Sept. 30, 2025

Saint Laurent’s Erotic Elegance

WORDS ANDERS CHRISTIAN MADSEN

SAINT LAURENT

Anders Christian Madsen reviews the Saint Laurent Spring/Summer 2026 collection by Anthony Vaccarello.

Cloudlike white hydrangeas formed a YSL-shaped maze at Place de Varsovie against a twinkling Eiffel Tower. There were pussy-bow blouses and billowing ballgowns, and an emotive classical soundtrack. Anthony Vaccarello’s show drew on all the tropes of Paris and the haute couture dream. But everything was not what it seemed at Saint Laurent. “She’s not as soft as we think,” he said. Those magnified pussy-bow blouses poked out from broad-shouldered lascivious leather skirt suits paired with leather-daddy caps and stiletto pumps so pointy they could kill. “These clothes have to say things that people can’t say,” Vaccarello teased.

Through those eyes, everything suddenly looked different. The technical fabric of his buckled-up trench coats—draped with ladylike flair—felt decidedly fetishy. The translucent dresses that followed clung to the skin like steamy shower curtains. Rendered in shaded painterly colors, the lightweight raincoat materials that filled the collection had a brilliantly seedy quality to them: a kind of polite perversity we rarely experience in times when everything is on display. “It’s being more radical in the message,” Vaccarello said. “Clothing as a sort of social comment, beyond just simple fashion.”

SAINT LAURENT

SAINT LAURENT

Even the ruffled, voluminous, floor-length, gigot-sleeved ballgowns that closed the show were subversive. Crafted in super-light nylon, it was as if they’d been thrown over the naked body, creating a silhouette fully covered yet so close to nudity. Vaccarello likened the women passing through the hydrangea-lined set to the gay men who have historically cruised in the maze of the Tuileries, a tradition founded in a time when desire wasn’t readily available on an app and lust was less in-your-face.

Within that portrayal, Vaccarello was telling a story of empowerment: women who are as in-charge whether they’re clad in buoyant ballgowns or dominatrix biker jackets. And within that story, there was an equally powerful proposal of pieces, something this designer has mastered in recent years. Those lightweight nylon trench coats interpreted his Saint Laurent silhouette in garments that created an easy, throw-it-on alternative to the more sculpted and rigid leather numbers that have previously characterized the look. There was once a fetish community in England called The Mackintosh Society. They would have loved this collection.