Rewrite
Lead ImageFrankie is wearing SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO
This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine:
Exactly a decade ago, Anthony Vaccarello took on one of the most weighty mantles in fashion – that of the house of Saint Laurent.
Almost entirely executed in black, with Saint Laurent’s Cassandre-designed 1961 YSL monogram piercing shoes as impossible heels, his first collection was paradoxically confident and tentative, a measured approach to tackling a formidable fashion legacy. Ever since, Vaccarello has boldly gone where no designer has gone before: namely, shrugging off that history and recalibrating the Saint Laurent name, using a profound knowledge of the archives as an anchor to a blissful and intentional ignorance. Reverence is dead – rather, Vaccarello has eschewed the constraints of that awesome patrimony, reimagining Saint Laurent not so much in his image but in the image of today – nothing quite right, everything reconsidered. Evening gowns have been refashioned in technical nylon or abbreviated high on the thigh, silks replaced with latex and silicone, tailored jackets hugely oversized, shown on a catwalk that, perhaps, apes the ballroom of the chandelier-hung Hotel InterContinental on rue de Castiglione, Paris, where Monsieur Saint Laurent used to show his haute couture greatest hits, season after season, but blown up to Hollywood scale, almost the size of the Stade de France.
Vaccarello’s Autumn/Winter 2026 womenswear show, staged within a scenography resurrecting the rue de Babylone apartment shared by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, was a masterclass in elegance and razor-sharp focus, bodies clad in silicone-coated lace in the jewel tones of the bibelots and objets d’art that originally punctuated that somewhat sacred space. Those were dispersed to museums and oligarchs across the four corners of the world in a landmark 2009 auction at Christie’s, yet the show’s distinct cinematic sensibility is a direct reflection of Vaccarello’s ever-present personal fascinations, obsessions that have powered Saint Laurent to new levels of cultural relevance and resonance through landmark fashion collections and a film-production company. Saint Laurent Productions, a unique enterprise for a fashion house, was established in 2023. Vaccarello has a close-knit group of models, directors and creatives around him, in echo of the chosen family that cosseted Yves himself. He is the longest-serving creative head of Saint Laurent since the near-beatified founder. That apartment belongs to the past but the house is now his.
Alexander Fury We’re meeting in this building, on the rue de Bellechasse, which brings us back to your start – this is where you staged your first Saint Laurent show, while this building was still under construction, ten years ago. What’s different now?
Anthony Vaccarello I have the feeling I have less on my shoulders. It’s not that I have nothing to prove any more, but the first collections are the most difficult, because you have to send a message to the world of what you want to do, the direction. But having children [he has two], you see things with distance and with something more …
AF A different perspective?
AV Yes. But the pressure – I always put the pressure on myself, no matter what.
AF Do you relate differently to the legacy of Saint Laurent now?
AV I understand that now, no matter what I’m going to do or the concept that I’m going to find in the collection, it’s going to look like Saint Laurent. Because I know that Saint Laurent is about the attitude, it’s about the detail, it’s about music, it’s about a woman. And I know with the make-up, hair, set, people relate it to Saint Laurent no matter what. So I don’t necessarily need to be close to the archive. I also like to look at something he never did, or something he should have said, to make my brain excited about storytelling. Now it’s more like a fantasy about what he could have said or could have done, more than what he did.
AF We first spoke ten years ago – back then, you said the first thing you did when you came here was meet Pierre Bergé, and then you went to look in the reserves of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent, at physical clothes. Do you still do that?
AV Not any more. I have the feeling that I know all the Saint Laurent pictures. When someone new from the studio wants to show me something they think is new, the exciting thing is to reject those things, in a twisted way.
AF It’s not as if, because you’ve been here this length of time, you now understand the Saint Laurent woman. It’s more that you’ve determined what the Saint Laurent woman is today.
AV It’s also my interests. It’s very selfish – it’s the way I see Saint Laurent, my way to see it. Maybe someone else would go to another era or other things about him, but that’s how I see him.
AF Thinking of Saint Laurent history and also of Saint Laurent after Saint Laurent, you came of age when Alber Elbaz and Tom Ford were leading the ready-to-wear here. Have their interpretations influenced you as well?
AV Of course. When I was young, those were the shows that were the most attractive to me. The shows of Monsieur Saint Laurent, in a way, they were very niche …
AF I remember, if I saw a Saint Laurent picture in the newspaper in the Nineties, as a fashion-obsessed kid, I would think, what is this old-lady dress?
AV Now you understand. It was perfect – those perfect women, perfect clothes, everything. But when we were young, perfection was not what we were looking for. We were more about experimenting – sex, gender fluidity, Jean Paul Gaultier …
AF And that big theatrical thing, with the British designers in couture houses – John Galliano, Alexander McQueen.
AV Saint Laurent was not for us. But now we understand that it had a huge impact on fashion. And even Galliano, Gaultier, they were obsessed with Yves Saint Laurent. It was already like an interpretation of what he did in the past, because they were older than us. But I discovered Saint Laurent through Tom Ford, through Alber, even through Hedi when he was doing Rive Gauche (1). It was a short period but I remember that moment.
AF When you talk about your references to Saint Laurent, you don’t look at the obvious clichés.
AV The Saharienne, the Mondrian – I’m not into those things.
AF Is there a reason you pull away from those? Because, for a lot of people, they’re totems.
AV It was too old for me. It was too Sixties. It’s not something I’m attracted to, I don’t know why.
AF Does it mean anything to you to have designed for Saint Laurent for the longest period bar Saint Laurent himself?
AV I feel lucky. Lucky that the group still trusts me, still gives me the opportunity to express myself through the legacy of the brand. It went so fast. Sometimes someone sends me a picture of what I did in the past and for me it was like yesterday. Everything is very clear but at the same time it seems like another life. When I was a kid, when I saw a picture of my parents in the Seventies, just ten years before, it seemed like a prehistoric thing.
AF I think there is this collapsing of time – in the Nineties, if you were wearing clothes from the Seventies or even clothes from the Eighties, it was acting out a nostalgia. But now if you wear clothes from 25 years ago, they still have a relevance.
