At first, you couldn’t tell it from ground level, but the banks of white hydrangeas we were all admiring—while the Eiffel Tower was busy doing its twinkling thing somewhere to our left—were actually laid out to spell YSL. (Drone footage revealed this on our phones, while we were simultaneously spectating on the arrivals of Hailey Bieber, Zoë Kravitz, Rosé, Jean-Paul Gaultier and, eventually, Madonna and her daughter Lourdes.)
It was a spectacular cinematic outdoor setting for a show laden with Saint Laurent codes; an event which draws hundreds more spectators beyond those with a seat on the inside. The message? Well, to start with, Paris at night is synonymous with Yves Saint Laurent, and under cover of darkness all manner of libertine behaviours may be savoured and condoned. Or that’s how it used to seem in the mythology of the 1970s and 1980s, when Saint Laurent was at his height and sex and glamour and ‘permissiveness’ were owned and glorified as quintessentially French in the pages of Vogue’s Paris edition, celebrated in the photography of Helmut Newton.
A far-off age indeed, in these times of the rise of the Trad Wife. “Louche aristocrat” is how Anthony Vaccarello typified the throwback look of the women who began to stalk in their shiny, pointy slingback stilettos around those gravel paths. At first, they were wearing power-shouldered black leather biker-jacketed pencil-skirted suits, with crisp, outstanding white pussy-bow blouses exaggerated almost to the point of going rogue. Definitely not sweet, domesticated little pussies, anyhow. Vaccarello had first used them this way in his hit menswear collection of fall ’23, he reminded us backstage.
But what were these mesdames up to, treading around this beautiful formal garden at night? One of them, in full leather—a matching corset, skirt and jacket—was wearing a black leather military cap. Vaccarello mentioned Robert Mapplethorpe in his show notes. “I wanted to start with, like, the idea of cruising from the gay scene in the Tuileries [gardens],” he said. “I wanted to redo it [here] in front of the Trocadero, having these women in leather cruising round a big YSL.”
How far can you go to be subversive and sexually charged in fashion in days like ours when women, even on film festival red carpets, have been ordered to cover up? Vaccarello—himself much involved with the movie world these days, of course—seemed to be pushing this point with the next passage of his show. Voila: the Saint Laurent raincoat and day dress, classics of the house which once turned bourgeois, now redone in multiple shades of thin, slippery-looking body-clinging nylon, covered from neck to knee with quite obviously nothing-much if anything underneath. “Yes, because it’s still about nudity,” Vaccarello shrugged. “A confrontation?” a journalist in the room suggested. “Yes. C’est Saint Laurent” he concurred, smiling.
The third passage was very Saint Laurent, too—in full-blown romantic historical mode. These billowing dresses—memories, perhaps, of Yves Saint Laurent’s landmark haute couture shows—were also made of nylon. Voluminous of skirt and sleeve, ruffled furiously in front, they formed a long parade of gorgeous colors, flowing in the night breeze. Vaccarello pointed out that the material means that a woman can just scrunch her evening gown up in a ball. Still, through all the voluminousness, there were still glimpses of the female form. “She goes from radical leather, a kind of hard woman that goes softly, softly, softly into these dresses,” he concluded with a glint in his eye. “But she’s the same woman. She’s not as soft as we think.”
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