“…Your Secret Labyrinth…”
Paris by night has always been the natural stage for Yves Saint Laurent, and on this evening Anthony Vaccarello chose to return to that legacy only to twist it into something unmistakably of our time. At the Trocadéro, a French formal garden was transformed into an endless sea of white hydrangeas. At first, they seemed nothing more than a romantic wall of flowers lining the runway. But once the drones rose into the sky, everyone’s phones revealed the truth: the flowers had been planted to spell out the letters “YSL.” A stroke of PR genius as much as a visual spectacle, reminding everyone that this was Saint Laurent, no ambiguity allowed. “I think it’s good to hammer home the point that, oh là là, you are at Saint Laurent, and you leave knowing you couldn’t have been anywhere else,”Vaccarello said backstage. Reviewed by Manit Maneephantakun
The front row mirrored the brand’s own mythology: Hailey Bieber, Zoë Kravitz, Madonna with her daughter Lourdes, Jean Paul Gaultier, Catherine Deneuve arm in arm, and Betty Catroux, Yves’s most famous muse. Adding a contemporary tilt, figures from the Asian sphere such as Rosé and Emily Ratajkowski made the night feel both a remembrance of the past and a declaration that the YSL legacy is still very much alive.
Vaccarello’s narrative unfolded in three deliberate chapters. He began with black leather as armor, broad-shouldered biker jackets, pencil skirts, and crisp white pussy-bow blouses inflated almost to rebellion. Some looks were topped with military caps in glossy black leather, evoking both Helmut Newton’s stark photography and Robert Mapplethorpe’s erotic iconography. “I wanted to start with the idea of cruising in the gay scene of the Tuileries,” he explained, “and redo it here, in front of the Trocadéro, with women in leather circling a massive YSL.” It was an opening of provocation and power, establishing sexual charge as a root code of the house.
The second passage shifted to nylon, Vaccarello’s chosen medium for modern nudity. The trench coat and day dress, bourgeois classics of the YSL wardrobe, were recast in whisper-thin nylon, clinging and transparent, leaving little if anything underneath. “Yes, because it’s still about nudity,” he shrugged to a journalist. Then came evening gowns, frothing with Belle Époque ruffles and puffed sleeves, yet all made from nylon, foldable into a backpack like a windbreaker. A deliberate illusion: the desecration of couture sanctity in order to suggest that luxury, too, can travel lightly, be worn and lived in, not sealed in archives.
The finale was historical gowns, a distorted conversation with Yves’s haute couture past. Billowing skirts, monumental bows, ballooned sleeves conjured Scarlett O’Hara as much as YSL’s own legendary couture shows, but once again fabricated in sheer nylon. Vaccarello laughed as he explained, “My woman can scrunch her evening gown into a ball and throw it into a bag. But she’s still the same woman. She’s not as soft as we think. Even softness is an illusion.”
Beneath the spectacle lay a subtext Vaccarello was keen to underline. He knows the world today is politically fraught and culturally divided, while fashion is often accused of silence. In his show notes he wrote: “At a time when dialogue is fading, style remains a language of communication… a language of resistance, of respect, and of inclusion.” But the question lingers: was this resistance truly enacted, or simply a Trojan horse dressed in leather, cruising imagery, and seductive nostalgia?
The references multiplied: he cited La Reine Margot, one of his favorite films, with its atmosphere of extravagant nihilism; the archival costumes Yves designed for the 1971 Proust Ball; Mapplethorpe and Newton as visual anchors. “I wanted to provoke debate,” Vaccarello admitted. And debate followed: some critics saw a sharp revival of Saint Laurent’s essence, while others wondered if nylon gowns weren’t a dilution of couture heritage into something dangerously cheap.
Yet in a luxury world where attention is currency, the verdict might already be clear. Drone shots of hydrangeas spelling YSL under the glittering Eiffel Tower went viral within hours. Images of Madonna and Zoë Kravitz side by side became meme-worthy moments. The broad-shouldered leather jackets are destined for Saint Laurent boutiques worldwide next season, while the nylon gowns will test whether younger consumers desire a “couture effect” that is portable, pragmatic, and provocative.
Perhaps this is proof that Vaccarello knows how to play past, present, and future all at once. While critics search for political meaning, he leaves only a smile and a closing line that sums up the entire enterprise:
“C’est Saint Laurent.”
