The set evoked the classic shows of Yves Saint Laurent
It was like stepping into a faint memory: inside his big black box on Place de Varsovie, Anthony Vaccarello had conjured – if not recreated – the elevated runway and chandeliers of the ballroom at the InterContinental Hotel where Yves Saint Laurent showed his collections. The air was filled with the most delicious fragrance – opulent, narcotic, transporting – and guests took their seats in black-lacquered Napoleon III chairs. “The last two years I haven’t looked at the archive. I like the idea of evoking Yves Saint Laurent without referring to a certain piece. It’s more of an evocation,” he said before the show. “I like to play with the fantasme we have in the house without doing clothes from the past.”
It marked a return to elegance
To a graceful piano soundtrack, a series of exquisite skirt-suits defined Vaccarello’s season silhouette: power blazers with formidable straight shoulders and sexy front-slit jupe skirts cut above the knee, all crafted in the tailoring cloths of the classic men’s wardrobe. The silhouette faded into voluminous blouson jackets styled with the same skirts and magnified levallière blouses whose long bows trailed ravishingly behind the models like the trains of gowns. The draping was echoed in blanket scarves fastened at the shoulder with jewels. “I wanted to do something around the world of elegance. It’s maybe something we don’t have a sense of today, that world. Maybe we don’t care, or maybe it has another meaning, or no meaning at all. I really want to bring back the idea of being ‘dressed’,” Vaccarello reflected.
It was Catherine Deneuve in the early ’90s
The structure of the show was itself an illustration of the elegance Vaccarello wanted to convey. Iterations on the same silhouette styled with minimal variations, look by look he calmly – elegantly – cemented his statement. True to his philosophy of evoking Yves Saint Laurent rather than imitating him, every silhouette felt like a memory: an idea or an ideal of an aesthetic familiar to us all. For all its retro shoulders and Working Girl vibes (Vaccarello himself liked the look to the style of Catherine Deneuve in the early ’90s), the reduction with which he approached his source material made the collection feel contemporary and relevant to a moment in fashion where we’re searching for appropriate codes in which to dress for tense times.
It reflected a craving for diplomacy and politeness
Vaccarello hasn’t been the only designer with an appetite for elegance this season, although he may be the one who’s communicated it most superbly. Around the runways, proposals have been made for a more put-together, polite and refined wardrobe in which to face the world, drawing on the virtues of the post-war decades when diplomacy was Alfa and Omega. Maybe it’s a reaction to the war raging in the European neighbourhood, maybe it’s an evolving outcome of Trumpian times of constant conflict, or maybe it’s an antithesis to the ever-present strife that meets us daily in the media and on social media, even at fashion week where industry infighting has ruled the hot topics this season. We crave a little elegance, and the power of clothes like Vaccarello’s can help to promote it.
It cemented Vaccarello’s era of triumph
After his men’s show in January – his first on Parisian soil – which floored the congregated fashion industry and its social media following, Vaccarello’s women’s collection fed into a moment of glory for the designer that seems to know no bounds. He admitted it had been a hard season, but the show he put on showed no signs of it – except, of course, for the painstaking precision and timing with which he executed every look. That’s hard work paid off. Vaccarello said he now challenges himself within the disciplines of the minimal and classic. “It’s the mood I’ve been in for a few seasons. I don’t want to be stuck in something that went well for me. I want to put myself not in danger but… to propose something different.”
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