The Anthony Vaccarello Saint Laurent farewell was always going to be felt rather than merely seen, and on the evening of 29 September, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, it was. FashionUnited has confirmed that this gold-gilded SS27 collection was Vaccarello’s finale at the house, ending a chapter that began when he took the role in 2016, as noted by Kering.
A decade distilled into one collection
Ten years is a long time to hold a flame to one of fashion’s most exacting legacies. The show notes carried a quote that made the occasion explicit without stating it plainly: ‘A light shines all the more brightly because we know it cannot be held. What passes sometimes leaves more light than what remains.’ As send-offs go, it was measured, literary, and entirely in keeping with the Vaccarello register.
The collection itself answered the sentiment. Gold throughout, but gold as a quality rather than a colour: crinkled organza, crunched lace, sheers that caught the light and released it. Nothing heavy, nothing laboured. A pencil skirt, a safari jacket, a trench coat, each arrived as if the weight had been considered and then carefully removed. Then came the closing passage of black chiffon gowns, staggeringly romantic and shot through with the particular sadness of something beautiful about to end.
A Shakespeare sonnet was delivered as the models walked. Three enormous gold chandeliers appeared to hang suspended in the Paris air above them. The set was not decoration; it was argument.
The numbers behind the vision
It is easy, watching a collection like this one, to think of fashion purely as feeling. The business reality beneath the organza tells a different story. Under Vaccarello’s creative leadership, Saint Laurent’s revenue nearly tripled, reaching a peak of €3.3 billion, according to FashionUnited. That figure does not happen by accident. It is the product of a coherent, consistent vision held firmly across a decade, the kind of creative constancy that the industry tends to celebrate only in retrospect.
What Vaccarello built at Saint Laurent was a house identity so resolved that it became self-evident. The tuxedo, the safari jacket, the Le Smoking reinterpreted season after season without apology or anxiety. When a creative director knows what a house is, the collections accumulate rather than contradict. This SS27 season is the proof: everything on that runway will read as current in three years, in five, in ten.
Charlotte Gainsbourg, and everyone who came to stand
The guest list was, as W Magazine noted, a gathering of the house’s legends. Wall to wall, all of them there. And at the close, Charlotte Gainsbourg sang. The room rose to applaud.
There is something in that image worth sitting with. Fashion shows are not usually the kind of event that makes an audience stand. They applaud, certainly, the industry has its rituals. But standing is different. Standing means the room has agreed, without discussion, that what they witnessed was beyond the routine transaction of a seasonal presentation. It means they understood, collectively, that something was ending and that it had been worth everything.
Vaccarello’s decade at the house was not without its pressures. Following Hedi Slimane’s polarising tenure, he arrived to a house in conversation with itself, and he resolved that conversation calmly and with authority. His Saint Laurent was adult, architectural in its restraint, and unapologetically Parisian. The women who wore it, and the women who aspired to wear it, knew exactly what they were reaching for.
Invest in anything from this collection and the reasoning will not require explanation in a decade. The trench, the pencil skirt, the sheer gold blouse: these are not purchases against a trend. They are purchases against time. That, finally, is Vaccarello’s most enduring contribution to the house, and it is considerable.
