When you think about the designers who created an aesthetic that still reverberates half a century later – Coco Chanel, Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent – much of their current relevance comes down to the creative directors in place at their houses now.
Lauren and Armani are still in charge of their labels. The legacies of the others rely on the respectfulness of the incumbents there and their skill at mining the archives and simultaneously creating updated versions that hit a nerve in today’s tumescent culture.
Saint Laurent is fortunate to have Anthony Vaccarello, a man who, after eight years there, so fully inhabits the mind of Yves, that his mood board backstage was filled with pictures of the man himself.
That’s partly because in a 2000 interview, when asked by a journalist who the Saint Laurent woman was, Yves cheekily replied it was himself. He was no stranger to self publicity. You may recall that in 1971 he starred, tastefully naked (no prudish sensibilities were harmed in the making of this image) in a now iconic photograph by Jeanloup Sieff for the first Saint Laurent eau de toilette campaign. By 2000, Yves, a much bulkier figure than the waif-y bearded one of 1971, always appeared in public fully clothed, in dark tailored suits and ties.
It was this Yves that attracted Vaccarello for his Spring 2025 collection. Double breasted suits in steel grey, charcoal, taupe and brown with white shirts, ties and enormous shoulders comprised half the show, some topped with leather blouson jackets or gabardine trench coats. The tailoring was, as you would expect, impeccable – although you rarely see anyone wearing these proportions, even during fashion month, for fairly obvious reasons.
Generally, this gets toned down by the time it hits the stores. And most of it will be outsold by the outsize specs the models wore – another playful reference to Yves’s own face furniture.
In any case, Saint Laurent’s front row acolytes – Carla Bruni; Catherine Deneuve, who famously wore Saint Laurent in several of her films; a still peroxide Betty Catroux, one of Yves’s early muses; and Emily in Paris’s Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu were less keen on wearing massive shoulder pads and more interested in putting on a spectacular display of slender crossed legs (and, in some cases, some interesting facial injectables).
Back to the catwalk, which was as mesmerising as the people watching (not always the case, especially when Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Moss are also among the VIPs). From besuited late-era Yves, the collection veered back to the Studio 54 period of the late 1970s and early 1980s .
Jewel-coloured brocade, collarless cropped jackets, halterneck chiffon blouses, frilled mini skirts, tiered chiffon maxis and arms and necks stacked with chunky gold jewellery were the yang to those yin suits.
The show was staged in the partially open air giant turret section of the Saint Laurent HQ in the Rue de Bellechasse on Paris’s Left Bank (where else?), and being open air, it was at the mercy of the elements. It rained. A light drizzle, a night sky, pools of light – suddenly we weren’t in Studio 54 but in Vienna 1949 for The Third Man. Yves, a film buff, would have approved.
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