“Saint Laurent is about the attitude, it’s about the detail, it’s about music, it’s about a woman” – Anthony Vaccarello
AV There’s no real definition of things from the 2010s or the 2020s. There’s no silhouette any more. Since the Nineties, it’s very blurry. Maybe because there are so many designers now, there are so many brands. In the Nineties, there was Tom Ford and Helmut Lang. Later, Nicolas Ghesquière.
Today, everything’s very referential. I think it’s Google – when you search for a picture that you like from the Nineties and it gives you all the copies, that’s the worst of the worst. You search for Sharon Stone’s white dress in Basic Instinct and you are given a hundred dresses from all those awful designers, doing satin. You don’t discover anything unexpected. The algorithms give you exactly what you’re supposed to see. Then you’re stuck.
AF There’s a confusion today – which is why there is no silhouette. It’s a proliferation. Your designs feel like a reaction to that. They’re incredibly singular, direct and precise, to cut through the noise of now. With this Autumn/Winter 2026 show, there were all those tuxedos.
AV When you see the details, the suits, for example, from the last show, there was two button, one button, striped, not striped. And all the laces were different – all the colours were very, very different, with a different design. But the silhouettes are the same.
I’m not influenced but I still have those shows of Nicolas for Balenciaga in mind. I remember the surf collection, the sailor collection, the flower collection. I like the fact that you put a name to the collection and you know it exactly. And I like for myself to have the stocking collection [Autumn/Winter 2024], the latex collection [Autumn/Winter 2020]. You know exactly the season, the silhouette. That’s how I grew up. I understand also when there are a lot of different silhouettes, like a character collection. But I don’t like when someone always does those multiple silhouettes, because it looks more like a merchandising collection …
AF Trying to please everybody.
AV Saint Laurent is not a house where you have to please everybody. It has to be one message, one thing. He was like that himself too – you like it or not.
AF I’m trying not to ask a hugely clichéd question, but where do you find inspiration? First of all, given the possibilities within Saint Laurent, how do you narrow that heritage down? You don’t strike me as a designer who’s going to start looking through a book and say, “Oh, well, let’s base it on this.”
AV At the beginning of the collection, I launch a few different silhouettes, then the fabric narrows everything down. I’m more into working with the fabric. The fabric really can give me the idea for the look.
AF Like the nylon for those Proustian ballgowns [Spring/Summer 2026]?
AV That, for example, excluded a lot of things I wanted to do at the beginning. And it has to be real, because with nylon you can do sport things, you can do trenches, but you cannot do a chemisier. So it already narrows the possibilities.
And then it narrows into the message of the collection one month before the show. But I need to explore a lot of different possibilities before I decide on the silhouette. I don’t want to start with a very specific idea. The only collection that was like that, that was clear since day one, was the latex collection. It was clear that I wanted to have the idea of the latex – that Pigalle stripper – with a real Saint Laurent top, the mix of those two. It was the only season where that came very early.
AF Do you ever start with Saint Laurent? Talking to you now, compared to when we first spoke a decade ago, your approach then was, here are my collages of specific Saint Laurent dresses, collections, women. Do you start now with an idea of a Saint Laurent silhouette, or a woman, or an image? Or do you do what you feel is right and then retrofit – “This is how this is Saint Laurent”?
AV It starts from a period of his work – it starts from the Nineties, late Eighties. I try to ask myself what he should have done back then to be relevant for my generation. If he wanted to be as cool as Helmut Lang.
AF As Monsieur Bergé is not alive any more, now you can say, this is what Saint Laurent got wrong, and this is as if, all of a sudden, Saint Laurent was going to be part of that fashion conversation.
AV If he was not stuck with that perfect lady, if he had another studio, what could he have done? I like that. Always having his point of view is a very specific way to make it very sharp and very perfect – but with a mistake, with something that was not part of his world. Like the latex, or the stocking, the silicone [Autumn/Winter 2025].
AF The idea of doing something wrong.
AV He could have done something wrong. But sometimes he was, in a way, stuck in a code, which is touching.
AF I always think of the fact that he never saw models as anything other than Saint Laurent women, never a reality. There are all these contradictions. I love that quote where a journalist thought he said that he saw women as dolls, and he said, “No, as idols.” But there’s this similarity between dolls and idols, because they’re both …
AV Fantasies.
AF They’re not women. There’s a weirdness, where Monsieur Saint Laurent loved women, celebrated women, but at the same time they came to him fully made-up, their hair in chignons.
AV As icons. I think, without doing some psychological thing, he was obsessed with his mother, who was already a cliché, a perfect kind of bourgeois woman. He was obsessed with Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe. Now we can say a bit camp. Very camp.
AF That pursuit of perfection is very camp.
AV It’s unreal. But when you see that woman, you’re happy to see that woman in a way. It can be a man or a woman – when you see that fantasy, you want to be like that. Even if you don’t have the body or the life to go with that fantasy, you want to be part of that fantasy.
AF There’s an ivory tower remove – Monsieur Saint Laurent was part of reality for such a long time, but then, by the Nineties, he totally wasn’t.
AV He got stuck, because he was sick, people around him isolating him, because he could have been a troublemaker. He was. Pierre Bergé and the team protected him. He was not in touch with reality any more. But I want to put that isolated Saint Laurent woman in Pigalle. The latest campaign, that I shot last week, was in the suburbs of Paris. I think it’s good to trash her – well, not trash her, but to make her more real.
“I try to ask myself what [Yves Saint Laurent] should have done back then to be relevant for my generation” – Anthony Vaccarello
AF Going back to that nylon collection, doing those ball dresses in nylon – there’s a sickness, as you say, a wrongness to it.
AV A big parka Proust dress. And it’s funny sometimes, when I see the comments and they say, “Oh, it’s a nylon dress. Saint Laurent would have never done that cheap fabric.” But I think that’s why it’s cool.
AF It’s not a vintage Saint Laurent dress, it’s for now.
