Golden years: Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent glow-up
For Spring-Summer 2027, Anthony Vaccarello appeared to close his ten-year chapter at Saint Laurent with a collection cast almost entirely in gold. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
There are examples of Ancient Egyptian kings having their bodies embalmed in gold leaf to preserve their godly immortality and majestic memory. On Tuesday evening in Paris, those pharaohs had nothing on Anthony Vaccarello, who dipped what is assumed to be his last collection for Saint Laurent nearly entirely in gold. The show notes opened with a piece of poetry from the designer, who – tellingly – wasn’t doing interviews: “A light shines all the more brightly because we know it cannot be held. What passes sometimes leaves more light than what remains.” Over the last decade, the fashion world has followed Vaccarello as he brought his skimpy, graphic sexiness into the house and married it with the founder’s bourgeois, bohemian dialogue between feminine and masculine. His tenure created an immaculate fusion that birthed a new golden age for Saint Laurent.
With the Eiffel Tower illuminated in gold lights, the Place de Varsovie plateau that Vaccarello has turned into a Parisian throne room for the house’s shows was decked out with giant gold chandeliers hovering over an elevated runway. His supposed swan song went to town on its theme, gilding a quintessential Saint Laurent wardrobe of sahariennes, trenches, blouses and wrap skirts alongside Vaccarello’s own broad-shouldered coats, voluminous blousons and abbreviated suits. Lamé, organza, guipure lace, mousseline, brocade, jacquard, metallic cotton and gold-leaf-coated latex shifted the colour from Byzantine to burnished, pale to matte, Art Deco to Brutalist. The effect was totalising: gold consumed clothes and bodies in a gilded orgy of radiance and opulence. Midas, Goldfinger and Louis XIV would have felt underdressed.
The effect was totalising: gold consumed clothes and bodies in a gilded orgy of radiance and opulence. Midas, Goldfinger and Louis XIV would have felt underdressed.
ANDERS CHRISTIAN MADSEN
The suspenseful, cinematic music that had played during seating and turned into a dramatic classical soundtrack during the show slipped into a live performance by Charlotte Gainsbourg, dressed in a sharp, black Saint Laurent suit. Forty-nine exits into Vaccarello’s gilded procession, the glow faded into ten all-black coats and cloudlike evening gowns that closed the show. Thus passes the glory of the world, as papal coronations will have it; or, in the words of Vaccarello’s teenage heroine Madonna – who became his friend during his tenure at Saint Laurent – on the final track of her newest album, which closes a run of dance songs with a quiet guitar ballad: “Everything fades away.” Like the best music, though, great design has a way of outliving the moment that made it. If it’s goodbye for now, Anthony, thank you for the music.
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