Saint Laurent Fall 2023 Ready-to-Wear Collection – NewsEverything Fashion

Elegance, that’s what Anthony Vaccarello said he was thinking about when it came to his fall 2023 collection. But here’s another ideal word for it: moment. As in: That Saint Laurent show on Tuesday night was a real…. Actually, epic would have worked just as well here, as would triumph. But in truth, all those words only make sense because of the way that Vaccarello so expertly, so confidently, so brilliantly explored his notion of elegance. “I wanted to do something around that idea, something tight and focused,” he said backstage moments before curtain up. “Maybe elegance is something we have no sense of today. Maybe we don’t care about it. Maybe it has some other meaning, or maybe it has no meaning at all. But I really wanted to bring that idea of being dressed.”

And how: Every aspect of the look was considered. It was a taut, perfectly controlled vision of tailoring, riffing on the classic YSL tailleur jupe—or skirt suit, to you and me—conjured out of menswear fabrics, just as Saint Laurent himself liked to do back in the day. (Though Vaccarello said he’d also been thinking about the forever icons that are Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl.) Vaccarello’s look rested on a biiigggg exaggerated shoulder jacket, cut into a classic men’s suit jacket, or smoking, or velvet blazer, over a lean skirt which finished just above the knee, a hemline that was a new length for him. These were worn with tanks as simple as cotton tees, killer patent slingbacks, weighty gilt bangles, and to a model, aviator shades; all very Helmut Newton. Sometimes the skirt was swapped for some cashmere leggings, and the jacket softened by the chiffon blouses with super-long trailing neckties trailing over the shoulders, or a shawl draped and pinned in place with more mega jewelry in the form of a gold brooch.

But for all this frisson of drama, the real kicker was that Vaccarello had worked as hard on making much of this soft and malleable as he had on the construction of those shoulders; one wonders if showing directly in front of the marvel that is the Eiffel Tower season after season has driven him to outdo its incredible feat of engineering. (This shoulder line was, he said, the most difficult yet to achieve, it all comes down to the way it has to be balanced by the sleeve, apparently.) For all their monumentality, the jackets themselves were relatively light, and the soft knit pieces voided any notion of stiffness. That softer touch was evident too in the smattering of evening that Vaccarello offered; a gorgeous diaphanous black lace and velvet banded camisole with a black sheer skirt, or any one of the draped and wrapped tops—one looked like a deconstructed smoking—worn with yet more of those leggings.