Anthony Vaccarello and I are sitting in his stately office, housed in a 17th-century hôtel particulier in Paris’s Left Bank. Vaccarello has just presented his spring 2023 womenswear collection for Saint Laurent in front of the Eiffel Tower, and today things are so quiet you can hear his French bulldog, Nino, snoring in the next room. Vaccarello’s office is minimally decorated, as if he’s still moving in, with a tidy black desk, a few Pierre Jeanneret chairs, and a small daybed underneath some bookshelves. “It’s peaceful,” he says, sipping from a tiny glass of water. “And very chic.”
Vaccarello, who took over Saint Laurent as the brand’s sixth creative steward (including Mr. Saint Laurent) in 2016, is plenty settled in. Under his design, artistic, and image direction, the brand’s revenues have exploded from $1.07 billion to nearly $2.85 billion. Though YSL won’t share sales breakdowns, Vaccarello says menswear has been a steadily growing part of the business. He notes with some pride that he’s achieved this epic expansion without thinking much about numbers, or paying attention to what’s selling and what’s not. “I have the feeling that fashion became a bit too commercial,” he says. “I mean, being commercial is not a bad word. It’s important to sell, but if you can sell and have a real message or real style, that is a bingo for me.”
One example: He’s eschewed splashy collaborations with other brands and artists, and avoided big marketing stunts of the kind we’ve come to expect from large luxury houses. “I still have that idea of when I did fashion when I was at school; all the brands were so different and so cool and fresh. Now, it’s all about doing the next collab and that kind of thing. I hate it. I find it super boring,” he says. Vaccarello is so committed to showcasing his very parisien vision of real style that you can count on one hand the number of bags—the most reliable driver of luxury brand revenue—he’s sent down the runway. Explains Vaccarello: “Where do you go with a bag on the runway?”
What Vaccarello does instead is create fashion that resonates and experiences that are genuinely moving. In July, in the middle of the Agafay Desert, a dusty, hour-plus ride outside of Marrakech, he staged his spring 2023 menswear show. Among those in attendance were talented people you wouldn’t quite call “celebs,” like Steve Lacy and Dominic Fike, as well as dozens of other beautiful creatures wearing gauzy pussy-bow blouses; fulsome, flowy trousers; and at least one dark cape that made its wearer look like a Jedi master. As the sun set, a troop of slender models emerged through a spooky mist. The first wore a strong-shouldered tuxedo with no shirt and simple black sandals. Another wore a silky white shirt with a plunging neckline and long black trousers that rippled in the wind. Yet another wore a large faux-fur duster coat, which grazed the tops of glimmering black high-heel boots.
Men’s fashion is going through a full-blown identity crisis—in the shifting terrain of masculinity and gender expression, and the Category 5 hurricane of trends swirling on social media, many designers seem confused as to what their customers want, or who they even are. In Marrakech, Vaccarello responded with a deeply felt urgency and clarity of vision. He presented clothing that spoke clearly of an aspirational life of pleasure and sensuality. Clothing for men who want to feel beautiful. It was a definitive moment in establishing the validity of his men’s line.
The audience clearly picked up what Vaccarello put down. As an otherworldly portal of an Es Devlin sculpture that punctuated the landscape descended back into a dark pool at the center of the runway and the models disappeared into the night, several members of the audience silently wept into their blouses. “For me, it's very important to cry at the show,” Anthony Vaccarello told me later. “I like when there's an emotion. It's super important to tell a story. Then at the end, if you cry, it means that you understood where I want to go, and I like that.”
It was not exactly destined that Vaccarello would emerge as a menswear force. When he arrived at Saint Laurent, he had never designed a shred of clothing for men, and his approach was initially cautious. “When I started doing men’s, it was more about what I was wearing back then. So it was kind of selfish, I have to say. Maybe too real,” he says. One of the designers he was wearing a lot at the time was Hedi Slimane, his predecessor at Saint Laurent. Slimane was a tough act to follow, especially for someone who was new to menswear. “I felt pressure starting men’s, because he used to do men’s, and he used to do really good men’s,” says Vaccarello, who is wearing, as he does nearly every day, a black leather aviator jacket designed by Slimane for Saint Laurent. “That’s why it took me time to find my own language.” He didn’t hold his first stand-alone men’s show until 2018, and even then the clothes echoed the vibe—think Viper Room habitué with a bad attitude—that had been established by Slimane. Vaccarello’s leggy and confident womenswear was rapturously received, and his menswear was seen as more of an afterthought.
The breakthrough came when he approached his men’s collections with the same cinematic eye he brought to his women’s line. “I had the feeling that my women’s and my men’s were very different, even if I was the one who designed both,” Vaccarello says. “Then I understood that maybe I had to work the men’s as I did the women’s—more like a fantasy, more like a film. The woman was like a character.” The idea was simple, according to Vaccarello: to make his menswear less “real” and “more elegant, more chic, more everything.” So, out went the classic YSL biker jackets, in came those powerful square-shoulder “le smoking” tuxedo jackets and mystique-inducing faux-fur dusters, both ideas borrowed from Vaccarello’s previous womenswear collections.
As Vaccarello’s alluring new vision has solidified, men who previously looked to Saint Laurent for staid staples like Chelsea boots and bomber jackets have been responding. “Our customer has really connected well with the ’70s louche aesthetic that Anthony has favored in recent seasons,” says Damien Paul, head of menswear at British retailer MatchesFashion.
Including guys like Lacy and Fike, two of the newest members of Vaccarello’s meticulously curated inner circle. As other fashion houses chase influencers and court social-media-clouted A-listers, Vaccarello has relied on a different approach to build what feels like a more enduring and authentic community of friends and ambassadors—Zoë Kravitz, Hailey Bieber, Vincent Gallo—who burnish the house’s sexy aura. “I don’t look at the Instagram follower count,” Vaccarello says. What’s more important is a smoldering sense of style and loyalty to Saint Laurent and to Vaccarello, who refuses to dress people he doesn’t know personally. “I prefer to have a few people that fit the house and understand the codes, and to build a relationship with them and to grow with them,” he says. In a fashion era where the word community is often seen near inclusion, Vaccarello is creating a sense of wicked—and incredibly aspirational—exclusivity around Saint Laurent.
If you want to join Vaccarello’s club, you’d be wise to follow the blueprint he lays out for the YSL man, the type of guy who knows his way around a pussy-bow blouse: “It’s a guy that’s very cultivated,” Vaccarello says. “He’s a guy that’s clever. He knows how to play. He knows how to push the limit sometimes.”
He is, in short, very chic.
