Portrait : le directeur artistique de Saint Laurent

The fitting room on the Avenue Marceau is quiet in the way expensive spaces are quiet — thick carpet, low voices, the occasional snap of a pin cushion. Anthony Vaccarello stands behind a model in a black jacket cut so sharp it could open envelopes. He adjusts the shoulder, pulls the sleeve a quarter-inch forward, steps back. The jacket is already perfect by most standards. He adjusts it again.

This is the work. Not the runway, not the front row, not the campaign that will run in six months. The work is the sleeve and the shoulder and the quarter-inch that separates a good jacket from one that makes you forget you're wearing cloth.

Vaccarello has been creative director of Saint Laurent since 2016. Seven years in, he remains one of the least quoted designers in Paris, which is either discretion or strategy or both. What he does say, he says in the clothes.

Formation

He was born in Brussels to an Italian father and a Belgian mother, studied at La Cambre, the same school that gave us Olivier Theyskens and Raf Simons. La Cambre does not teach you how to make a pretty dress. It teaches you how to think about why the dress exists at all. Vaccarello graduated in 2002, worked briefly for Fendi, then spent the better part of a decade building his own label — lean, minimal, aggressively sexy in a way that felt European rather than American. The silhouette was unforgiving. The hemlines were not suggestions.

His early work caught the attention of Donatella Versace, who brought him in to design Versus from 2014 to 2016. It was a useful apprenticeship. Versace is a house built on sex and gold hardware and the assumption that subtlety is for other people. Vaccarello learned how to work at scale, how to design for a house rather than a name, how to make clothes that photograph well and move even better.

Then Saint Laurent called.

The inheritance

Yves Saint Laurent died in 2008. Hedi Slimane took over the creative direction in 2012, dropped the 'Yves', moved the atelier to Los Angeles, and spent four years making the skinniest, shiniest, most unapologetically rock-and-roll clothes Paris had seen in a decade. The critics were divided. The sales were not.

When Slimane left in 2016, the question was not whether his successor could fill his shoes — the shoes were a size 40 and nobody was interested in filling them. The question was whether Saint Laurent could survive another reinvention without losing the plot entirely.

Vaccarello's first collection for the house landed in October 2016. It was not a reboot. It was a recalibration. He kept the silhouette lean, the palette dark, the hemlines short. But where Slimane had leaned into Los Angeles and the Sunset Strip and a kind of glossy, androgynous cool, Vaccarello leaned into Paris. Specifically, the Paris of the 1970s, when Yves Saint Laurent was dressing Catherine Deneuve and the Le Smoking was not yet a museum piece.

The references were clear but never literal. A tuxedo jacket worn over nothing. A silk blouse open to the sternum. A leather mini that sat two inches above the knee and stayed there. The clothes were sexy in the way French women are sexy, which is to say they were sexy without trying, or at least without admitting they were trying.

Signature

If you look at seven years of Vaccarello's Saint Laurent, a pattern emerges. The shows open with tailoring — sharp, black, built on a narrow shoulder and a high waist. Then come the dresses, often in liquid jersey or silk crêpe, cut to follow the body without clinging to it. Then the evening pieces, which are where he takes the biggest swings: a cape that pools on the floor, a gown slit to the hip, a jacket embroidered in gold thread that catches the light and refuses to let go.

The palette is almost always black, white, gold, and the occasional flash of red. He is not interested in pastels. He is not interested in print, except when the print is leopard or zebra or something else that reads as texture rather than pattern. He is very interested in shoulders, in waists, in the place where fabric meets skin and what happens in the inch before and after.

The silhouette has softened slightly since 2016 — the shoulders are a touch wider, the trousers a touch looser — but the intent has not. These are clothes for women who do not need to be told they look good. They already know.

The atelier

Saint Laurent is not a couture house, but it operates like one in certain respects. The atelier on Avenue Marceau employs around 60 people, most of whom have been there longer than Vaccarello. They work in wool crêpe and silk georgette and leather so fine it feels like paper. The house still sources cloth from the same mills Yves Saint Laurent used in the 1970s — Dormeuil for the tuxedo fabric, Clerici for the silks, various tanneries in Italy for the leather.

Vaccarello works closely with the head of the atelier, a woman named Madame Blazy (no relation to Bottega's Matthieu Blazy), who has been with the house since 1989. She knows how a Saint Laurent sleeve should sit, how the lining should fall, how much weight a silk blouse can carry before it stops looking effortless. Vaccarello defers to her on construction. She defers to him on everything else.

The fittings can take hours. A single jacket might go through five or six iterations before it makes it to the runway, and even then Vaccarello will sometimes pull it at the last minute if the shoulder isn't right. This is not perfectionism for its own sake. It is the understanding that a Saint Laurent jacket is not just a jacket. It is a piece of architecture that happens to be worn on the body.

What comes next

The fashion system is not built for longevity. Designers are hired, fired, moved sideways, replaced. Seven years at a major house is a decent run. Vaccarello shows no signs of leaving.

His most recent collections have pushed slightly beyond the core codes — more colour, more volume, the occasional nod to 1980s power dressing. But the foundation remains the same: sharp tailoring, high hemlines, an understanding that sex appeal is about confidence rather than exposure.

He told System magazine in 2019 that he does not design for a specific woman. He designs for a specific attitude, which is harder to pin down and more useful in the long run. The attitude is Parisian in the way that Parisian style is often misunderstood — not effortless, but practiced enough to look effortless. Not minimal, but edited. Not sexy, but aware of the power that comes with looking good and choosing not to apologise for it.

The jacket on the Avenue Marceau is finished now. Vaccarello steps back, nods, moves on to the next piece. There are 40 more looks to fit before the show. The work continues.