VAQUERA’s Fractured Present Finally Hits the Menswear Rail

A bridal look opened the show. Seven months later, a bullet bra polo and a raccoon tail hat are sitting in a men’s shop.

Most runway shows save the wedding dress for last. VAQUERA sent it out first. For Fall/Winter 2026, designers Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee opened their Paris show with a bride in a pillbox hat, a reversal that told the room early on that the usual order of things had been suspended for the evening. What followed was the most openly unruly collection the label had shown in years, and now, with autumn arriving in New York.

Signal. What happened: VAQUERA’s newest full-price menswear arrivals have gone live on men’s site designer page, following the label’s Fall/Winter 2026 runway show in Paris. Exact object: a group of roughly twenty-two pieces including the Brown Quilted Corduroy Jacket ($1,510), Gray Slouchy Blazer ($1,290), Gray Wide-Leg Baby Trousers ($1,190), Black Mini Fringe Bag ($1,215), Off-White Bullet Bra Polo ($315), and Brown ‘Raccoon Tail’ Hat ($495). When and where: sorted under latest arrivals, with older VAQUERA stock sitting separately in the sale section. Source: VAQUERA for Men listing, plus the label’s Fall/Winter 2026 show notes. Why it matters: VAQUERA shows and sells largely without a gender line, so a dedicated men’s edit at a major retailer is where its theatrical runway language gets tested as day clothing for a buyer who may never have watched the show.

The timing makes sense. A runway season shown in Paris in winter usually trickles into stores from late summer onward, and the list now reads like a small, curated translation of that show for a men’s floor. The prices are real luxury prices. The attitude behind them has not changed much since the label’s subway platform days.

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VAQUERA’s show notes for the season opened with a piece of advice rather than a mood board: don’t commit too hard to one idea of your own future. The designers framed the season as a transformation for the label itself, built around a small mantra, hold on tightly, let go lightly, and a question about whether a person, or a garment, can be unhinged and complete at the same time. The full notes and credits sit on Fashion Week Online’s show page.

That question matters more for VAQUERA than it might for most brands. For several seasons the pair had been working toward steadier commercial footing, making pieces that sat more comfortably on a shop floor. In a post-show conversation with WWD’s reviewer, DiCaprio was blunt about how that had felt: “We got too caught up in thinking about what people wanted.” The Fall/Winter 2026 collection was the correction. Assless skirts, topless tops, and feathered pieces came back, and so did the label’s older habit of treating a runway as a place to make art first and figure out retail second.

The twist is that the designers see this as a better commercial strategy, not a worse one. Their logic runs roughly like this: if they genuinely love a piece, their customers probably will too.

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The show’s cast of characters was spelled out in the notes: distorted drab mods, twisted ladies who lunch, and abstracted leather daddies. Each archetype was pulled slightly out of shape. Proportions stretched, familiar tailoring slumped or ballooned, and polish gave way to something closer to a controlled mess. The bridal opener, complete with pillbox hat, set the tone for a show that questioned ceremony and expectation from its very first exit.

Two of those three characters translate almost directly to a men’s rail. The drab mod lives in slim, slightly wrong tailoring, grey and brown wool, a conductor’s cap. The leather daddy lives in fringe, black hide, and hardware. The ladies who lunch are harder to spot in a men’s edit, though their influence shows up in the jewelry and in a small fringed handbag that list to men without comment.

The production team behind the show was a familiar one. Longtime VAQUERA stylist Emma Wyman styled the collection, Michel Gaubert handled the show music, and casting came from Rachel Chandler and Jane Morineau, all credited in the label’s official show notes. The label’s special thanks list included Adrian Joffe, the president of Comme des Garçons and the architect of Dover Street Market, whose Paris operation took VAQUERA into its fold in 2020.

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Read top to bottom, the menswear list is a neat cross-section of what VAQUERA does best: tailor that has been knocked slightly off its axis, graphic jersey that plays tricks on the eye, and accessories that lean into costume.

The tailoring sits at the top of the price range. The Gray Slouchy Blazer ($1,290) is exactly what its name promises, a grey jacket designed to look like it has given up on standing to attention. It pairs naturally with the Gray Wide-Leg Baby Trousers ($1,190), and the combination reads like a drab mod after a very long night. For something heavier, the Brown Quilted Corduroy Jacket ($1,510) is the single most expensive clothing piece in the edit, and the matching Brown Corduroy Wide Trousers ($890) make a full autumn suit in one of the most traditional fabrics in menswear, given VAQUERA’s exaggerated proportions. The Black Wide-Leg Baby Jeans ($685) bring the same generous leg to denim.

Shirting is where the belt becomes a structural idea. The Blue Belted Shirt ($885) and Taupe Belted Shirt ($790) both work a belt into the shirt itself, a small detail that changes how a basic button-down sits on the body.

