Following the publication of Madame Bovary, at his 1857 trial for obscenity (bear with me here, it’s going somewhere), the author Gustave Flaubert declared of his fictional heroine, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Yves Saint Laurent was no dummy. The man used to unwind by reading À la recherche du temps perdu, with the volumes locked up in a specially-made Louis Vuitton trunk he stashed in the Château Gabriel. Purchased in 1983, the mansion was the spot where Marcel Proust first met the publisher Gallimard (hallowed ground!) and where Saint Laurent themed every room after a different character. So, he probably fingered through Flaubert too. I am sure he knew about that trial when, in the early 2000s, he was asked by a journalist a somewhat facile question – the kind of questions we ask designers a lot, including his successor Anthony Vaccarello. “Who is the Saint Laurent woman?” “After a while, he said, ‘La femme saint Laurent, c’est moi,’” recalls Vaccarello with a smile. “So I thought, okay. Maybe I want to take that?”
He took it, and he ran with it. This collection was a sprint, a breakneck trip through the messages and meanings of Saint Laurent, its richness and infinite variety. Vaccarello was talking backstage before his Spring/Summer 2025 show, in front of a moodboard of images of Yves. It was pinned with striped poplins and fine wools and foulard jacquards painstakingly matched to the originals, including the Polaroid his Andy Warhol portrait was based on. But that was only part of the story – which itself was a conscious break with the recent past. For a few seasons, Vaccarello has been hammering home his interpretations of Saint Laurent through relentless repetition – last season, sheer, the one before safari. Bar a few outliers in each – last season, fluid crepe trouser suits; for last spring, long bias evening dresses – they were one-trick ponies. That was, of course, the point. In doing so, Vaccarello asserted the dominance of fashion and of the weighty heritage of Saint Laurent, editing that sublime history to singular supreme moments, and then offering riff after riff. One trick, but executed to the perfection Yves commanded.
“But I don’t want to be stuck,” Vaccarello said. So he broke free.
This time, there were many sides to Saint Laurent, just as there are to women, and to Yves and his work. So we got Yves in work mode, soberly suited in languid trouser suits in wool caviar, wool canvas, wool gabardine that accentuated height, with the confidently broad Saint Laurent shoulder. Then we got Yves’ women at play, in draped blouses and billowing long-tiered chiffon skirts threaded with lurex that recalled the designers’ 1976 Hippy De Luxe collection, hung with heavy jewellery. One of these was named ‘Loulou’ after Loulou de la Falaise, Yves’ constant muse, right-hand woman and jewellery designer. In fact, all the outfits were named after women vital to Saint Laurent’s life and creativity – Betty (Catroux), Clara (Saint), Bianca (Jagger), the models Iman, Amalia, Katoucha. If Vaccarello’s past collections have been exercises in pure design – practicality be damned with those viscose voile stockinette dresses – this was truly about dressing. “The past seasons she was very seductive – I wanted her to be like that. But this season she’s more in control. More empowered,” he said. And you saw that, which was something that didn’t really come from the clothes, but rather the attitude of the women inhabiting them, which, of course, was all down to the clothes, to the easy angle of a pocket, the authority of shoulder, the spirit of design.
Where Vaccarello really let rip was in the final section, where he looked back to Saint Laurent’s designs on the cusp of the 1990s. “Almost tacky,” Vaccarello said, with a sly smile, in front of pictures of brocade after brocade fashioned into short, chunky-shouldered jackets with saucer-sized jewel buttons, tossed over a ribbon-appliqued lace skirt and contrasting lace body. “It’s important in fashion to play with that.”
The colour was sublime – emerald and foliate greens, amber, pillbox scarlet, the blue of Saint Laurent’s house in the Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech, which also coloured the lacquered catwalk. There was something Warholian about the repetition here, that brocade jacket, bodysuit and skirt appearing again and again in different iterations of these “Strange Yves Saint Laurent colours”. That’s something Saint Laurent himself did plenty – I was reminded of his Spring/Summer 1989 haute couture collection, which closed with a series of spectacular embroidered capes over slender dresses in clashing yet somehow perfectly harmonious colours. “Saint Laurent cannot be matched as a colourist,” wrote The New York Times – and we could say the same now about Vaccarello. Its a skill he’s kept somewhat hidden in his recent shows, although the delicate nuances in last season’s cavalcade of cling-film tight sheer dresses demonstrated it, on second consideration.
Yves Saint Laurent once named a perfume ‘Champagne’ until the Comité interprofessionnel du vin de Champagne forced him to change it. And that kind of sums up the bubbly, fizzing energy of this show, which is tricky if not impossible to describe. I’d need all 3,000 pages of La Recherche to do it proper justice, and even then it’s just something you need to be there and witness to really get. The emotional jolt of that final barrage of colour – there were even jewels on the elongated vamps of the models’ polished patent leather court shoes – was a riposte to dress-down, to the homogeny that has characterised so much of fashion lately. “I’m lucky to be at Saint Laurent, there is so much history here,” Vaccarello commented, in front of a collection that not only did it justice, but became part of that history too.