AV For that you have to know Saint Laurent, you need to have some knowledge and to see the details. Not everyone knows.
AF You’re not paralysed by a legacy, by his perfection and his pursuit of perfection. I love you asking, “What could he have done better?” It’s the most audacious thing you could say of this figure revered by everybody.
AV Maybe I can say it because I’m not French. I have the feeling that, being from Belgium, we have another perception.
AF You also explode a lot of the clichés of Saint Laurent. You’ve never done the Mondrian dress, and – I may be wrong – but I feel like this was one of the first times you’ve done Le Smoking.
AV In that sensuous way, yes.
AF And those Picasso and Braque birds. Is there a reason you’ve tended to pull away from those Saint Laurent icons?
AV It will not look real coming from me. It was very him to do those Braque birds because he was a collector. It was part of his reality. Me, I will look like I’m copying something that I don’t necessarily understand … I’m not a collector. That’s not my thing.
AF Is there something that’s in your reality that you think you put into the collections?
AV It’s part of my own past, something I saw. The latex collection, I’m not obsessed with that collection but I could relate it to Pedro Almodóvar.
AF Is your reality cinema? Your connection with film is deep and your collections have always been cinematic, in the way they’re shown.
AV I think it’s a mix of what I saw when I was young and what I think of Saint Laurent. Film and fashion. The stocking collection could have been a meeting between David Cronenberg’s Crash and Yves Saint Laurent. It’s always more linked to imagery from cinema or imagery from the Nineties.
AF As opposed to an art collection, it’s almost like a film collection?
AV I see it more like that. A painting as a dress, it will not feel true for me. It looks like a copy. I remember Pierre Bergé telling me, in that first meeting, never copy Yves Saint Laurent. Do your own thing but never copy. And if I were to put a dress inspired by those painters, I would feel like I betray that.
I know the reference, but I play with that. Sometimes when something is too close to what he did, I say, “OK, that’s exactly what I don’t want.” Let’s take that idea of silhouette, let’s close our eyes and try to do something totally in another way.
AF Are you interested in couture?
AV Yes. I think that the way I’m doing my shows … they’re not couture, because they don’t respect the rules of couture, but they’re done in a couture way. They’re not clothes that I send to a factory in Italy. Everything is done in the atelier. And there are a lot of fittings. If I did a couture collection … I like the idea, but I think it would be something very different from what you expect. I would love to do a tuxedo couture collection, where you see, I don’t know, 40 tuxedos.
AF Like at the end of the Pompidou show, where it was all those different Le Smokings? (2)
AV I love that. All black and all well done – a couture way to do a tuxedo, where you really have to pay attention. It would not be flamboyant things, no.
AF Can you remember when you were a kid and you first became aware of Saint Laurent as a house?
AV The advertising for Opium. It was Linda Evangelista in China. And I have a lot of images of Catherine Deneuve in films or going to the César awards. That’s how I discovered Saint Laurent.
AF It wasn’t catwalk pictures?
AV Not at all. I don’t have memories of a catwalk picture of Saint Laurent. It was more my mother knowing about Saint Laurent because of the perfume or … Women were all very Saint Laurent back then, in the Eighties. He really touched the streets with all the women at night – they dress with a proportion that was very him. It was already like a derivative, an idea of Saint Laurent.
AF You once told me that no one in your family was into fashion when you were growing up.
AV No.
AF Was there any presence of fashion there at all? Magazines?
AV No, I really discovered fashion by myself, with television. My family were not at all into that. Not even into art. They were a normal Italian Belgian family. But I think it’s better like that. I think it’s better to discover things because we have an interest in it than being surrounded by those beautiful things. You have to search for it. For me, there’s more value.
AF I remember you telling me that you went to La Cambre because you wanted to dress Madonna. That was why you went there. I want to know, how did it feel to actually dress Madonna? I realised this meant much more than just having her at your Spring/Summer 2027 menswear show.
AV Madonna, she made fashion click for me, for sure. Because she was into Versace …
AF Azzedine, a lot of Alaïa. Gaultier. Obviously Galliano, that whole moment.
AV Take a Bow. I always wanted to do fashion, but being in Belgium I thought, it’s impossible for me to be able to dress her. I mean, how can she notice me? How can she even know who I am? And then I saw Olivier Theyskens dressing her for the Oscars, for all those television shows in 1998. And I was like, “Oh wow, a Belgian designer dressed Madonna. Where did he study?” I saw that he studied at La Cambre. It was ten minutes from my house. I was studying law back then, totally depressed. Now I have a model, it’s Olivier Theyskens – I wanted to be Olivier Theyskens. And my whole life changed when I entered La Cambre. There was that idea that Olivier came here, Olivier did that. A fantasy. Also stupid, because I imagined Madonna coming to La Cambre and dressing in that leather dress. Stupid. But in my head it really activated an idea of possibility.
So, yes, having her at the show and texting her and talking to her, it’s crazy, but I never planned that, in a way.
AF Well, you did plan it. This is 30 years in the making.
AV Yes, it was the plan. I never thought about that. Everything makes sense. Life, it’s really strange.
“Maybe I compromised too much at the beginning. Maybe I wanted to please. I care less and less about that” – Anthony Vaccarello
AF Thinking of a wider engagement with culture, and your connection with cinema, I wanted to talk about Saint Laurent Productions.
AV It makes sense only at this house.
AF Has that changed your role here – has it changed the way you work with fashion?
AV No, it was always part of me. And I needed to do something different – I needed to get out of that schedule of pre-collection, show, pre-collection. I wanted to speak with directors, I wanted to be inspired by something different. It came very naturally. It’s all about connection. I met first Gaspar Noé – we became friends. And I was obsessed with [his 2002 film] Irréversible back then. So it’s funny how something else that you are obsessed with comes back into your life years later. And from him, I met Pedro Almodóvar. Nothing was calculated, nothing was planned, it’s never business orientated. And I think that’s why it works. It’s because it came from what I really felt was important to do at that moment. I have a connection with these directors, they’re part of my language. And that language, it’s also in the language of the clothes I’m doing. There’s a bit of Cronenberg, there’s a bit of Jim Jarmusch in what I’m doing. And I feel so lucky that we had those Oscars, the Palme d’Or (3). It’s like a joke.
