The temperature dropped to 10 degrees at the Saint Laurent show last night, but the headlining guests were anything but cold. A handful of truly iconic supermodels — Kate Moss, Jerry Hall, Shalom Harlow, Eva Herzigova, Amber Valetta, Carla Bruni — made an incendiary entrance dressed in the gloriously chubby fur coats that were the star of Anthony Vaccarello’s AW22 collection for the house.
Despite their Rolls Royce glamour, those giant coats never looked more practical than in the plein air show in front of a purpose-built Art Deco fountain, created specially by Saint Laurent against the glittering backdrop of the Eiffel Tower. Worn with long dresses underneath them, they didn’t just keep those women warm — they made them look unapologetically smoking hot, far removed from the hamster wheel of trends. And that is what you want from YSL.
Watching the show that followed, you got the sense that Anothony Vaccarello isn’t done with some of the themes he began exploring last season. In fact, it felt like he had more to say on the idea of extra-long dresses worn with dramatically floor-weeping coats. According to his show notes, he was inspired by the tubular sheaths worn by the legendary choreographer Martha Graham for her 1930 performances of “Lamentation”, which enveloped the body from head to toe, as well as the fabulously high-camp shows of Yves Saint Laurent from the mid-80s, when Yves often experimented with hooded ‘capuches’ to lend an exotic sensuality to daywear and dresses, perhaps inspired by his upbringing in Algiers and a lifelong love of Morrocco. A rich, subdued colour palette took its cue from Polaroids of YSL couture fittings of the same era: deep oxblood and mauve, shots of chartreuse and Mountbatten pink, and a rainbow spectrum of browns, beiges and greens.
As a designer, Anthony has developed an unapologetically aesthetic singularity and confidence, so much so that his recent shows have been entirely devoted to simple ideas. You know who else did that? Yves! Whether it was Mondrian or Picasso, Russia or China, the house of Saint Laurent has a rich history of collections devoted to unpacking a singular theme — and what Anthony understands is that it makes collections all the more distinctive and memorable.
By now, the world knows that Saint Laurent offers a full wardrobe — spanning everything from T-shirts to sneakers, boots to tuxedos, even lighters and water bottles — so it was refreshing to see a designer dispense with merchandising on the catwalks and lean into the luxury of taking one’s time to expand upon an idea. The women it attracts aren’t in search of sartorial fads — they have an internal confidence, and they know what they like. For spring, they’ll be thinking about wearing jewel-tone silk-jersey dresses — some, simply body-con with elegant turtlenecks, others, sculpturally draped with twists and pleats wrapping around the body — with broad, perpendicular-shoulder leather coats, sweeping the floor and collecting everything in their wake.
Yes, these clothes are decadent prospects, glamorous in their unapologetic vision of femininity. Just as in the 80s, an era that is increasingly becoming parallel to our current socio-political climate, these hulking silhouettes mimic the extremities of the stock market with their triangular shapes of wide shoulders, nipped waists and columnar skirts.
Clothes for wallflowers, these are not. You move out of your way for the imperious woman in these coats, and you do everything you can to figure out who she is behind those hoods and nocturnal sunglasses. And sure, you can take it all apart and think of how to navigate those long coats on your morning commute (if in doubt, simply take a note from Kate’s book and drag it across the floor behind you, as she did at the show) or how you’ll muster the confidence to wear a slinky, semi-sheer gown. But, really, it doesn’t matter. You can simply dream of embodying the spirit of the woman who does.
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Images via Spotlight