most in its atmosphere—Luchford’s grainy intimacy, the slow-burn pacing of the short films, and the restraint in Vaccarello’s styling all converge to evoke a sense of brooding glamour. Rather than leaning into overt nostalgia, the visuals channel a particular strain of ’80s eroticism—cinematic, emotionally fraught, and deeply stylized. Taylor-Johnson, in particular, moves between anguish and seduction with an intensity that feels both performative and sincere. The minimal yet richly tactile styling echoes this duality: the sharp tailoring is softened by gesture and expression. The pairing feels deliberately theatrical, almost literary: two men, two modes of being, staged in a perpetual exchange.

What lingers most isn’t the mood or even the styling, but the decision to center two men at opposite ends of their careers — not in conflict, but in conversation. It’s a rare move in luxury menswear, where youth is often fetishized and age sidelined. By allowing both figures to fully inhabit their roles —one restless, the other assured—Vaccarello sketches out a more expansive, layered vision of masculinity. It’s not a reinvention of the Saint Laurent man, but a reminder that he’s always been plural.