What does luxury look like in the absence of spectacle? For Saint Laurent, the answer is wrapped in a tea towel, poured into a plastic cup, and slipped into a pair of gold heels at a garden party no one planned. In Saint Laurent’s latest SS25 campaign “An Ordinary Day”, British photographer Martin Parr to reframe the fashion campaign as something else entirely: a portrait of absurd realism where elegance gatecrashes the everyday.
Sharp, saturated, and slightly irreverent, the series places Saint Laurent accessories amid scenes lifted from suburban life. A leopard-print tote sits on a striped garden chair, bursting with cherry radishes and leeks. YSL logo brooch and gemmed earing meticulously placed on the toast smeared with marmalade. A toy dog keeps guard on a pair of stilettos with the audacity of royalty. Through the whimsical lens of Martin Parr and the artistic direction of Saint Laurent’s creative head Anthony Vacarello, the mundane becomes manicured, and the grotesque, glamorous.
There is no runway here, but there is choreography: of silver spoons, floral lounge chair, gleaming brooches, and a pair of golden wedges next to a wobbly jelly. Martin Parr doesn’t photograph fashion, he photographs how it lands — on skin, in routines, across generations. Models of various ages and ethnicities sit beside garden gnomes and paper napkins. They do not pose, they exist. And that is the point.
“An Ordinary Day” is a manifesto disguised as a joke. It whispers that style does not need occasion, just presence. This elegance is not an escape from the real, but its most lucid interpretation. And in doing so, it hands back glamour to the people, with a wink and a gold YSL logo.
