This past June, Anthony Vaccarello showed his men’s Spring 2020 Saint Laurent collection—and a smattering of women’s looks from his 2020 Resort—on a boardwalk (of ebonized wood, very YSL) that snaked down a Malibu beach. There was a pulsating soundtrack and a major A-list-y celeb front row, but both kind of recede into the memory when you consider Vaccarello had the West Coast sky sliding into night and the waves crashing against the shoreline as his backdrop.
Vaccarello said he had been thinking about how Morocco’s glittering hippie/boho enclaves of the late ’60s and early ’70s (also very YSL) are mirrored by the live-by-your-own-free-spirited-rules of latter-day California. It’s a pretty spot-on comparison. After all, where else resides that sense of being able to simultaneously lose yourself and find yourself?
For him, that duality might also be striking a little closer to home; to Paris, specifically Vaccarello’s Left Bank design atelier. There was a distinct new comfort level to the men’s collection, literally and metaphorically; the terrific djellaba-like tunic-shirts and voluminous tapering pressed-pleat pants, a sure sign of his growing confidence with menswear. When it comes to the women’s looks—seen in greater numbers a few weeks ago at a viewing of the 2020 Resort—it’s obviously different. Vaccarello has been designing accomplished (and provocative) womenswear for a decade and more. His Saint Laurent women’s shows have been pyrotechnic showstoppers, with some audacious ideas—neon in black light; monumental sculptural feathers—which have been brand (and Instagram) dynamite.
Yet away from the main stage, Resort makes it clear that Vaccarello is getting very comfortable in going full steam ahead on a YSL that’s about everyday life. (Look, I know the term is all relative, and after seeing the Resort, who wouldn’t want to have the kind of fabled, escapist day-to-day these clothes exude?) If Saint Laurent the man designed plenty of the building blocks of the modern wardrobe—the tuxedo, the blouse, the trench—then Vaccarello is retooling them his way. From Resort that might mean a black velvet smoking jacket with gilded edges, worn with a long black leather skirt that has as much snap as the fastenings running down its front, or a jet and gold sequin lace camisole with white jeans.
An ivory silk tie-front shirt worn with yet more of those press-pleated pants riffed on Monsieur Saint Laurent’s own North African uniform back in the day. Ditto the vest traced with swirls of embroidery over a silk shirt where polka dots were formed out of a constellation of golden pinheads. These were worn with jeans that grazed the ankles, the better to show off new tortoiseshell-effect leather oxfords, or, possibly, ribbon-strap thong sandals. When you wear them, you might be feeling gritty old city streets underfoot, but as with much else on offer here, you’ll also be magically transported elsewhere.
