Saint Laurent: In Yves’s Footsteps, Chasing the Light
This season, Vaccarello paints an emotional portrait, in terms of both aesthetics and collective memory. “I’ve always wanted to collaborate with the Yves Saint Laurent of the ’70s,” Vaccarello said. Attached to the press release was a black-and-white photograph of the house’s iconic founder, Yves Saint Laurent, on a tennis court, his long, slender legs in exactly the wide, turned-up shorts we saw on the runway and a long-sleeved camp-style shirt. That photograph inspired the collection’s opening look.
The collection was also a kind of tribute to the artists Larry Stanton, Patrick Angus and Billy Sullivan, and to the generation of beautiful young men lost to AIDS in those years. It evokes a suspended moment between Paris and Fire Island, when escape turned into elegance and desire into language. It pays homage to a lost generation and to the artists who gave a face to silent desires. The vivid colours of the artists’ portraits are reflected directly in Vaccarello’s palette: burgundy, faded earth, dried moss, pool blue, yellow, pale green, navy, a mustardy greenish beige and mint green… “Less dark, more light, more sensuality, more fun,” is how Vaccarello sums up the collection. It conjured a moment suspended between Paris and 1970s Fire Island.
SAINT LAURENT IN THE MIDDAY LIGHT
For this collection, Anthony Vaccarello chose not the night but the clarity of afternoon light. The show took shape around French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s installation “Clinamen” at the Bourse de Commerce. Porcelain bowls drift and collide in a circular pool, drawing invisible lines on the water and creating an unchoreographed resonance.
Draped trousers gathered at the waist, shirts with padded shoulders, trench coats both fluid and sharp — all these powerful pieces and colours were hypnotic.
Plenty of silk taffeta, slick nylon windbreakers, dazzling and unexpected bursts of colour: all of it looked magnificent. Padded, billowing shirts in celadon green or turquoise, sometimes completed with ties in the same fabric, knotted tightly at the collar…
In this collection, every shirt tells of a memory, every jacket of a passion, every colour of an emotion.
Every garment on the Saint Laurent runway is, in fact, an invitation. To be bolder, to feel more deeply and to express oneself through style… And perhaps most importantly, to write our own story by bringing past and present together… Combining the silhouettes of the past with the sensibilities of today, Vaccarello sets the Saint Laurent man free.