The Le Smoking jacket from 1966 hangs in the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris behind glass
The Le Smoking jacket from 1966 hangs in the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris behind glass. The cloth is grain de poudre, a fine worsted weave that holds a crease. The shoulders are padded but not stiff. The lapels sit flat. What strikes you first is not the provocation—though it was provocative then—but the precision. This is a garment that knows exactly what it is.
That precision is the through-line. Saint Laurent has moved through three distinct eras, each with its own vocabulary, but the house has never been casual. Not under its founder, not in the years that followed, not now.
1961–2002: Yves Saint Laurent
Yves Saint Laurent opened his own maison in 1961, three years after a brief, combustible tenure at Dior. He was twenty-five. His first collection under his own name—shown in January 1962—was not a manifesto. It was controlled, wearable, and commercially successful. The press noted the lack of drama. That would come later.
What Saint Laurent understood early was that women's lives were changing faster than their wardrobes. He gave them the peacoat in 1962, the jumpsuit in 1968, the safari jacket in 1968. He put them in trousers when trousers were still read as costume. The Le Smoking tuxedo was not the first time a woman wore a jacket and pants—Marlene Dietrich had done that thirty years prior—but it was the first time the gesture came from haute couture with no wink, no camp, no concession.
The house moved between two poles. One was rigour: the tuxedo, the trench, the blazer. The other was fantasy: the Mondrian dress in 1965, the Ballets Russes collection in 1976, the Chinese opera coats. These were not opposing impulses. They were the same impulse expressed in different registers. Both required absolute control of line and volume. Both were about the body in motion, not the body on display.
Saint Laurent worked with the same atelier for decades. He showed twice a year. He repeated himself when repetition served the work. The smoking returned season after season because it was not a trick. It was a solution.
By the 1990s, the house had become an institution. The ready-to-wear was commercially dominant. The haute couture continued, but Saint Laurent himself had begun to step back. His final collection was shown in January 2002. He was sixty-five. He closed the atelier and retired. The house, by then owned by Gucci Group, would continue without him.
2012–2016: Hedi Slimane
Hedi Slimane arrived at Saint Laurent in 2012 with a single, non-negotiable premise: the house would be called Saint Laurent Paris, not Yves Saint Laurent. The name change was symbolic and absolute. He was not interested in inheritance. He was interested in a specific vision of youth, music, and Los Angeles.
Slimane had built his reputation at Dior Homme a decade earlier with a silhouette so narrow it reset the proportions of menswear. At Saint Laurent, he applied the same logic to women. The jackets were sharp. The trousers were cigarette-slim. The dresses were short, often in leather or sequins. The models were young, androgynous, cast from the front rows of clubs in Silver Lake and Le Marais.
This was not what the house had been. It was also not arbitrary. Slimane's work had a thesis: Saint Laurent the man had dressed a certain kind of woman in the 1970s—Bianca Jagger, Betty Catroux, Loulou de la Falaise—and those women had moved through the night with a specific energy. Slimane wanted that energy, not the archive.
The collections were divisive. Critics noted the absence of colour, the relentless black, the lack of reference to the house's own history. Slimane did not adjust. He showed in Los Angeles. He cast musicians and artists, not professional models. He shot the campaigns himself. The clothes sold.
What Slimane understood—and what his detractors often missed—was that he was building a new foundation, not renovating the old one. The Le Smoking had been radical because it gave women access to male power. Slimane's leather jackets and skinny jeans were radical because they erased the question of power altogether. The woman in his clothes was not borrowing anything. She was simply present.
He left in 2016. The house did not announce his departure. It simply moved forward.
2016–present: Anthony Vaccarello
Anthony Vaccarello's first collection for Saint Laurent appeared in October 2016. It opened with a black tuxedo jacket over a sheer blouse. The jacket was cropped at the ribs. The trousers sat low on the hip. This was not Slimane's silhouette and it was not Saint Laurent's original smoking. It was a third position.
Vaccarello had worked at Versus Versace and Fendi before Saint Laurent. His own eponymous line, launched in 2008, had been small and focused: short dresses, high slits, strong shoulders. At Saint Laurent, he expanded the vocabulary but kept the grammar. The clothes are still narrow through the body. The hemlines are still short. But there is more air now, more skin, more overt sexuality.
Where Saint Laurent the man had coded desire through tailoring and where Slimane had coded it through subcultural reference, Vaccarello codes it directly. The slit runs to the hip. The neckline drops to the sternum. The blazer is worn open over nothing. This is not subtle, but it is not careless either. The construction is exact. The fit is engineered. A dress that appears simple—black jersey, no seams—has been draped and cut to move in a specific way when the body turns.
Vaccarello has also brought colour back. Not in volume, but in flashes: a gold lamé gown, a fuchsia blouse, an orange leather coat. He shows in Paris, at night, often at the Trocadéro. The sets are minimal. The casting is diverse. The pace is fast.
He does not reference the archive explicitly, but he does not ignore it either. The smoking returns, season after season, each time slightly altered. The shoulder drops. The lapel widens. The pant leg flares. These are not homages. They are iterations.
The house now operates at scale. There are flagship stores in every major city. The ready-to-wear is divided into seasonal collections and permanent offerings. The leather goods—particularly the Sac de Jour and the Kate—are commercial anchors. The beauty line is significant. This is a functioning luxury conglomerate, part of Kering, with revenue in the billions.
But the clothes still move. Vaccarello's spring 2024 collection included a black blazer worn over a sheer bodysuit, paired with wide-leg trousers that pooled at the ankle. It was shown at night, under artificial light, on a model who walked quickly. The jacket did not close. The trousers dragged slightly on the ground. It was not perfect. It was alive.
There is a photograph from 1978 of Yves Saint Laurent in his atelier on rue Spontini. He is standing in front of a dress form, adjusting the drape of a sleeve. His hands are on the fabric. His face is turned away from the camera. The room is full of cloth and light.
The dress form is still there. The atelier is now a museum. But the gesture—the hand on the cloth, the adjustment, the refusal to let the work be finished until it is right—that gesture continues. Not because anyone is trying to preserve it, but because it is the only way the work gets done.