Method. Saint Laurent SS24

September 27, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The spring-summer 2024 Saint Laurent collection, presented on a marble runway against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower last night, gave a mood. But did it deliver truly great, contemporary-looking clothes? Anthony Vaccarello has found a new formula for his job at the Parisian maison: find a theme from Yves Saint Laurent’s vast archive, refresh it for the eyes of a contemporary customer, and consistently stick to it for the entire season. This sort of repetition-technique delivers strikingly coherent collections that sell well – and give YSL’s legacy a new relevance. But I felt that something started to crack in Vaccarello’s “genius” method this season.

The new collection was inspired by pioneering women through the lens of Saint Laurent’s late 1960s Saharienne look. Vaccarello looked to the likes of Amelia Earhart and Adrienne Bolland, who infiltrated “domains once considered exclusively male.” Earhart’s influence was perhaps the most evident, with aviation themes filtering through in aviator sunglasses and head-caps. Formula 1-style racing dress also came to the fore, with utility-style jumpsuits sitting sharp on the shoulders, slouching at the leg and belted tightly at the waist for shape. As the models progressed through the stage, service jackets and cargo trousers gave way to billowing, pleated gowns, mesh tops and glittering mini dresses in khaki, beige, burgundy and deep blue. Of course, it all looked super-chic and refined on the moody runway – an entire production, actually – but in the end, I thought the clothes had a rather dated outlook at what successful, contemporary women want to dress like. I doubt they want to be invested so much in 20th century nostalgia.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Belle Du Jour. Saint Laurent Pre-Fall 2023

June 29, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

If you’ve had a yearning for big shoulders lately, you can thank Anthony Vaccarello for that. For several seasons now, and for both the women’s and men’s collections, Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent has been pumping them way up. It’s a look that rests on a squared-off line with a lot of impact. It’s also been a neat way to underscore his and the house’s exemplary tailoring skills which are impeccable. The deadly-chic Saint Laurent women’s pre-fall 2023 sketches out the look. There those shoulders are on masculine inflected overcoats, their swagger exaggerated by dark glasses, door knocker hoop earrings, and spike-heeled black boots. There they are again on leather and shearling jackets, some cut with a curvy blouson-y look or natty aviator versions, with featherweight shawls knotted at the neck to trail in the wind, leaving everything and everyone in their wake. The high-gloss, high-power era of fashion, roughly the late ’70s to the just dawning ’90s, is something that Vaccarello’s YSL has long been tapped into. Yet his smartness with it has been to amplify the look while also denuding it of some of its associations. Yes, he might be evoking that time with his second-skin black dressing, the wrists weighted with hefty golden cuffs, or with the roomy boardroom coats over sliver-thin pencil skirts that finish a fraction above the knees. But this isn’t a historicist retreat; there’s no desire here to create clothing shellacked with outmoded notions of power and status. Instead, Vaccarello’s attitude reads as modern: a touch of dishevelment with the hair of his models, a certain androgynous beauty, a kind of casual offhandedness about the whole proceedings. Vaccarello is designing for someone who’s curious about wearing chicer, glossier, more structured clothing, but who is still firmly living in, and dressing for, the world today.

Men’s – Each Man Kills The Things He Loves. Saint Laurent SS24

June 13, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Anthony Vaccarello took Saint Laurent to Berlin, the city of Lydia Tár and Helmut Newton. The first signs as to where the designer was going with his spring-summer 2024 men’s show – a miracle of impressive tailoring broad in the shoulders and attenuated in the legs, interspersed with yet more shoulders, nakedly fragile this time, framed by gossamer silk or chiffon sleeveless shirting – was to be found on Instagram. A brief clip of the 1950 French short film, Un Chant d’Amour, a grainy black and white ode to sensuality as much to criminality, and directed by the writer Jean Genet, delivered the first vibes. Vaccarello also mentioned the name of the collection: Each Man Kills the Things He Loves. The title was, by way of Oscar Wilde, the song sung by Jeanne Moreau in a movie adaptation of one of the French writer’s great novels, Querelle de Brest. It was later filmed in 1982 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder simply as Querelle. Et voila, there you have it: Moreau, an icon of the French nouvelle vague, as Parisian as, well, Yves Saint Laurent, and Fassbinder, one of Berlin’s most legendary directors, a man who knew a thing or two about dissonant sexuality and the power between men and women as much as, well, again, Saint Laurent.

Still, what Vaccarello showed this Monday was far, far more than a clue-laden trail of reference A to B. He himself might have Berlin as part of his own personal landscape of the past – as a student in Brussels back in the day, he would hit the city’s still-going-at-noon-the-next-day nightclubs – but in many respects, this impressive and assured outing wasn’t only about the city. While there might be deft and nimble references to each locale, with each carrying a certain resonance in the YSL universe, this was, once again, Vaccarello in superbly rigorous mode, an approach echoed by his choice of venue, the structural precision of the Mies van der Rohe-designed Neue Nationalgalerie (my favourite museum in Berlin!). “When you leave the show, I want you to have the silhouette clearly in your head,” he said backstage. In other words, it’s a design approach that’s thoughtful, concise, and intent on stripping away the fuss to the perfect distillation of 50 looks, exploring – and what could be more YSL than this? – the exquisite tension between tailleur, aka suiting, and flou, all that light-as-air, fluid, sensual soft dressing, of which there was plenty in this men’s show. The exchange between his women’s and his men’s played out in delicate slipper satin tanks with deep décolletés under swaggering jackets, the matching pants cut high and narrow at the waist (ooof: breathe in!) and sliced at the ankles to show off high chunky-heeled boots. In leopard spots or polka dots (two recurring leitmotifs here) as sensually wrapped shirts or as one-shouldered tops, their bow-tie necklines trailing southwards like veils. And in prosaic black sweatshirting transformed into couture-y evening looks, draped to slide off the shoulders, with a new laidback version of smoking pants. An honorable mention too to the myriad sublime tuxedos that opened and closed this show. They also followed the impressively shouldered and roomy line of his jackets and the narrowness of the trousers. With their bow ties and high-collared shirts, and distinctly androgyne chic, they gave a bit of a Tár vibe.

Chic, No? Saint Laurent AW23

March 1, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.
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Men’s – Vertical Chic. Saint Laurent AW23

January 18, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.