The Le Smoking jacket on display at the Met in 2017 was not the original

The Le Smoking jacket on display at the Met in 2017 was not the original. It was from 1975, six years after Yves Saint Laurent first showed a dinner jacket cut for women. The lapels were sharp, the shoulders were broad, and the waist suppressed just enough to acknowledge the body beneath. It hung on a mannequin beside an evening gown, and the jacket looked more radical.

That tension — between the codes of masculine tailoring and the house's reputation for sensuousness — is where Saint Laurent has always lived. The question now is whether that tension still holds.

Foundation and the Rive Gauche turn

Yves Saint Laurent opened his couture house in 1961, backed by his partner Pierre Bergé. He was twenty-five. He had already worked under Christian Dior and briefly led that house after Dior's death. What he built on his own was different: a couture atelier that looked outward, toward the street, toward youth, toward women who worked.

In 1966 he opened Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, the ready-to-wear line that would define the house more than the haute couture ever did. The first boutique was on the rue de Tournon. The clothes were not diluted couture — they were designed for a different woman, one who moved faster and had less help getting dressed. The safari jacket, the peacoat, the blouse with a bow at the neck: these were not metaphors. They were tools.

Saint Laurent retired in 2002. The house had been sold to Gucci Group in 1999, and by the time he left, the structure that had supported his vision was already corporate. He died in 2008. The name stayed.

Hedi Slimane and the reset

When Hedi Slimane arrived in 2012, he changed the name. Saint Laurent Paris, not Yves Saint Laurent. The monogram shifted. He moved the atelier from the avenue Marceau to Los Angeles for part of the year, and he showed in California. The silhouette narrowed — skinny jeans, sharp lapels, cropped leather jackets that sat high on the hip. The reference points were specific: Sunset Strip in 1972, the Ramones, Patti Smith, a version of rock and roll that was already archival when Slimane was born.

It worked. Sales doubled during his tenure. The house became legible to a younger customer who had no memory of Yves Saint Laurent the man but recognized the aesthetic codes Slimane was working with. The Le Smoking became a micro-mini dress. The safari jacket became a leather biker with studs at the shoulder. He was not preserving the archive — he was using it as raw material.

He left in 2016.

Anthony Vaccarello's tenure

Anthony Vaccarello, who had been designing his own line and briefly worked at Versus Versace, took over in April 2016. He was thirty-four. His first collection for Saint Laurent showed that fall, and the silhouette opened slightly. The hemlines stayed short, but the shoulders softened. He kept Slimane's sharp tailoring but brought back a kind of overt sexuality that Slimane had encoded rather than stated. Vaccarello's women wore mini dresses with plunging necklines, sheer blouses, and trousers cut so low the hip bone showed.

The references were clear: Yves Saint Laurent's work from the late seventies and early eighties, the era of big shoulders and bigger earrings, of Tom Ford's Gucci, of Helmut Newton photographs where the models looked like they had just left someone's bed and were on their way to a board meeting. Vaccarello was working in a register that was explicitly sexual in a way that fashion had moved away from. The question was whether that register still had purchase.

Eight years in, the answer is mixed. Vaccarello has been consistent. The silhouette has remained narrow, the hemlines short, the tailoring precise. He shows in Paris, often at the Trocadéro or another grand location, and the shows are staged as spectacle — long runways, dramatic lighting, a soundtrack that builds. The clothes are designed to be seen from a distance and to photograph well. They do.

Sales have been strong, though not at the pace of Slimane's tenure. Saint Laurent is part of Kering, which also owns Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and Balenciaga. In Kering's most recent earnings report, Saint Laurent's revenue was stable but not surging. The house is profitable, and it is not in crisis, but it is also not driving the conversation the way it did under Slimane.

The image problem

Saint Laurent's image is now split. There is the archive — the Le Smoking, the Mondrian dress, the safari jacket, the idea of Yves Saint Laurent as a couturier who understood women and gave them permission to dress like men. And there is the current product: short dresses, high heels, a kind of glamour that reads as more traditionally feminine, even as it is built on the bones of masculine tailoring.

The two images do not contradict each other, exactly, but they do not reinforce each other either. The customer who buys a Saint Laurent blazer now is buying into a different fantasy than the customer who bought one in 1975. The blazer itself has not changed that much — the cut is still sharp, the shoulders still structured — but the context has. Fashion has moved toward comfort, toward ease, toward a kind of dressing that does not require heels or a blow-dry. Saint Laurent has not moved with it.

Vaccarello has been explicit about this. In interviews, he has said he is not interested in comfort, that he designs for women who want to be seen, who want to make an entrance. That is a defensible position, but it is also a narrow one. The house that once made the peacoat and the safari jacket — garments that were designed for movement, for work, for a life lived outside the frame of a photograph — now makes clothes that are designed primarily to be looked at.

Where the house stands

Saint Laurent is not in decline. The stores are full, the runway shows are attended, the handbags sell. The Loulou, the Solferino, the Niki — these are recognizable shapes, and they move units. The monogram is everywhere, printed on canvas, embossed on leather, stamped on hardware. The house has a clear identity, and it knows who its customer is.

But clarity is not the same as vitality. Saint Laurent today is a house that knows what it does well and does it repeatedly. Vaccarello's collections are technically accomplished — the tailoring is sharp, the proportions are controlled, the fabrics are luxurious. But they do not surprise. The spring 2024 collection looked like the spring 2023 collection, which looked like the fall 2022 collection. The vocabulary is fixed.

There is an argument that this is what a heritage house should do: find its codes and repeat them, season after season, until they become legible across decades. Hermès does this. Chanel did this, for a long time. But Saint Laurent was not built on repetition. It was built on a couturier who looked at what women were doing and made clothes that fit those lives. The house now makes clothes that fit a very specific fantasy, and it does not seem interested in expanding that fantasy or questioning it.

The last show Yves Saint Laurent designed, in January 2002, included forty years of his work. There were Le Smoking jackets from different decades, safari jackets, evening gowns, the Mondrian dress. The models walked slowly, and some of them cried. Saint Laurent himself came out at the end, and the applause went on for several minutes. It was not a fashion show — it was a retrospective.

The house today is still showing that retrospective. The clothes are new, but the ideas are not. Vaccarello is working within the archive, not against it, and the result is a kind of stasis. Saint Laurent is not failing, but it is not moving either. It is standing very still, in very high heels, waiting to be photographed.