Anthony Vaccarello‘s work at Saint Laurent has reached new levels of creative success since the designer started to read the YSL glossary and began translating its nuances and quintessences into contemporary interpretation of painfully hot, Parisian chic. The autumn-winter 2023 collection, presented on an elevated, chandelier-lit runway that looked exactly like the one on which Yves presented his shows in the 1980s, focused on a look as simple (and eternally good-looking) as a masculine, big-shouldered jacket worn with a pencil skirt. This power-look came down the runway in various fabric and silhouette iterations, nearly always kept in black or white with pops of tartan plaid or earthy brown. Some of these sharp blazers evolved into flowing, floor-sweeping capes of silk or velvet (for the evening), or were nonchalantly wrapped with plaid scarves (for a rainy, Parisian day). There’s really not much more to say about the collection except for the fact it’s another impressive exercise of refinement coming from Vaccarello, and a very seductive, smart, and commercially-vital homage to the YSL legacy. In the voice of a Catherine Deneuve-esque Parisienne, “chic, no?“
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
For the last couple of seasons, Anthony Vaccarello has been delivering his best womenswear collections for Saint Laurent. He’s starting to refine (and redefine) the menswear line as well. Long, tall, lean – those were the words that spontaneously shot to mind while the designer was sending out the autumn-winter 2023 collection that swept away the gendering of clothes with every passing flick of its floor-grazing coat-tails. At Saint Laurent, it was instantly very clear: Vaccarello has been building on the dramatically attenuated silhouettes that have been striding out at his women’s collections recently, and their transference into menswear is now complete. “I really want them to be almost one person,” he said. “So women could be the men, and the men could be the women. No difference. I want more and more to put them at the same level. No distinction.” While the audience reclined on a circular banquette, sipping Champagne at the perimeter of a beige center-stage, it was equally apparent that Vaccarello was speaking about his idea of what drop-dead elegance means to people of his own generation. In material terms, that translates to dark, vertical, narrow coats; black leather and velvet; necks exaggeratedly tied in flourishing bows or sunk funnel-necks; the cool, tailored swagger of Smoking jackets, the cache-coeur drape of tops and chest-revealing cowl-front silk shirts that plunge into wrapped cummerbunds. Whereas what was for “her” was pioneeringly co-opted from “him” by Yves Saint Laurent in the 1960s and ’70s, now Vaccarello has reversed the process in the 2020s. Of course, the codes of the house offer endless gifts to play with on the menswear scale: patent block heels, adaptations of the pussy-bow see-through chiffon blouse, a hint of the North African draped hood. Vaccarello did all that, with a confidence and conviction that is all his own. What’s progressive about it is the way he’s pushed past anything that might be categorized as “blurry,” “fluid” or “neutral.” In the bigger scheme of fashion, his contribution is bringing exactly the opposite qualities to rethinking clothes and gender: what Vaccarello deals in is rigor, precision, and a brilliant ability to cut. It was a true Saint Laurent on-brand orchestration (with a little help from Charlotte Gainsbourg, who while wearing a black velvet tuxedo played on the piano in the middle of the Bource De Commerce venue), for sure, but a resonantly relevant step forward for the designer too.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Anthony Vaccarello is staying close to the obsession he’s been evolving lately at Saint Laurent: the super-chic and ultra-elegant flowing, languid, maxi silhouettes. The silk skirts are floor-sweeping, the boxy coats are long, the eveningwear is all about the body-clinging column. For resort 2023 (which serves as a sweet entrée to the fabulous spring-summer 2023 fashion show collection), all the YSL-isms are here, but adjusted because Vaccarello has that ineffable way of remaking their proportions to feel totally right for the moment we’re in. Like the draped cocktailania of Monsieur Saint Laurent’s ’80s and ’90s reinvented into tiny dresses and just as tiny bodysuits. Vaccarello has been busy perfecting his drapery style for some time now. What else resonates here, what gets that eye fixated on the proceedings, is how this collection tackles the twin pillars that the house of Saint Laurent was built on, the mid-century couture-era codes of tailleur and flou, that are the very guiding principles of French fashion. Vaccarello gives the collision of those two approaches a very distinctly personal spin: gorgeously frothy chiffon dresses, with flouncing hems come with cabans embellished with blowsy blooms, or beaten-up leather bomber jackets. Heritage, tradition, and craft, but handled with a snap and crackle. This is an example of really good in fashion in 2023.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Those latest Saint Laurent collections are impeccable. And the spring-summer 2023 offering is to die for. “To me, the body says what words cannot,” Martha Graham, the revered, radical American modern dancer and choreographer once said. It wouldn’t be crazy to think that’s the kind of statement Anthony Vaccarello, Saint Laurent’s creative director, would concur with. His work for the house has always exalted a corporeal glory; his own view of physicality – strong, celebratory, unapologetic – and the legacy of the house merged to be totally in sync. Graham’s and Vaccarello’s orbits surprisingly spun into each other at his remarkable show, which was staged in the almost dream-like Parisian setting of a grand paved garden replete with cascading fountain. The result: a quietly epic examination of what happens when you both reveal and conceal the body – and