This Oscar-Contending Producer Sure Is a Fantastic Fashion Designer
StyleWith a gloriously twisted Paris Fashion Week finale, Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello proves he is the menswear auteur of the moment.By Samuel HineJanuary 29, 2025Save this storySaveSave this storySaveThis is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.FADE IN:A young man stalks through the gloomy ballroom in a long leather duster. Underneath, he wears a dignified gray business suit, double-breasted, with a striped dress shirt and a dark red tie firmly knotted at his throat. He is listening to the thumping bassline of “You Want It Darker.” The eye is drawn to his legs, which are clad in kinky, thigh-high leather boots. Hands in pockets, the man, on the hunt for a dangerous encounter, disappears into the night.This was the opening scene of Tuesday evening’s Saint Laurent Winter 2025 runway show, masterfully produced by Anthony Vaccarello, who premiered an unforgettably twisted men’s fashion moment under the soaring glass dome of the Bourse de Commerce. Based on Vaccarello’s costuming alone, you can picture the movie as an American Psycho-meets-Cruising fever dream directed by Gaspar Noé (who was sitting in the front row, wearing dark sunglasses).It’s not the most far-fetched notion. Yves Saint Laurent himself designed clothing for films like Belle de Jour, but Vaccarello has taken the house’s cinematic legend much further with Saint Laurent Productions, a new division of the fashion house established in 2023 to produce films by the designer’s favorite auteurs. Now, Vaccarello is a rising player in Hollywood; at Cannes in May, Saint Laurent Productions premiered David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope, and Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, which won the festival’s Jury Prize and went on to become the surprise breakout film of the year. Last week, the contemporary opera nabbed 13 Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, directing, and actress in leading role—the most Oscar noms in history for a foreign language film. “Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent” is listed as a producer and costume artistic director.ZHUXIAN CHENIronically, Emilia Pérez wasn’t nominated for costume design, though there’s such a strong sense of character in Vaccarello’s runway collections that it seems like only a matter of time before he takes home a little gold man with his name on it. At the Bourse de Commerce, every starlet clutching a champagne flute in the front row seemed to have stepped into a dramatic narrative: Steve Lacey in the dark overcoat of a mob boss, Lennon Gallagher the taupe suit of a London private eye. At YSL, Vaccarello has cornered the market for strong shoulders, but his designs are elegantly shaped, more heartthrob than heavy. He is a master of generating sex appeal by covering someone in more clothing rather than less (though he’s good at that too).This season, Vaccarello’s script emerged from a fantasy encounter between Yves Saint Laurent and Robert Mapplethorpe in the early 1980s, which played out in an intense tryst between the couturier’s fastidious uniform and the New York artist’s taste for fetish and kink.Waist-up was a version of what Vaccarello called a “bourgeois facade”: long, fulsome suit jackets in heavy wools that ranged from boardroom pinstripes to sturdy Savile Row plaids borrowed from Saint Laurent’s early-’80s Rive Gauche collections. Gabardine trenches and leather motorcycle jackets enhanced the muscular silhouette, as did sturdy overcoats, some of which erupted with manes of delicate feathers (a nod to the house’s couture archive) that glimmered in the light of the chandeliers arranged on the runway.Processed with VSCO with kp8 presetBut on the bottom was a freaky plot twist: stiff black leather waders, which stretched from floor to hipbone. With chunky square toes and sturdy heels, these were less Johnny Cash chilling by the river and more BDSM dungeon master. In a preview, Vaccarello smiled when he called it “respectable on the top and kind of dirty on the way down.”They are certainly not everyday boots you’ll see flying out of YSL boutiques come fall. But Vaccarello’s audacious juxtaposition was the most compelling creative statement in a week where I saw piles of beautiful tailoring. Look at most Paris Fashion Week shows and you’ll see a commentary on the trends of the day. Vaccarello, on the other hand, speaks to our time in the same way the most compelling auteurs do. He is making fashion for our knife-edge moment. Facing an uncertain future, risky and reckless behavior only becomes more seductive.Processed with VSCO with 3 presetVaccarello found that tension in the early-’80s heyday of Saint Laurent and Mapplethorpe. “I think there was a danger, a kind of anxiety then, that I can relate to the moment that we are living in now,” the designer said. According to Vaccarello, Mapplethorpe photographed a YSL men’s catalogue in 1983, though the downtown NYC
This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.
FADE IN:
A young man stalks through the gloomy ballroom in a long leather duster. Underneath, he wears a dignified gray business suit, double-breasted, with a striped dress shirt and a dark red tie firmly knotted at his throat. He is listening to the thumping bassline of “You Want It Darker.” The eye is drawn to his legs, which are clad in kinky, thigh-high leather boots. Hands in pockets, the man, on the hunt for a dangerous encounter, disappears into the night.
This was the opening scene of Tuesday evening’s Saint Laurent Winter 2025 runway show, masterfully produced by Anthony Vaccarello, who premiered an unforgettably twisted men’s fashion moment under the soaring glass dome of the Bourse de Commerce. Based on Vaccarello’s costuming alone, you can picture the movie as an American Psycho-meets-Cruising fever dream directed by Gaspar Noé (who was sitting in the front row, wearing dark sunglasses).