AF It’s also because you’re looking at it from a creative point of view and not from a commercial point of view.
AV It’s not like, “You have to produce the next James Bond.” No, thank you. That’s not me. And it’s not Saint Laurent at all.
AF You spend time in Los Angeles now.
AV Only two months a year. I go there one month after each show, two months a year.
AF I was going to compare it to Saint Laurent travelling to Marrakesh to escape. Is it the same? And does it give you a different relationship with the idea of Parisianity? Because I think that’s a very important idea within Saint Laurent.
AV I think if you stay too much in Paris, you’re stuck in that idea of the Parisian. And I think he had to go there to find the colours, to find a different movement. I don’t want to compare myself to that. But I have the feeling that, in LA, I feel more free, far from the noise, far from the pressure. Here, it can be a little Versailles, with all the politics you had at Versailles.
And going there is so far, but in the middle of nature, but also in the middle of art, in the middle of people with culture, if you find them. I do my pre-collections there. And I really feel the pre-collection is very different from my shows, but it gives me input for what I do six months later. Somehow, it impacts my shows. In a way it gives me another perspective, another silhouette, other colours.
AF We talked about Monsieur Bergé, his connection between you and Saint Laurent’s history. He died in 2017. Are there people around you today that connect you with that legacy? Is that important?
AV When I arrived in Paris with my husband, he was working with Alber Elbaz [at Lanvin]. And there was a fit model there, Brazilian, called Suelen Pinho, working with Alber. He knew her when she was working with Yves Saint Laurent – Yves called her, from Brazil. So she started with him. We became best friends when I arrived in Paris in 2008. Now she’s in the studio with me. It’s me, her and my husband. Everything together. And as she knew Alber, she knew Yves Saint Laurent, it’s important for me to see her eyes, emotional or sparkling – I see that I’m touching a memory. Her point of view is very important. It’s crazy, because we were friends for years – drinking, everything. Now we’re older. It’s also crazy and fun that she was part of that world. The end of that world.
AF It’s weird, because that world feels very old, so removed. Not just past, it feels like a completely different era. Almost ancient.
AV When she was young, she experienced that … she did the Stade de France show (4). She did those things. She knows. It’s stupid, because she knew the good gold and the bad gold fabric, for example, for me to use in the menswear show – “That’s cheap. That’s chic.” Because Saint Laurent, it’s really the limit of, not cheap and chic, but you can be very tacky or you can be right.
AF Like a leopard print.
AV I like that line. And she helped me … because I can do Versace. She puts me back in the right line.
AF Well, the other thing that’s interesting with her is that she’s from that world, but not.
AV She always had to be made-up and she wasn’t able to look Monsieur Saint Laurent in the eye. The rules were very, very strict. And of course, outside, she was smoking weed. She understands transformation.
AF Speaking of transformation – how have you transformed over the past ten years? What do you feel you’ve learnt?
AV I learnt discipline, I learnt to edit. Maybe at the beginning I was not as sharp at editing, giving the right message. And I think, with seasons and years, I have become more focused, more sharp. Without compromising. Maybe I compromised too much at the beginning. Maybe I wanted to please. I care less and less about that.
1. In July 1996, Pierre Bergé — the co-founder of the house of Saint Laurent — employed Hedi Slimane to design the label’s ready-to-wear menswear line. In June 1998, Yves Saint Laurent formally retired from ready-to-wear entirely and Alber Elbaz was recruited from Guy Laroche to head its womenswear. After the acquisition of the Saint Laurent house by Gucci Group in November 1999, Gucci’s Tom Ford was installed as creative director of ready-to-wear for women and men in 2000 and presented his debut collection in October of that year. He served as the design head of both Gucci and Saint Laurent until 2004.
2. On 22 January 2002, the house of Saint Laurent staged a retrospective catwalk show at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, simultaneously celebrating its 40th anniversary, the retirement of its founder, Yves Saint Laurent, and the cessation of its haute couture operations. The finale of the show consisted of 40 variations of Le Smoking, the final two worn by Laetitia Casta, then the model for Marianne, and Catherine Deneuve.
3. Saint Laurent Productions, the film subsidiary of the fashion house, has supported shorts and features by directors including Pedro Almodóvar, David Cronenberg and Paolo Sorrentino. Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez (2024), co-produced by Saint Laurent Productions, was nominated for the Palme d’Or, Queer Palm, and 13 Academy Awards: it won two, for best supporting actress and best original song.
4. On 12 July 1998, Yves Saint Laurent staged a monumental fashion show featuring 300 designs at the Stade de France, near Paris, for the Fifa World Cup.
Hair: James Pecis at Bryant Artists using BLU & GREEN BEAUTY. Make-up: Yumi Lee at Streeters using LA BEAUTÉ LOUIS VUITTON. Manicure: Nori at See Management using DIOR BEAUTY. Set design: Javier Irigoyen at Total World. Casting: Rachel Chandler for Midland at Art Partner. Models: Frankie Rayder at The Lions Management, Kit Hansen at AMR Agency, Romae Gordon at Lulu Management, Ruth Deng at The Society Management and Zaryah at Fusion Models NYC. Digital technician: Jarrod Turner. Lighting: Erik Snyder. Photographic assistant: Athe Torri Cervantes. Styling assistants: Pheobe Icke and Sierra Estep. Hair assistant: Kyia Jones. Make-up assistant: Yuka Ito. Set-design assistants: Matthias Heumeier and Nick Kozmin. Casting assistants: Eléonor Delécluse and Nico Mao. Production: Hen’s Tooth Productions. Executive producer: Mary-Clancey Pace. Producer: Brenna Smit. Production assistant: Gregory Gabb. Post-production: Two Three Two. Special thanks to Huron Studios
This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally from 17 September 2026. Pre-order here
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Lead ImageFrankie is wearing SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO
This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine:
Exactly a decade ago, Anthony Vaccarello took on one of the most weighty mantles in fashion – that of the house of Saint Laurent.