Then comes the trompe l’oeil. VAQUERA has spent years printing lingerie onto everyday garments, and the bra tee has become one of the label’s most recognizable pieces. The new group includes the White Bra Tee ($150), the entry point to the whole edit, along with a White Trompe L’Oeil Tall Tee ($260) and a Black Trompe L’Oeil Hoodie ($545). The Off-White Bullet Bra Polo ($315) goes one step further, applying the conical bullet bra silhouette of mid-century pin-up lingerie to one of the most conservative shirts a man can own.

 

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The accessor are where the leather daddy and the costume box meet. The Black Fringe Leather Belt ($535) and Black Mini Fringe Bag ($1,215) bring western fringe, a fitting nod for a label whose name is the Spanish word for cowgirl. The hats are the most theatrical pieces on the page: a Black Conductor Hat ($425), a Black Masked Hat ($465), and a Brown ‘Raccoon Tail’ Hat ($495), a frontier cap in the tradition of the coonskin, turned into a fashion object. Jewelry rounds it out with an ‘XL Silver Ball’ Necklace ($940) and a Short Beaded Necklace ($400).

Earlier-season VAQUERA pieces are still on the page too, now marked down, including a Black Skeleton Sweater, a Black Crown Vest, and a Swarovski crystal crown belt. The contrast between the two groups is instructive. The discounted pieces lean on graphic gimmicks. The new full-price arrivals lean harder on cut and proportion.

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Footwear was another thread of the Fall/Winter 2026 season, and it came through VAQUERA’s ongoing partnership with Converse. The label’s show notes confirmed a new chapter of the collaboration, building on the Chuck Taylor XXXHi Slouch Wedge and XHi Slouch Wedge, two earlier releases that pushed the Chuck’s high-top upward into an almost absurd, slouching shaft over a hidden wedge heel.

For Fall/Winter 2026, the pair introduced a new heel that reworks a familiar form through the same approach to scale and construction. VAQUERA said further details on the footwear would come later in 2026, and as of this writing those details have not been fully laid out. Nothing from the new Converse chapter appears in the SSENSE menswear edit yet.

The Converse partnership matters for VAQUERA in a practical sense. A collaboration with one of the most widely worn shoe in the world gives a label known for assless skirts a far wider door into the mainstream, without asking it to tone down its ideas. The Slouch Wedge worked because it looked like a joke about the Chuck Taylor that happened to be wearable, which is more or less VAQUERA’s approach to clothing as a whole.

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VAQUERA was founded in New York in 2013. The name comes from DiCaprio’s time working in an East Village kitchen, where his co-workers called him “la vaquera.” He had been a stylist before he made clothes, and as he told i-D in an early interview about the label’s subway show, he taught himself to sew using cosplay tutorials because nobody was making the clothes he wanted to shoot. That early presentation was staged on the uptown platform of the Delancey Street F train station, with models eating carrots as commuters filmed on their phones.

The label broke into the fashion mainstream a few years later. One of its most famous pieces, a life-size bag in the style of Tiffany & Co. packaging that tied around the shoulders and left the back exposed, became shorthand for what critics started calling fashion fan fiction. VAQUERA was nominated for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in 2017. A 2018 profile in The New York Times described a label still struggling to turn a profit, whose designers kept day jobs at a Brooklyn secondhand store, behind a bar, and as a cater-waiter, and noted that most of its handful of stockists at the time were in Japan.

The founding group has changed over the years. Claire Sullivan was part of the design team for a stretch, and today the label is led by DiCaprio and Taubensee. The support structure changed too. Dover Street Market’s Paris operation took the label on in 2020, handling the business side so the designers could focus on the work. VAQUERA began showing in Paris, and in the summer of 2025 the pair formally relocated there from New York, a move they framed through questions about good and bad taste in the city that has long claimed to define both.

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Fan fiction borrows familiar characters and puts them in situations their creators never intended. VAQUERA does the same with garments. The polo shirt, the conductor’s cap, the grey suit, and the Chuck Taylor are all characters every shopper already knows. The label writes them a stranger plot.

 

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That approach has always sat awkwardly with the idea of separate men’s and women’s collections. The label has long shown its clothes on a mixed cast and sold much of it as unisex, which means a men’s edit is really a buyer’s selection from one shared wardrobe rather than a separate line designed for men. The pieces we chose lean toward tailor, jersey, and hats, while the most extreme runway looks, the topless tops and assless skirts that drew the headlines, stay on the runway.

What remains is a small, specific wardrobe: a slouch grey suit, a corduroy jacket built like a quilt, a polo with a bullet bra printed across the chest, and a raccoon tail hat priced at $495. It is the Fall/Winter 2026 collection’s fractured present, edited for a men’s floor, and it is now sitting in latest arrive.