Anyone who was at Anthony Vaccarello’s terrific winter 2020 runway show for Saint Laurent was inevitably floored by the color and the fact that there was plenty of it. Actually, maybe I should scream that out: color! Or just spell it out—c-o-l-o-r—so that it’s as monumental as the Eiffel Tower that stands gleaming in the night sky and is always in the direct line of vision from the YSL show venue.
This collection of many colors wasn’t business as usual chez Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent. He has been a master of nuance at the Parisian house. Many a season has seen a textural layering of black on black on black—by turns an imagining of it as romantic, sexual, or folkloric. So, Vaccarello’s palette of electric blue and scarlet and deep purple—classic YSL hues that he gave an inventive and lustrous twist by using for the likes of a latex cocktail dress or leggings worn with a bougie-chic blazer—was quite the (delightful) shock to the system.
Of course, anyone who’d looked at this fall collection, a season typically not seen publicly until it’s actually in the stores, might have gotten a clue that color was on his mind. “I started really enjoying those mixes of colors with the fall,” Vaccarello said. “It gave me the idea and desire to continue it for winter. I always thought that [color] was not my thing...but with time I have to say I just love mixing those improbable colors together, like in a painting.” With fall there isn’t the same maitresse vibe of winter but instead a softer, warmer approach, using color—rust, ochre, a deep leafy green—in a judicious way so that it exalts and amplifies the kind of pieces Vaccarello sees as his perfect YSL garderobe.
That could mean a red velvet jacket—one of the many jackets that he treats as something utilitarian and everyday, worn “with your hands in your pockets...like a coat,” he opined—over a white open-neck blouse and with beaten-up jeans. (Jeans, incidentally, not a million kilometers away from those he just revealed in his superlative men’s fall-winter collection.) Or it could mean a kingfisher silk blouse gleaming from beneath an ocelot-like furry bomber and leather ski pants, the shade of blue set off beautifully by a hippieish gold metal belt.
The other narrative threaded throughout his fall Saint Laurent is the ’70s, an evergreen era for the house. Here the decade is given a different cultural context by Vaccarello. He’s not looking so much at the likes of Betty Catroux or Loulou de la Falaise but instead Jane Fonda—actress, activist, icon. “[She] is always relevant, for everything she did in the ’70s and also for what she is still doing,” he said. “She is committed and active and never afraid to stand for her beliefs.”
Incidentally, the year that her feminist-empowering thriller Klute came out—1971—was the very same year that Yves himself sent out his controversial ’40s-by-way-of-the-’70s collection. There are shades of both in this Saint Laurent fall: the button-through skirt in leather or patchworked denim; the fluffy chubby; the squared-off shoulder line of a double-breasted jacket, be it a Le Smoking or in BCBG navy wool. And it’s with those jackets that Vaccarello finds a perfect equilibrium, their sublime shoulder lines set off, as he envisages, by the softest of dresses worn underneath. That combination’s quiet power is one meaningful way to consider dressing when navigating our new and ever-changing world.