Almost entirely executed in black, with Saint Laurent’s Cassandre-designed 1961 YSL monogram piercing shoes as impossible heels, his first collection was paradoxically confident and tentative, a measured approach to tackling a formidable fashion legacy. Ever since, Vaccarello has boldly gone where no designer has gone before: namely, shrugging off that history and recalibrating the Saint Laurent name, using a profound knowledge of the archives as an anchor to a blissful and intentional ignorance. Reverence is dead – rather, Vaccarello has eschewed the constraints of that awesome patrimony, reimagining Saint Laurent not so much in his image but in the image of today – nothing quite right, everything reconsidered. Evening gowns have been refashioned in technical nylon or abbreviated high on the thigh, silks replaced with latex and silicone, tailored jackets hugely oversized, shown on a catwalk that, perhaps, apes the ballroom of the chandelier-hung Hotel InterContinental on rue de Castiglione, Paris, where Monsieur Saint Laurent used to show his haute couture greatest hits, season after season, but blown up to Hollywood scale, almost the size of the Stade de France.
Vaccarello’s Autumn/Winter 2026 womenswear show, staged within a scenography resurrecting the rue de Babylone apartment shared by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, was a masterclass in elegance and razor-sharp focus, bodies clad in silicone-coated lace in the jewel tones of the bibelots and objets d’art that originally punctuated that somewhat sacred space. Those were dispersed to museums and oligarchs across the four corners of the world in a landmark 2009 auction at Christie’s, yet the show’s distinct cinematic sensibility is a direct reflection of Vaccarello’s ever-present personal fascinations, obsessions that have powered Saint Laurent to new levels of cultural relevance and resonance through landmark fashion collections and a film-production company. Saint Laurent Productions, a unique enterprise for a fashion house, was established in 2023. Vaccarello has a close-knit group of models, directors and creatives around him, in echo of the chosen family that cosseted Yves himself. He is the longest-serving creative head of Saint Laurent since the near-beatified founder. That apartment belongs to the past but the house is now his.
Alexander Fury We’re meeting in this building, on the rue de Bellechasse, which brings us back to your start – this is where you staged your first Saint Laurent show, while this building was still under construction, ten years ago. What’s different now?
Anthony Vaccarello I have the feeling I have less on my shoulders. It’s not that I have nothing to prove any more, but the first collections are the most difficult, because you have to send a message to the world of what you want to do, the direction. But having children [he has two], you see things with distance and with something more …
AF A different perspective?
AV Yes. But the pressure – I always put the pressure on myself, no matter what.
AF Do you relate differently to the legacy of Saint Laurent now?
AV I understand that now, no matter what I’m going to do or the concept that I’m going to find in the collection, it’s going to look like Saint Laurent. Because I know that Saint Laurent is about the attitude, it’s about the detail, it’s about music, it’s about a woman. And I know with the make-up, hair, set, people relate it to Saint Laurent no matter what. So I don’t necessarily need to be close to the archive. I also like to look at something he never did, or something he should have said, to make my brain excited about storytelling. Now it’s more like a fantasy about what he could have said or could have done, more than what he did.
AF We first spoke ten years ago – back then, you said the first thing you did when you came here was meet Pierre Bergé, and then you went to look in the reserves of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent, at physical clothes. Do you still do that?
AV Not any more. I have the feeling that I know all the Saint Laurent pictures. When someone new from the studio wants to show me something they think is new, the exciting thing is to reject those things, in a twisted way.
AF It’s not as if, because you’ve been here this length of time, you now understand the Saint Laurent woman. It’s more that you’ve determined what the Saint Laurent woman is today.
AV It’s also my interests. It’s very selfish – it’s the way I see Saint Laurent, my way to see it. Maybe someone else would go to another era or other things about him, but that’s how I see him.
AF Thinking of Saint Laurent history and also of Saint Laurent after Saint Laurent, you came of age when Alber Elbaz and Tom Ford were leading the ready-to-wear here. Have their interpretations influenced you as well?
AV Of course. When I was young, those were the shows that were the most attractive to me. The shows of Monsieur Saint Laurent, in a way, they were very niche …
AF I remember, if I saw a Saint Laurent picture in the newspaper in the Nineties, as a fashion-obsessed kid, I would think, what is this old-lady dress?
AV Now you understand. It was perfect – those perfect women, perfect clothes, everything. But when we were young, perfection was not what we were looking for. We were more about experimenting – sex, gender fluidity, Jean Paul Gaultier …
AF And that big theatrical thing, with the British designers in couture houses – John Galliano, Alexander McQueen.
AV Saint Laurent was not for us. But now we understand that it had a huge impact on fashion. And even Galliano, Gaultier, they were obsessed with Yves Saint Laurent. It was already like an interpretation of what he did in the past, because they were older than us. But I discovered Saint Laurent through Tom Ford, through Alber, even through Hedi when he was doing Rive Gauche (1). It was a short period but I remember that moment.
AF When you talk about your references to Saint Laurent, you don’t look at the obvious clichés.
AV The Saharienne, the Mondrian – I’m not into those things.
AF Is there a reason you pull away from those? Because, for a lot of people, they’re totems.
AV It was too old for me. It was too Sixties. It’s not something I’m attracted to, I don’t know why.
AF Does it mean anything to you to have designed for Saint Laurent for the longest period bar Saint Laurent himself?
AV I feel lucky. Lucky that the group still trusts me, still gives me the opportunity to express myself through the legacy of the brand. It went so fast. Sometimes someone sends me a picture of what I did in the past and for me it was like yesterday. Everything is very clear but at the same time it seems like another life. When I was a kid, when I saw a picture of my parents in the Seventies, just ten years before, it seemed like a prehistoric thing.
AF I think there is this collapsing of time – in the Nineties, if you were wearing clothes from the Seventies or even clothes from the Eighties, it was acting out a nostalgia. But now if you wear clothes from 25 years ago, they still have a relevance.
