Saint Laurent’s Martha Graham-Inspired S/S'23 Show

“I think I was missing that mega, super elegance of the house,” said Anthony Vaccarello of a new season infusing Yves Saint Laurent heritage tailoring with the tube dresses of American choreographer Martha Graham. British Vogue fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen reports from Paris.

It was all shoulders and length

Anthony Vaccarello may have swapped his affinity for the super short for a new obsession with length, but it hasn’t cramped the bold sensuality that defines his work. For the second season running, the designer dedicated his Saint Laurent collection to floor-length silhouettes, layering languid column dresses with broad-shouldered greatcoats with hems that swept along the surface of his tiled runway across from the Eiffel Tower. “Last season was very dramatic – it was all black and white – and this season I wanted to continue that idea for a really ‘dressed’ woman,” he said during a preview. “I think I was missing that mega, super elegance of the house.”

It was inspired by Martha Graham

Vaccarello found his mega, super elegance in a conversation between the masculine tailoring of Yves Saint Laurent and the tube dresses of the American choreographer Martha Graham, whose stripped down and clarified approach to movement revolutionised modern dance. Her signature stage wardrobe was embodied by long jersey silhouettes that accentuated the anatomical sculpting of the body. Vaccarello distilled that language into graceful dresses structured from the body itself, which often looked like walking life drawings. “I loved the purity,” he said.

It made a huge impact

Now six years into his Saint Laurent residency, Vaccarello is carving out a remarkable practice founded in highly defined form, language and colour work. He increasingly uses his collections to investigate a single shape and defined palette, which he reiterates and refines until they’ve been purified into a message so clear it leaves a mark. (Literally, so strong is his message that, after the show, you can still sense the contours and tones of the collection imprinted on your retina.) It’s not just clever creatorship, but clever marketing, too. There wasn’t a person in the audience – physical or digital – who won’t remember Vaccarello’s proposal when they eventually shop for their spring/summer 2023 wardrobe.

Colours were informed by the desert

In the process of his evolution, Vaccarello is becoming quite the colourist, too. His collection drew on the Marrakech-inspired tones of the Saint Laurent archive in earthy colours that reflected the same focus on fine-tuning and finesses as his silhouette. Like those shapes, they were intense but sensual, enhancing the tensions that sculpted the collection: the sharp versus the soft, the strong versus the fragile, the structured versus the free. Vaccarello said a recurrent reference had been the colours and atmosphere of Polaroids from the fittings of Yves Saint Laurent and his muses.

Saint Laurent built a fountain

To match his sculptural lines, Vaccarello had erected a life-size brutalist stone fountain in his Place de Varsovie show space, which sat atop a massive square tiled in stone. As always, it came with a view of the Eiffel Tower, a structure as memorable as Vaccarello’s new silhouette itself. “I liked the idea of them being super structured and very slim,” he said of his statuesque coats. They may have referenced the ’80s, but they felt just as relevant for contemporary power dressing.