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!
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!
It’s one of those Isabel Marant collections which she might have designed with her eyes closed. And there’s nothing bad about it. This super chic, super Parisian, super effortless Marant look is eternal. For spring-summer 2023, she doubled down on that approach, with a look that was abbreviated, exuberant, and went from soft to tough – often in the same outfit. The designer clearly went back to basics, as it were, revisiting the moment when she started her label in the mid-’90s through to the dawn of the 2000s. There was a new mood in the air then, streetwise and raw, but also with a kind of world-weary, knowing charm. It was a moment when a different kind of woman – a little grunge, a little boho, a whole lot cool – made herself known. “I wanted to go back to a certain fragility of femininity, but still keeping in mind the Isabel Marant woman, who is a bit of a city warrior,” said the designer. She referenced the work of the brilliant late photographer Corinne Day, who pretty much photographed Kate Moss before anyone else, but who also, importantly, spent her sadly all too brief career photographing women as they would like to be seen themselves. You could also say that that’s quintessential Marant: a label where women can see themselves in it. The very personal era that Marant revisited was writ large in this collection. Racer cut tanks and swingy little dresses in patchwork configurations of metallic-threaded floral silk chiffon came with zippered leather minis and moto pants that had been washed and washed to get the perfect lived-in patina. Laser-cut suede jackets were as long as the shorts and fluttery skirts they were worn with. Camo looked as if it had been sun-bleached, cut into an oversized jacket or cargo pants, another from the Marant arsenal of killer trousers. And to underscore what makes Isabel Marant, the woman and the label, tick, there was a profusion of artisanal detailing, from the tiny seed pearls sprinkled across an organdy camisole, to the macramé threaded across an organza blouse.
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!
Unabashedly feminine and sexy, Magda Butrym‘s resort 2023 party-ready pieces sit in a league of their own – and continue to evolve in her new collection. The Polish designer delivers new off-shoulder necklines and the return of her signature, hot-red rose appliqués, now on separates, rendered in crochet and denim, and adorning an elongating pink number that exudes high statuesque glamour. She also introduces more coverage – most notably on a crystal-flecked long-sleeve gown in scintillating pale beige. The tailoring is sharp as usual, this time in an array of colours, from bold magenta to deep black. The pink long-sleeve floor sweeper with a dramatic side slit and floral-detailed high neck is the Aphrodite of Butrym’s latest eveningwear. These are clothes to dance in, all night, in the moonlight. No wonder why the collection is titled “Super Moon”.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
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