“Saint Laurent is about the attitude, it’s about the detail, it’s about music, it’s about a woman” – Anthony Vaccarello
AV There’s no real definition of things from the 2010s or the 2020s. There’s no silhouette any more. Since the Nineties, it’s very blurry. Maybe because there are so many designers now, there are so many brands. In the Nineties, there was Tom Ford and Helmut Lang. Later, Nicolas Ghesquière.
Today, everything’s very referential. I think it’s Google – when you search for a picture that you like from the Nineties and it gives you all the copies, that’s the worst of the worst. You search for Sharon Stone’s white dress in Basic Instinct and you are given a hundred dresses from all those awful designers, doing satin. You don’t discover anything unexpected. The algorithms give you exactly what you’re supposed to see. Then you’re stuck.
AF There’s a confusion today – which is why there is no silhouette. It’s a proliferation. Your designs feel like a reaction to that. They’re incredibly singular, direct and precise, to cut through the noise of now. With this Autumn/Winter 2026 show, there were all those tuxedos.
AV When you see the details, the suits, for example, from the last show, there was two button, one button, striped, not striped. And all the laces were different – all the colours were very, very different, with a different design. But the silhouettes are the same.
I’m not influenced but I still have those shows of Nicolas for Balenciaga in mind. I remember the surf collection, the sailor collection, the flower collection. I like the fact that you put a name to the collection and you know it exactly. And I like for myself to have the stocking collection [Autumn/Winter 2024], the latex collection [Autumn/Winter 2020]. You know exactly the season, the silhouette. That’s how I grew up. I understand also when there are a lot of different silhouettes, like a character collection. But I don’t like when someone always does those multiple silhouettes, because it looks more like a merchandising collection …
AF Trying to please everybody.
AV Saint Laurent is not a house where you have to please everybody. It has to be one message, one thing. He was like that himself too – you like it or not.
AF I’m trying not to ask a hugely clichéd question, but where do you find inspiration? First of all, given the possibilities within Saint Laurent, how do you narrow that heritage down? You don’t strike me as a designer who’s going to start looking through a book and say, “Oh, well, let’s base it on this.”
AV At the beginning of the collection, I launch a few different silhouettes, then the fabric narrows everything down. I’m more into working with the fabric. The fabric really can give me the idea for the look.
AF Like the nylon for those Proustian ballgowns [Spring/Summer 2026]?
AV That, for example, excluded a lot of things I wanted to do at the beginning. And it has to be real, because with nylon you can do sport things, you can do trenches, but you cannot do a chemisier. So it already narrows the possibilities.
And then it narrows into the message of the collection one month before the show. But I need to explore a lot of different possibilities before I decide on the silhouette. I don’t want to start with a very specific idea. The only collection that was like that, that was clear since day one, was the latex collection. It was clear that I wanted to have the idea of the latex – that Pigalle stripper – with a real Saint Laurent top, the mix of those two. It was the only season where that came very early.
AF Do you ever start with Saint Laurent? Talking to you now, compared to when we first spoke a decade ago, your approach then was, here are my collages of specific Saint Laurent dresses, collections, women. Do you start now with an idea of a Saint Laurent silhouette, or a woman, or an image? Or do you do what you feel is right and then retrofit – “This is how this is Saint Laurent”?
AV It starts from a period of his work – it starts from the Nineties, late Eighties. I try to ask myself what he should have done back then to be relevant for my generation. If he wanted to be as cool as Helmut Lang.
AF As Monsieur Bergé is not alive any more, now you can say, this is what Saint Laurent got wrong, and this is as if, all of a sudden, Saint Laurent was going to be part of that fashion conversation.
AV If he was not stuck with that perfect lady, if he had another studio, what could he have done? I like that. Always having his point of view is a very specific way to make it very sharp and very perfect – but with a mistake, with something that was not part of his world. Like the latex, or the stocking, the silicone [Autumn/Winter 2025].
AF The idea of doing something wrong.
AV He could have done something wrong. But sometimes he was, in a way, stuck in a code, which is touching.
AF I always think of the fact that he never saw models as anything other than Saint Laurent women, never a reality. There are all these contradictions. I love that quote where a journalist thought he said that he saw women as dolls, and he said, “No, as idols.” But there’s this similarity between dolls and idols, because they’re both …
AV Fantasies.
AF They’re not women. There’s a weirdness, where Monsieur Saint Laurent loved women, celebrated women, but at the same time they came to him fully made-up, their hair in chignons.
AV As icons. I think, without doing some psychological thing, he was obsessed with his mother, who was already a cliché, a perfect kind of bourgeois woman. He was obsessed with Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe. Now we can say a bit camp. Very camp.
AF That pursuit of perfection is very camp.
AV It’s unreal. But when you see that woman, you’re happy to see that woman in a way. It can be a man or a woman – when you see that fantasy, you want to be like that. Even if you don’t have the body or the life to go with that fantasy, you want to be part of that fantasy.
AF There’s an ivory tower remove – Monsieur Saint Laurent was part of reality for such a long time, but then, by the Nineties, he totally wasn’t.
AV He got stuck, because he was sick, people around him isolating him, because he could have been a troublemaker. He was. Pierre Bergé and the team protected him. He was not in touch with reality any more. But I want to put that isolated Saint Laurent woman in Pigalle. The latest campaign, that I shot last week, was in the suburbs of Paris. I think it’s good to trash her – well, not trash her, but to make her more real.
“I try to ask myself what [Yves Saint Laurent] should have done back then to be relevant for my generation” – Anthony Vaccarello
AF Going back to that nylon collection, doing those ball dresses in nylon – there’s a sickness, as you say, a wrongness to it.
AV A big parka Proust dress. And it’s funny sometimes, when I see the comments and they say, “Oh, it’s a nylon dress. Saint Laurent would have never done that cheap fabric.” But I think that’s why it’s cool.
AF It’s not a vintage Saint Laurent dress, it’s for now.
