For the past ten years, every season, Anthony Vaccarello has spoken to a certain person. Someone who knows exactly what they are looking for: a devotion to the work of Yves Saint Laurent and a commemoration of a glamour that is increasingly rare. Throughout the decade, the designer has distilled Monsieur Saint Laurent’s historic legacy into a vision that is anything but old-fashioned. Even with deep reverence, Vaccarello knows that his role is not to simply regurgitate, but to adapt, to translate. Through the continuation of the legacy, his time at the maison has given the world an understanding of the creative director’s principles. His adaptation of sacred text is just as pious.
His usual modus operandi was present from the beginning. The show opened beneath the sound of billowing, funereal music, the atmosphere charged with a sense of ceremony. Chandeliers hung low overhead, creating an artificial ceiling below an open sky.
The Vaccarello silhouette: high necks, broad shoulders, tightly drawn waists. Drama, unmistakably. Pussy-bow scarves trailed behind the models like split trains, their colours emblematic of Saint Laurent under Vaccarello — burnt oranges, deep greens, shades that felt pulled directly from the house's visual vocabulary and pushed into something darker. Vaccarello likes to drive the point home. He’s spoken at length about his tendency to hone in on a handful of silhouettes and experiment on them with materiality and palette. This season, the formula was inverted.
Gold became the show's great obsession. Heavy earrings framed open necklines, while new surfaces became canvases for the colour: embroidered palettes, embellishment, metallic textures. Texture itself became a kind of wonderland, each surface catching the light differently, allowing gold to become something more than a hue. It shimmered, reflected, cracked and softened.
Fur appeared at the collars and cuffs, adding another dimension of excess. There was an array of silhouettes, but they were held together by the same chromatic language: a collection unified not by uniformity, but by colour, material and mood. And then, gradually, the gold gave way to black. The volume remained, but the light disappeared.
Black dresses arrived enormous and grief-stricken, their proportions almost funereal. What had begun as a celebration of glamour became something closer to mourning. Texture, again, became the emotional language. It was a wonderland, a dream, a eulogy — perhaps even a parting gift. After a decade of translating reverence into something entirely his own, the feeling that lingers is one of gratitude: for the care with which, season after season, Vaccarello upheld Saint Laurent, so naturally and so completely that, for a moment, we forgot it could ever belong to anyone else.
Words by Pedro Vasconcelos
