The menswear shows that drew to a close in Paris on Sunday were all about progress: the unrelenting financial progress of the two French conglomerates LVMH and PPR, whose current menswear focus is a major background driver of many of the week’s key collections; and aesthetic progress, which is an altogether more personal – and complicated – issue that centres on a designer’s work, and how they allow it to evolve.

Since Hedi Slimane took over as creative director of Saint Laurent last year, he has gutted the house in order to lay down a new design code, one that owner PPR hopes will bring this inconsistent brand into permanent profit. That would be progress of a kind, but not the only kind that matters; Slimane has his own history to overcome, from the drama of his womenswear debut last October (brief recap: editors were irritated by his attempts at control; stores loved the clothes), to his time as menswear designer for Saint Laurent himself in the late 1990s, and his exit from Dior Homme in 2007.

His collection for autumn/winter 2013 was the equivalent of a full wardrobe (leather jacket; jeans; Prince of Wales coat) for his Saint Laurent man. Though that man on the catwalk was super-skinny, store-bound pieces such as a hooded duffel or a slender-lapelled black coat will easily translate into more forgiving sizes. It’s a design trick Slimane perfected at Dior: a trompe l’oeil-slim product that real men can actually wear.