AV For that you have to know Saint Laurent, you need to have some knowledge and to see the details. Not everyone knows.
AF You’re not paralysed by a legacy, by his perfection and his pursuit of perfection. I love you asking, “What could he have done better?” It’s the most audacious thing you could say of this figure revered by everybody.
AV Maybe I can say it because I’m not French. I have the feeling that, being from Belgium, we have another perception.
AF You also explode a lot of the clichés of Saint Laurent. You’ve never done the Mondrian dress, and – I may be wrong – but I feel like this was one of the first times you’ve done Le Smoking.
AV In that sensuous way, yes.
AF And those Picasso and Braque birds. Is there a reason you’ve tended to pull away from those Saint Laurent icons?
AV It will not look real coming from me. It was very him to do those Braque birds because he was a collector. It was part of his reality. Me, I will look like I’m copying something that I don’t necessarily understand … I’m not a collector. That’s not my thing.
AF Is there something that’s in your reality that you think you put into the collections?
AV It’s part of my own past, something I saw. The latex collection, I’m not obsessed with that collection but I could relate it to Pedro Almodóvar.
AF Is your reality cinema? Your connection with film is deep and your collections have always been cinematic, in the way they’re shown.
AV I think it’s a mix of what I saw when I was young and what I think of Saint Laurent. Film and fashion. The stocking collection could have been a meeting between David Cronenberg’s Crash and Yves Saint Laurent. It’s always more linked to imagery from cinema or imagery from the Nineties.
AF As opposed to an art collection, it’s almost like a film collection?
AV I see it more like that. A painting as a dress, it will not feel true for me. It looks like a copy. I remember Pierre Bergé telling me, in that first meeting, never copy Yves Saint Laurent. Do your own thing but never copy. And if I were to put a dress inspired by those painters, I would feel like I betray that.
I know the reference, but I play with that. Sometimes when something is too close to what he did, I say, “OK, that’s exactly what I don’t want.” Let’s take that idea of silhouette, let’s close our eyes and try to do something totally in another way.
AF Are you interested in couture?
AV Yes. I think that the way I’m doing my shows … they’re not couture, because they don’t respect the rules of couture, but they’re done in a couture way. They’re not clothes that I send to a factory in Italy. Everything is done in the atelier. And there are a lot of fittings. If I did a couture collection … I like the idea, but I think it would be something very different from what you expect. I would love to do a tuxedo couture collection, where you see, I don’t know, 40 tuxedos.
AF Like at the end of the Pompidou show, where it was all those different Le Smokings? (2)
AV I love that. All black and all well done – a couture way to do a tuxedo, where you really have to pay attention. It would not be flamboyant things, no.
AF Can you remember when you were a kid and you first became aware of Saint Laurent as a house?
AV The advertising for Opium. It was Linda Evangelista in China. And I have a lot of images of Catherine Deneuve in films or going to the César awards. That’s how I discovered Saint Laurent.
AF It wasn’t catwalk pictures?
AV Not at all. I don’t have memories of a catwalk picture of Saint Laurent. It was more my mother knowing about Saint Laurent because of the perfume or … Women were all very Saint Laurent back then, in the Eighties. He really touched the streets with all the women at night – they dress with a proportion that was very him. It was already like a derivative, an idea of Saint Laurent.
AF You once told me that no one in your family was into fashion when you were growing up.
AV No.
AF Was there any presence of fashion there at all? Magazines?
AV No, I really discovered fashion by myself, with television. My family were not at all into that. Not even into art. They were a normal Italian Belgian family. But I think it’s better like that. I think it’s better to discover things because we have an interest in it than being surrounded by those beautiful things. You have to search for it. For me, there’s more value.
AF I remember you telling me that you went to La Cambre because you wanted to dress Madonna. That was why you went there. I want to know, how did it feel to actually dress Madonna? I realised this meant much more than just having her at your Spring/Summer 2027 menswear show.
AV Madonna, she made fashion click for me, for sure. Because she was into Versace …
AF Azzedine, a lot of Alaïa. Gaultier. Obviously Galliano, that whole moment.
AV Take a Bow. I always wanted to do fashion, but being in Belgium I thought, it’s impossible for me to be able to dress her. I mean, how can she notice me? How can she even know who I am? And then I saw Olivier Theyskens dressing her for the Oscars, for all those television shows in 1998. And I was like, “Oh wow, a Belgian designer dressed Madonna. Where did he study?” I saw that he studied at La Cambre. It was ten minutes from my house. I was studying law back then, totally depressed. Now I have a model, it’s Olivier Theyskens – I wanted to be Olivier Theyskens. And my whole life changed when I entered La Cambre. There was that idea that Olivier came here, Olivier did that. A fantasy. Also stupid, because I imagined Madonna coming to La Cambre and dressing in that leather dress. Stupid. But in my head it really activated an idea of possibility.
So, yes, having her at the show and texting her and talking to her, it’s crazy, but I never planned that, in a way.
AF Well, you did plan it. This is 30 years in the making.
AV Yes, it was the plan. I never thought about that. Everything makes sense. Life, it’s really strange.
“Maybe I compromised too much at the beginning. Maybe I wanted to please. I care less and less about that” – Anthony Vaccarello
AF Thinking of a wider engagement with culture, and your connection with cinema, I wanted to talk about Saint Laurent Productions.
AV It makes sense only at this house.
AF Has that changed your role here – has it changed the way you work with fashion?
AV No, it was always part of me. And I needed to do something different – I needed to get out of that schedule of pre-collection, show, pre-collection. I wanted to speak with directors, I wanted to be inspired by something different. It came very naturally. It’s all about connection. I met first Gaspar Noé – we became friends. And I was obsessed with [his 2002 film] Irréversible back then. So it’s funny how something else that you are obsessed with comes back into your life years later. And from him, I met Pedro Almodóvar. Nothing was calculated, nothing was planned, it’s never business orientated. And I think that’s why it works. It’s because it came from what I really felt was important to do at that moment. I have a connection with these directors, they’re part of my language. And that language, it’s also in the language of the clothes I’m doing. There’s a bit of Cronenberg, there’s a bit of Jim Jarmusch in what I’m doing. And I feel so lucky that we had those Oscars, the Palme d’Or (3). It’s like a joke.