the frisson you generate when you make your look long, lean and loaded with attitude. Backstage, just before the show, Vaccarello mentioned that he’d been looking at the groundbreaking way that Graham dressed her company in tubular dresses for her 1930 production Lamentation, costuming which audaciously emphasized every bit of physical agility from her dancers. Vaccarello first discovered Graham, he said laughing, by being a fan of Madonna’s in the 1990s, when the Material Girl had been busy singing Graham’s praises to the sky. But for spring Vaccarello looked back a decade earlier to YSL’s past – the mid-’80s days when models strode those old school elevated podiums in Monsieur Saint Laurent’s hooded, draped, capuche dresses. They were visions of languid elegance, dressed to the nines with myriad jeweled accessories, the maquillage as immaculate as the hauteur they were so gifted at projecting. Vaccarello riffed on all the draping and hooding for a slew of beautifully rendered dresses cut from jersey in two different weights, one heavier and opaque, giving a more constructed look; the other lighter and gauzier, gently veiling the body underneath. Some of these dresses were slipped under sweeping great coats and trenches which fell in narrow columnar proportions from big shoulders in leather or tweed or wool, or with more leather in the form of capacious blouson jackets which nipped inwards as their cut moved towards the waist. Vaccarello’s color palette was gloriously muted but definitive, taken from the clothes shot on Polaroid from YSL fittings back in the day: soft browns, purples, camels, olives and taupes, their tones heightened by the substantial jeweled or Claude Lalanne-esque gold cuffs. There were barely-there sandals and satiny pumps with high cut vamps and gleaming metallic shades. Everything came together to create a look that was finished, polished, considered, and done. But what drives Vaccarello is where we are right now. Despite the historical referencing, his push is to always exist in the present. You can trace that from this collection back through his last few women’s runway shows. It’s a thread which takes you from the bold shouldered blazers and latex of winter 2020 to the Belgian-y swaggering coats and floor-trailing skirts he did for autumn, to last night’s glorious offering. Let’s call what Vaccarello is doing empower dressing. It doesn’t rest on the outward gestures – the width of the shoulders, the height of the heels, or the length of the skirts. Instead, it reflects what’s within, unspoken, but undeniably powerful and potent.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
For spring-summer 2023 season, Anthony Vaccarello came up with his best menswear collection for Saint Laurent. The clothes were brilliant and absolutely desirable. Of course, the setting helped. Vaccarello had decamped to the Agafay desert, an hour or so out of Marrakech. It’s a city with real significance to Yves Saint Laurent the man (he had two homes here, most famously Villa Oasis, nestling beside the Majorelle Garden) and the brand (Marrakech is the location of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent). And then factor in the show’s mise en scène: an epic and haunting circular light show installation designed by artist and set designer Es Devlin, which rose up from a mirage pond, and was erected atop the moonlike terrain. Still, a cinematic setting doesn’t mean a whole lot if the clothes can’t live up to it. And here was Vaccarello’s master stroke: present a collection which he said, just before the show, was, “for the first time, my most personal. It’s maybe less, let’s say costume-y, than it could have been in the past.” Vaccarello looked back 20 years to when he was a student in Brussels at the La Cambre art school, a time when the tautly drawn lines of Belgian noir were omnipresent in fashion. It gave a defined tailored silhouette, to be sure, but one with a softness and a crumpled sense of being loveworn. Vaccarello took his own sartorial impulses from his earlier years – “it was how I dressed in 2000. It was a look that I loved, and I wanted to recreate that spirit; I was missing that” – and married them beautifully to the classic codes of YSL.
Trenchcoats came sharply shouldered but with a beguiling fluidity to their silhouette, cut with a barely perceptible flutter to them, in black wool or pliable glove-like leather. Lanky pants started high at the waist then fell into an easier, wider stride, some with a satin-y tux stripe running down the leg, or styled like jeans but cut from the most luscious of velvets, both often partnered with delicate gauzy tops that clung to the torso. The le smoking was a constant and compelling refrain here. Vaccarello had updated the classic tux, utilizing all the inherent fluidity of YSL’s beloved grain de poudre fabric, while others were cut from the slitheriest and slippiest of lounge lizard satins. He shaped his jackets with a judiciously judged jut to their shoulders, then might finish them off by having them clasp the body via their double-breasted or wrapover fastenings, drawing attention to a slenderized waist in the process. Sometimes though the newness came from something of the past. The flash of male décolleté – Vaccarello’s models sported almost to a man their jackets sans shirts – was something he’d picked up on from looking at how house icon Betty Catroux preferred to wear her tailoring back in the day. Again and again, look after look, it became clear that there was something about the pleasure of yielding to all of this, finding a place of comfort, of peace and of calm. It’s why, Vaccarello said, he’d chosen Marrakech. Not because he wanted to do a YSL in Morocco tribute collection, but because he understood that the city had been a place of solace and refuge for Monsieur Saint Laurent, in much the same way that Los Angeles has become a place of rest and recharge for himself.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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