Remember when, in those less politically correct times of the 1980s, Yves Saint Laurent licensed his name to a line of terribly chic, terribly thin, terribly bad for you cigarettes? That was the terribly low-brow thought that leapt to mind when the high-concept installation Cloud #07156 by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya began to pump clouds of water vapour from a vent in the floor of the Pinault Collection’s rotunda, the arena where Anthony Vaccarello habitually shows his menswear collections.
There wasn’t a smoking vibe to his Spring/Summer 2027 show – bar the fumé colours of menthol blue, ash grey and a gleaming, burnished gilt lamé like a lit cigarette end. Even Saint Laurent’s signature Le Smoking tuxedo, the apotheosis of the masculine-feminine interchange at the heart of his work, was absent. Which was kind of Vaccarello’s point this season – absence, restraint, paring back, much like Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons were figuring in Milan. “Someone told me it was ten years since I started at Saint Laurent,” Vaccarello said backstage before the show. “Maybe, after ten years, I want to clean everything in my work.”
So this was Vaccarello stripping back, to three-button long-line suits, boxy and slightly uncomfortably-cut like those Yves Saint Laurent himself sported in the Nineties, with high-tugged trousers he dubbed “very Jacques Chirac” after the dowdy suits sported by France’s president in the 1990s. “Daddy style.” Never let it be said Vaccarello doesn’t have a sense of humour. The suits were closed with bejewelled buttons inspired, in part, by a member of the Saint Laurent set, the model and design aficionado Tina Chow, who once clipped an earring into a buttonhole as an unconventional brooch. Vaccarello’s were inspired by that gesture – and, perhaps, by the trays of elaborate jewelled buttons presented ceremonially to Saint Laurent, with which to adorn every collection and which are preserved, as if in aspic, within the Musée Yves Saint Laurent. The show here closed with a trench coat, one of Saint Laurent’s most significant contributions to the wardrobes of modern women. It was rendered in gleaming gold-leaf faille, like a religious icon.
Vaccarello, however, isn’t confined to that awe-inspiring patrimony. He isn’t creating for a museum, or within a museum, even if he does show in an art gallery. He understands his references deeply enough to challenge them. Stripping back lead, here, to stripping off – a reflection, obviously, of the fact Saint Laurent was the first to épater la bourgeoisie with his transparent blouse in 1966. Yet, when Vaccarello showed bottomless models in briefs and tailoring, it wasn’t so much a reference to that but to the modern commodification of sexuality, the openness about bodies of a new generation. “They’re all on OnlyFans,” Vaccarello laughed. “Selling their feet.” That was a sly nod to the collection’s shoes, hyper-classic laced men’s shoes executed in transparent polyvinyl chloride. “I like the idée of bare feet,” Vaccarello said. “But it’s not chic.”
Chic can be a paralysing concept, a notion of good taste so rigid and recalcitrant it calcifies, stifling any growth. “It’s chicer when there’s a mistake,” said Vaccarello, of the mismatching buttons, the somewhat strange proportions, the crunched techy knits. It’s a heresy in the world of Saint Laurent, of absolute perfection, models fully made up with vermillion lips and immaculate chignons before Monsieur ever even set eyes on them. Yet Vaccarello also reasoned that some of his more audacious mixes – like nylon or silk-satin windcheaters teamed with tailoring – would be what Saint Laurent would do if he were alive today, under the influences of the modern world. “Saint Laurent was the first to use stereotypes of clothes,” he said, citing the peacoat and Saharienne as shifts from everyday to exalted couture. “Today, he would’ve been inspired by sport.”
Those were the elements that strolled through the billowing clouds of smoke in the Bourse de Commerce. And while they were commercial, for sure, it never feels like that is the thrust of Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent. After a decade, he has now inhabited his role as house leader longer than any predecessor, bar the founder himself. Vaccarello hasn’t made it his own. Rather, he’s done something much cleverer, and far more difficult, managing to dance between, possibly, the most weighty heritage of 20th-century fashion and his own decidedly contemporary impulses. Vaccarello is literally serving two masters – Saint Laurent, and himself. There can be no better service to a legacy than that.
