On Monday night in Paris, Anthony Vaccarello seduced with black satin, grain de poudre, leather and chiffon blouses — and what could be more Saint Laurent than that?
Leaving rock-tinged and bohemian-flavored looks in the dust, the designer is settling into a new soigné groove at the house that Yves built — and it looks tremendously chic.
While the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce, billionaire François Pinault’s contemporary art museum, was teeming on Monday night with TV and film heartthrobs in see-through or plunging shirts and pants tight on the hips, they’re not Vaccarello’s muses. He was channeling the legendary couturier himself and his dandy boyfriend Jacques de Bascher in their glory days: hair slicked back, eyes shielded by dark glasses, bodies as slender as an opening parenthesis and dressed to the nines.
The lightbulb that went off in Vaccarello’s head recently is that what’s good for the goose can be equally good for the gander: Editors who attended Saint Laurent’s terrific spring 2023 womenswear show will recognize the same floor-sweeping, broad-shoulder coats, here shown over turtleneck sweaters that stretch from naval to calf in lieu of tube dresses, and silky pants.
“It was inspired by those years at Yves Saint Laurent when everything started from the shoulder,” Vaccarello explained backstage. “I really want to keep that line.”
He also reprised the hooded silhouettes, too, though most men would keep these off their head.
But for a few items — a white shirt with a dramatic neck bow here, a swingy camel topcoat there — most of the collection was black: belted coats as glossy as fresh tar; knitted tunics and tops elegantly draped and wrapped, and tuxedo jackets and pants to smoke all others. These were clothes with grandeur and presence.
Backstage, Vaccarello said he studied some of the founder’s final couture collections in the late ’90s and early Aughts, and applied the same meticulous details to the menswear, pointing to the delicate stitching around the collars of the chiffon tops, “done the atelier way.”
The show marked a return for Saint Laurent to the Paris runway. In recent years, Vaccarello took men’s collections for Saint Laurent on the road — to Marrakech, Morocco; Jersey City, New Jersey; Venice, Italy, and Malibu, California.
He said the plan going forward is to continue showing in Paris each January and travel once a year. “A surprise,” he teased.