It’s not the most far-fetched notion. Yves Saint Laurent himself designed clothing for films like Belle de Jour, but Vaccarello has taken the house’s cinematic legend much further with Saint Laurent Productions, a new division of the fashion house established in 2023 to produce films by the designer’s favorite auteurs. Now, Vaccarello is a rising player in Hollywood; at Cannes in May, Saint Laurent Productions premiered David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope, and Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, which won the festival’s Jury Prize and went on to become the surprise breakout film of the year. Last week, the contemporary opera nabbed 13 Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, directing, and actress in leading role—the most Oscar noms in history for a foreign language film. “Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent” is listed as a producer and costume artistic director.
Ironically, Emilia Pérez wasn’t nominated for costume design, though there’s such a strong sense of character in Vaccarello’s runway collections that it seems like only a matter of time before he takes home a little gold man with his name on it. At the Bourse de Commerce, every starlet clutching a champagne flute in the front row seemed to have stepped into a dramatic narrative: Steve Lacey in the dark overcoat of a mob boss, Lennon Gallagher the taupe suit of a London private eye. At YSL, Vaccarello has cornered the market for strong shoulders, but his designs are elegantly shaped, more heartthrob than heavy. He is a master of generating sex appeal by covering someone in more clothing rather than less (though he’s good at that too).
This season, Vaccarello’s script emerged from a fantasy encounter between Yves Saint Laurent and Robert Mapplethorpe in the early 1980s, which played out in an intense tryst between the couturier’s fastidious uniform and the New York artist’s taste for fetish and kink.
Waist-up was a version of what Vaccarello called a “bourgeois facade”: long, fulsome suit jackets in heavy wools that ranged from boardroom pinstripes to sturdy Savile Row plaids borrowed from Saint Laurent’s early-’80s Rive Gauche collections. Gabardine trenches and leather motorcycle jackets enhanced the muscular silhouette, as did sturdy overcoats, some of which erupted with manes of delicate feathers (a nod to the house’s couture archive) that glimmered in the light of the chandeliers arranged on the runway.
But on the bottom was a freaky plot twist: stiff black leather waders, which stretched from floor to hipbone. With chunky square toes and sturdy heels, these were less Johnny Cash chilling by the river and more BDSM dungeon master. In a preview, Vaccarello smiled when he called it “respectable on the top and kind of dirty on the way down.”
They are certainly not everyday boots you’ll see flying out of YSL boutiques come fall. But Vaccarello’s audacious juxtaposition was the most compelling creative statement in a week where I saw piles of beautiful tailoring. Look at most Paris Fashion Week shows and you’ll see a commentary on the trends of the day. Vaccarello, on the other hand, speaks to our time in the same way the most compelling auteurs do. He is making fashion for our knife-edge moment. Facing an uncertain future, risky and reckless behavior only becomes more seductive.
Vaccarello found that tension in the early-’80s heyday of Saint Laurent and Mapplethorpe. “I think there was a danger, a kind of anxiety then, that I can relate to the moment that we are living in now,” the designer said. According to Vaccarello, Mapplethorpe photographed a YSL men’s catalogue in 1983, though the downtown NYC art star and the famed Paris couturier aren’t known to have ever met. What they had in common was a taste for the nightlife underworlds of their respective cities.
“I like the idea of the life of Yves Saint Laurent in that moment where it was more dark and when he was dealing with addiction,” Vaccarello said. (The designer’s downward spiral was memorably depicted in the 2014 film Saint Laurent.) “When you think of his night life in ’82, ’83, you can see that every morning he had to go back to work,” Vaccarello added. “So there was always that respectability of Monsieur Saint Laurent in the bourgeois look with the tie. But I wanted to mix that with the evening side of going to those bad places in Paris.” Mapplethorpe enters as a sort of spiritual guide to Saint Laurent’s nocturnal explorations. “Robert Mapplethorpe was very chic, very classic, but you can feel a toughness in his attitude,” said Vaccarello, who collects the photographer’s work. “I thought about what these two people would say to each other at that time.”
Next month, Hollywood will properly size up Vaccarello when he attends the Academy Awards for the first time. “I always dreamed about that ceremony, from watching it on TV as a kid,” he said. (The designer, who wears a uniform of Nike AirMaxes and black T-shirts, assured us he will not pull up to the red carpet wearing leather waders.)
It is now crystal clear that Vaccarello is one of the daring talents of fashion today. If Emilia Peréz—a whirling Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, and Selena Gomez-starring musical that follows a Mexican cartel leader’s transition into a woman—wins even a chunk of the film’s 13 nominations, Vaccarello could also be validated as one of cinema’s new creative rainmakers. Backstage, I asked him if he ever imagined he would be producing an Oscar favorite like Emilia Peréz. “No, when I saw the script of that film, it was strange,” he replied. “I mean, nothing was fitting together, but I kind of liked the idea of doing something bizarre. And at the end, that’s what people like.”
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