Anthony Vaccarello’s Dynamic Decade At Saint Laurent

Ten years is a long time in fashion, but in that span, Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello, who celebrates a decade at the fabled house this year, has never loosened his iron grip on chic. The dark-haired Belgian is often described as quiet, but focused might be a better description.

He has always preferred to let his designs do the talking, and they have plenty to say. Big-shouldered, short-skirted, daringly transparent, sexually liberated, deliciously decadent – the hallmarks of Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent era add up to a bold, precise and unmistakable design language, with desire at its heart.

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Anthony Vaccarello made his Yves Saint Laurent debut on a damp night in Paris in September 2016. Taking over one of the crown jewels of French fashion, he had two legacies to contend with. First there was that of Yves Saint Laurent, the shy, neurotic, bespectacled founder, who in the 1960s and 1970s reshaped fashion and defined glamour, sexuality and decadent excess for generations to come. Second was the recently departed Hedi Slimane, whose groupie-glamour Saint Laurent aesthetic loomed large over the house.

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When I interviewed Vaccarello a few weeks after his debut, he told me how, in the run up to the show, he’d met with the late Pierre Bergé, Yves’s business partner (and former lover), who ran the Yves Saint Laurent Foundation. He took him to Yves’s office, which had remained untouched after the designer’s 2008 death, and handed Vaccarello the original 1961 Adolphe Mouron, aka Cassandre, artwork for the YSL logo. As the young designer held the precious symbol of the house, Bergé cautioned him not to copy Yves, but to be himself. On the mannequin next to them was a long leopard couture gown from 1982, which Vaccarello took as a sign. He used it as inspiration for his debut collection, creating vampish, ultra mini versions with models teetering on heels made from Cassandre’s YSL logo.

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The brand still makes those emblematic heels – just one example of the remarkable consistency of Vaccarello’s work. He doesn’t chop and change style, or people. Many of his muses, such as Kate Moss, Catherine Deneuve, Anja Rubik, Zoë Kravitz and Charlotte Gainsbourg, have been with him since the first show, forming a core of carefully curated friends of the house who exude that unmistakable Saint Laurent aura. I once asked him to describe his YSL woman. “I think she’s free,” he said, which he defined as being yourself and not following the crowd.

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Vaccarello isn’t interested in the crowd. Instead, he’s laser-focused on the message, with each collection mining a specific aspect of Saint Laurent chic. For AW18, it was leather micro shorts and swashbuckling slouchy boots (when he said a Saint Laurent girl should “have character and good legs” he wasn’t joking – he never jokes). SS19 served up cut-away bodysuits over sheer tights as a racy alternative to evening gowns, AW19 was all about glow-in-the-dark party dresses, while for SS23 it was safari suits. The shockingly sheer AW24 collection was made from hosiery fabric, while the strong tuxedo messaging of AW26 paid homage to Yves’s Le Smoking revolution (in 1966 his evening trouser suits were a radical proposition).

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The cool clarity of each collection stands out against the accelerated churn of fashion trends, allowing Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent to cut through, and not just for his clothes, but also for his cinematic sense of staging. He recently said that “fashion shows should be like movies”. His are epic spectacles, with the twinkling Eiffel Tower guest-starring at his open-air shows and subliminally associating his collections with the ultimate symbol of Paris.

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Speaking of movies, in recent years Vaccarello has evolved his creative director role beyond just fashion. In 2023, he founded Saint Laurent Productions, the first fully fledged film production subsidiary created by a luxury fashion house, with the brand providing financing and costuming for a string of notable movies, including the Oscar-nominated Emilia Pérez, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds (both 2024), and the Pedro Almodóvar short Strange Way of Life (2023), starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke. A dynamic decade at Saint Laurent has propelled him into the cultural super league. Vaccarello doesn’t just think big, he thinks beyond.

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Issue 77 of 10 Magazine – FUTURE, LEGACY, HERITAGE  – is on newsstands now. Order your copy here.