Byzantine, Art Deco, almost Brutalist: Anthony Vaccarello takes Saint Laurent through eight golds for Summer 2027, then switches the lights off with black.
Most designers who fall for a colour use it like seasoning. Anthony Vaccarello, for Saint Laurent Summer 2027, has upended the shaker. The colour is gold, and the house has every right to it: Monsieur Saint Laurent adored the stuff, and once called it the colour of the sun when it falls on a woman.
The repetition, which Vaccarello has made a habit of exploring, lives in colour this time rather than silhouette. The house lists the golds the way a sommelier lists vintages: deep, Byzantine, pale, Renaissance, matte, Art Deco, burnished, and a modernist version it describes as almost Brutalist. The point, according to the notes, is not decoration. The gold is meant to wrap each look from head to toe, in the day as much as the night.
The raw material is the Saint Laurent wardrobe itself, gilded. The sahariennes, trenches, blouses and wrap skirts of Monsieur Saint Laurent’s own era sit beside Vaccarello’s newer classics: the strong-shouldered coats, the voluminous blousons, the short, precise suits edged with fur. Together they are meant to read as the golden age of the house, reimagined for the present, which is a neat way of saying that the archive has been dipped.
Then come the fabrics, and here the list becomes a small act of bravado: lamé, organza, guipure lace, mousseline, brocade, jacquard, metallic cotton and latex coated in gold leaf. That last one sounds like a dare to a dry cleaner. The embroidery, the jewelling and the handling of the cloth may recall haute couture, but the house is insistent that this is artisanal work made for the women of today, not for a salon of the past.
The accessories take the gold further. There are monumental, jewelled filigree earrings, and shoes built from gilded metal chains, set on twisting snake heels, which supply the touch of danger the house has always liked to keep close.
The best part of the story may be how it ends. In the closing looks, the gold gives way to black, which absorbs the light as readily as gold throws it back. A velvet suit with jewel buttons is described as pure YSL, and a trio of black evening dresses, said to resemble nimbus clouds and loosely, impulsively constructed, nods to Vaccarello’s Belgian roots.
Whether all that gold flatters or glares will be settled by the cut, the light and the body inside it, rather than by a press note. But the idea has a clean logic: spend an entire collection on radiance, then close on the thing that makes radiance visible. Vaccarello puts it himself in the words that frame the show: “what passes sometimes leaves more light than what remains.”
