At Saint Laurent, Opulence Was the Word

"That space wasn't some lavish backdrop to Saint Laurent's entertaining but, rather, a living, breathing collaborator in his creative enterprises. Yves Saint Laurent gets a Matisse, then makes a Matisse dress; Bergé buys Goya's 1791 Portrait de Luis María de Cistué y Martínez, and Saint Laurent translates that baby Spanish aristocrat's pink sash to a bowed 1983 evening gown."

"In Vaccarello's case, the apartment was stripped bare, plundered. 'It's kind of depurated to the maximum,' he said. That is, bar a single sculpture of an athlete's torso in marble. The original was created between the 1st and 2nd centuries; Vaccarello's replica, merely a few weeks old, but blown up several times, to cinematic scale."

"That neatly echoes a shift in proportion and perspective that Vaccarello has brought - and continues to bring - to his vision of Saint Laurent, as well as his font of knowledge. He was talking, backstage an hour or so before his show, about the doves that swooped in metal and crystal around his models' earlobes."

Anthony Vaccarello designed his Autumn/Winter 2026 Saint Laurent show around the aesthetic of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé's rue Babylone apartment, a space that functioned as a creative collaborator rather than mere backdrop. The apartment's contents, auctioned in 2009 for nearly $400 million, inspired artworks by Matisse, Goya, and Mondrian that Saint Laurent translated into garments. For this collection, Vaccarello stripped the imaginary space bare, retaining only a monumental marble sculpture of an athlete's torso—a classical piece enlarged to cinematic proportions. This shift in scale reflects Vaccarello's evolving approach to Saint Laurent's vision, incorporating fine art references like Picasso's doves rendered in metal and crystal adorning models' earlobes.

Read at AnOther