AF It’s also because you’re looking at it from a creative point of view and not from a commercial point of view.
AV It’s not like, “You have to produce the next James Bond.” No, thank you. That’s not me. And it’s not Saint Laurent at all.
AF You spend time in Los Angeles now.
AV Only two months a year. I go there one month after each show, two months a year.
AF I was going to compare it to Saint Laurent travelling to Marrakesh to escape. Is it the same? And does it give you a different relationship with the idea of Parisianity? Because I think that’s a very important idea within Saint Laurent.
AV I think if you stay too much in Paris, you’re stuck in that idea of the Parisian. And I think he had to go there to find the colours, to find a different movement. I don’t want to compare myself to that. But I have the feeling that, in LA, I feel more free, far from the noise, far from the pressure. Here, it can be a little Versailles, with all the politics you had at Versailles.
And going there is so far, but in the middle of nature, but also in the middle of art, in the middle of people with culture, if you find them. I do my pre-collections there. And I really feel the pre-collection is very different from my shows, but it gives me input for what I do six months later. Somehow, it impacts my shows. In a way it gives me another perspective, another silhouette, other colours.
AF We talked about Monsieur Bergé, his connection between you and Saint Laurent’s history. He died in 2017. Are there people around you today that connect you with that legacy? Is that important?
AV When I arrived in Paris with my husband, he was working with Alber Elbaz [at Lanvin]. And there was a fit model there, Brazilian, called Suelen Pinho, working with Alber. He knew her when she was working with Yves Saint Laurent – Yves called her, from Brazil. So she started with him. We became best friends when I arrived in Paris in 2008. Now she’s in the studio with me. It’s me, her and my husband. Everything together. And as she knew Alber, she knew Yves Saint Laurent, it’s important for me to see her eyes, emotional or sparkling – I see that I’m touching a memory. Her point of view is very important. It’s crazy, because we were friends for years – drinking, everything. Now we’re older. It’s also crazy and fun that she was part of that world. The end of that world.
AF It’s weird, because that world feels very old, so removed. Not just past, it feels like a completely different era. Almost ancient.
AV When she was young, she experienced that … she did the Stade de France show (4). She did those things. She knows. It’s stupid, because she knew the good gold and the bad gold fabric, for example, for me to use in the menswear show – “That’s cheap. That’s chic.” Because Saint Laurent, it’s really the limit of, not cheap and chic, but you can be very tacky or you can be right.
AF Like a leopard print.
AV I like that line. And she helped me … because I can do Versace. She puts me back in the right line.
AF Well, the other thing that’s interesting with her is that she’s from that world, but not.
AV She always had to be made-up and she wasn’t able to look Monsieur Saint Laurent in the eye. The rules were very, very strict. And of course, outside, she was smoking weed. She understands transformation.
AF Speaking of transformation – how have you transformed over the past ten years? What do you feel you’ve learnt?
AV I learnt discipline, I learnt to edit. Maybe at the beginning I was not as sharp at editing, giving the right message. And I think, with seasons and years, I have become more focused, more sharp. Without compromising. Maybe I compromised too much at the beginning. Maybe I wanted to please. I care less and less about that.
1. In July 1996, Pierre Bergé — the co-founder of the house of Saint Laurent — employed Hedi Slimane to design the label’s ready-to-wear menswear line. In June 1998, Yves Saint Laurent formally retired from ready-to-wear entirely and Alber Elbaz was recruited from Guy Laroche to head its womenswear. After the acquisition of the Saint Laurent house by Gucci Group in November 1999, Gucci’s Tom Ford was installed as creative director of ready-to-wear for women and men in 2000 and presented his debut collection in October of that year. He served as the design head of both Gucci and Saint Laurent until 2004.
2. On 22 January 2002, the house of Saint Laurent staged a retrospective catwalk show at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, simultaneously celebrating its 40th anniversary, the retirement of its founder, Yves Saint Laurent, and the cessation of its haute couture operations. The finale of the show consisted of 40 variations of Le Smoking, the final two worn by Laetitia Casta, then the model for Marianne, and Catherine Deneuve.
3. Saint Laurent Productions, the film subsidiary of the fashion house, has supported shorts and features by directors including Pedro Almodóvar, David Cronenberg and Paolo Sorrentino. Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez (2024), co-produced by Saint Laurent Productions, was nominated for the Palme d’Or, Queer Palm, and 13 Academy Awards: it won two, for best supporting actress and best original song.
4. On 12 July 1998, Yves Saint Laurent staged a monumental fashion show featuring 300 designs at the Stade de France, near Paris, for the Fifa World Cup.
Hair: James Pecis at Bryant Artists using BLU & GREEN BEAUTY. Make-up: Yumi Lee at Streeters using LA BEAUTÉ LOUIS VUITTON. Manicure: Nori at See Management using DIOR BEAUTY. Set design: Javier Irigoyen at Total World. Casting: Rachel Chandler for Midland at Art Partner. Models: Frankie Rayder at The Lions Management, Kit Hansen at AMR Agency, Romae Gordon at Lulu Management, Ruth Deng at The Society Management and Zaryah at Fusion Models NYC. Digital technician: Jarrod Turner. Lighting: Erik Snyder. Photographic assistant: Athe Torri Cervantes. Styling assistants: Pheobe Icke and Sierra Estep. Hair assistant: Kyia Jones. Make-up assistant: Yuka Ito. Set-design assistants: Matthias Heumeier and Nick Kozmin. Casting assistants: Eléonor Delécluse and Nico Mao. Production: Hen’s Tooth Productions. Executive producer: Mary-Clancey Pace. Producer: Brenna Smit. Production assistant: Gregory Gabb. Post-production: Two Three Two. Special thanks to Huron Studios
This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally from 17 September 2026. Pre-order here
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