Work Hard, Play Harder at Saint Laurent

Anthony Vaccarello held a surprise show for the Saint Laurent men’s collection a few days after the official men’s week had ended, with a circular catwalk inside Bourse de Commerce, the Tadao Ando-designed museum inside a former stock exchange building that is owned by Kering, the luxury conglomerate behind Saint Laurent.

As usual, Vaccarello looked back at the history, and personality, of Yves Saint Laurent, finding ‘a productive tension between temperamental opposites,’ which, according to the Belgian creative director, ‘has been a hallmark of Saint Laurent since the house’s founding.’ Inspired by the wardrobe introduced by Yves Saint Laurent in his Haute Couture and Rive Gauche collections in the seventies and eighties and by the spirit of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Vaccarello imagined ruthless businessmen in Wall Street-style double-breasted jackets and combines them with huge black leather boots, as if lost between the executive floor and some obscure SM leather bar. The collection was about polarity: between somber and light, soft and firm, work (hard) and play (harder).

The men, elegant yet menacing, evoked Patrick Bateman, the main character of American Psycho, a serial killer with an obsession for fashion. Backstage, Vaccarello mentioned Saint Laurent’s many, manynights spent in grimy Parisian sex clubs. It’s interesting to see that designers no longer solely get inspired by the esthetic DNA of the houses they work for, but also by the personal history of the designers in whose footsteps they follow. At Dior, Kim Jones sometimes looked back at the life of Christian Dior in a similar way. It’s storytelling on another level.

The historical references extended to the set. Ando’s minimalist interiors were juxtaposed with parquet flooring and enormous chandeliers that recalled the ballroom of the Intercontinental Hotel, where Saint Laurent presented its Haute Couture collections between 1975 and 2001. It was a beautiful, elegant. But fresh, or even remotely wearable, not so much.

Courtesy: Saint Laurent

Text: Jesse Brouns