Lead ImageSaint Laurent Autumn/Winter 2025 womenswearCourtesy of Saint Laurent
“A sensitive body, inside strong clothes.” That was Anthony Vaccarello’s statement, backstage, before his Autumn/Winter 2025 collection – the closing shot of Paris Fashion Week, and the main drag of the season as a whole. Like other designers, he was thinking of women, and he was looking back – to Saint Laurent’s past, of course, but also his own past season. “This time, I wanted something more clean – no ornamentation, no decoration,” he said. “It was a reaction to last season’s finale – the brocade and lace.” Even if you didn’t see that show, you’ve seen the clothes, arguably the most photographed of the entire collection within magazine editorials and on red carpets, glistening and glowing odes to the mastery of Saint Laurent’s unparallelled colour sense. “I still love that, but I wanted to clean it up.”
Vaccarello was also thinking about couture and what it means at Saint Laurent. It’s a house that no longer creates custom-made clothing for the world’s wealthiest women, but during Yves Saint Laurent’s career, he was lauded as one of the greatest. If in doubt, watch the documentary Yves Saint Laurent: The Last Collections by Olivier Meyrou, the beautifully melancholic, stiflingly claustrophobic 1998 film entirely recorded within the confines of the Saint Laurent couture house and charting Yves’s markedly painful creative process, his physical frailty and emotional torment, yet also filled with the most exquisite clothes you’ve ever seen. It was understandably suppressed by Yves Saint Laurent’s business partner and later husband Pierre Bergé until after his death – he couldn’t face seeing the mirror of his and Saint Laurent’s divergent lives and relationships that he himself commissioned.
It’s a period Vaccarello is constantly drawn to, Saint Laurent’s collections of the 1990s, half-remembered when he was a teenager – I hasten to add, those weren’t Yves Saint Laurent’s glory years. His style had nullified, stuck in reference to his own past, largely standing stark and alone outside of fashion’s conversations, but revered all the same for its excellence of craft, and for flashes of the genius that once was. It’s a somewhat extraordinary approach to take to the legacy of Saint Laurent – to reference its forgotten moments, rather than its greatest hits. But it allows Vaccarello to create some of the most compelling and powerful fashion today.
FYI, Vaccarello’s up for the real stuff. “I would like to do couture at Saint Laurent,” he said, while explaining how these clothes were not couture despite gestures and echoes, deep-cuffed, archaically formal leather gloves, those odd colour combinations – tangerine and violet, deep purple with artichoke-green and bruised blue, persimmon over caramel – and a directly archival bunch of blurred floral prints and rampant animalier patterns coated in silicone to make them dance like especially jittery latex sheaths about the body. Although the clothes – slim pencil skirts and lavaliere houses with the bows knotted in the back – seemed haute, the techniques were decidedly ready-to-wear, with tech knits used to create silhouettes with stretch. “I really wanted a sense of elasticity, a sense of freedom,” Vaccarello said. “There is no structure, everything is moving, it’s all done by shape and fabric.” That includes the jutting Saint Laurent shoulder, one that has risen (literally) back to prominence in Vaccarello’s past few collections, which here was a gentler iteration, a shell, without padding or weight, in silks or even guipure lace, light shining through like an X-ray. “Angular, but soft,” he said, of its appearance in high-rise blouses and soft, low-belted jackets.
Of course, that notion of manipulation with just fabric and shape is very couture – but Vaccarello decided to deflate his finale of grand Saint Laurent evening dresses by cutting them like soft negligees, their skirts stuffed with tulle, and slinging leather bomber jackets over the top, as if to hammer home his point that this wasn’t the real deal. There were also no trousers, a Saint Laurent signature if ever there was one. When asked about them, Vaccarello shrugged – too much reverence can be a bad thing. “A show for me is not supposed to tick all the boxes of merchandising,” he said. “It’s an image. It’s seduction.” Oh, we were seduced all right.
