First Fashion, Now Film: Anthony Vaccarello’s Cinematic Vision for Saint Laurent

If you were a child of the nineties, you probably did not dream about the brand Yves Saint Laurent. By then the leading fashion genius of the third quarter of the 20th century, often credited with inventing modern womenswear, had handed prêt-à-porter to his assistants, who hewed closely to a creed of bourgeois Parisian elegance. For a nineties kid, there were new thrills: the minimalism of Helmut Lang, the early grunge of Marc Jacobs, the lavish glamour of Versace, the humor and cheek of Jean Paul Gaultier, the deconstructed forms of Yohji Yamamoto.

Even so, Anthony Vaccarello was not the type of future designer who taped pages of Vogue Italia to his bedroom walls, though he did doodle a stiletto now and then in his math notebook. For him, music and the visual culture shaped by MTV were the doorway to fashion: Björk in the “Violently Happy” video, and above all Madonna in Gaultier’s iconic pink cone bra from the Blond Ambition era. “To be honest, when I was a student, Yves Saint Laurent was not someone I looked up to,” says Vaccarello, who will mark a decade at the head of Saint Laurent next year. “To me he already felt a bit old-fashioned, more linked to perfume and to that woman, very elegant, very sophisticated, the woman he always created. Yet those clients stayed with him, and he never gave up on those incredible women, a bit outside of time. I love that now, and I am drawn to the nineties moment when he shaped that perfect woman.

I like the idea of taking that DNA and applying it to today’s woman

Taking a flower and putting it on a yoga top for someone you might see at Erewhon.” 

This morning we are not at Erewhon, but we are not far in distance or in demographic. A late-spring marine layer throws steely light through palms in the garden of the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, where athleisure-clad couples sip oat-milk lattes. Although this part of town, with pastel Lamborghinis and loud party people, is a little much for Vaccarello, he gladly chooses breakfast at the Chateau, fried eggs and avocado, a classic California plate.

Born and raised in Belgium to Sicilian parents, Vaccarello spends a month in Los Angeles twice a year, usually in March and November, a breather after six intense months building the women’s collection. The tradition began with the birth of his son, Luca, four years ago. He and his husband, Arnaud Michaux, who is also his creative partner in Saint Laurent’s design studio, connected with a surrogate in Colorado, since surrogacy is illegal in France and California’s pandemic waitlists were too long. After Luca was born, the new family spent his first month in LA before returning to Paris. The experience was so good for everyone, including the biological mother, that they repeated it last year when their daughter, Lola, arrived.

Blonde ambition
Gwyneth Paltrow wears a Saint Laurent creation by Anthony Vaccarello (here and throughout; ysl.com), as Vaccarello looks on.

While building his family, Vaccarello has also widened the cultural reach of the house he runs. In 2023 he launched Saint Laurent Productions to support independent filmmakers, starting with short films by Pedro Almodóvar and, posthumously, Jean-Luc Godard. Three Saint Laurent productions screened at Cannes in 2024: Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds and Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope. At the end of summer Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother premiered in Venice, while Claire Denis’s The Fence bowed in Toronto. Vaccarello designed the costumes for all of them, which makes Saint Laurent Productions a continuation of Yves Saint Laurent’s work for stage and screen, most famously Catherine Deneuve’s wardrobe in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour from 1967. The goal, though, is not nostalgia but linking artists he admires with the house he leads, and in that way building a Saint Laurent that goes beyond fashion.

“It is all about the directors,” Vaccarello says of the films he supports. “These directors shaped me when I was a kid, they made my vision what it is today. I am not paying them back, I want to help them keep doing what they do.

 I am not making blockbusters. Marvel does not attract me.

This is real support for independent film, and it is a way to extend the brand into something more popular and visible, something that lasts. Shows and campaigns are great, but they are fleeting. Maybe I should not say it, but in twenty or thirty years the film will still exist, and the name Saint Laurent will still be on it.”

Jarmusch, whose film won the Golden Lion in Venice, first worked with Saint Laurent in 2021 on a short for the house. The film, French Water, gathered a glittering cast that included Julianne Moore, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Indya Moore, and Chloë Sevigny. Vaccarello then tapped Jarmusch for an ad campaign. The director reached out to Vaccarello as soon as he began conceiving Father Mother Sister Brother.

“Aesthetically, it was fantastic, because they simply trusted me,” Jarmusch recalls.

 “I had not made a feature in five years, I was frustrated with financing mechanisms. I either have total artistic control or I do not do it at all, but there was pressure around going over budget, and it was too much. Working with Saint Laurent meant one thing, they wanted to make that process easier. They are not film people who insert their opinions into the production. It was more like the Renaissance, and I had a patron.”

When Vaccarello arrived at Saint Laurent after Hedi Slimane’s departure in 2016, the house had recently closed its Los Angeles design studio, which Slimane, a lover of the city’s music scene and its extremely well-dressed youth, had opened a few years earlier.

To be clear, Vaccarello is not in Los Angeles for work, the city does not inspire him much.

“I have always loved Los Angeles,” he says, “the weather, the beautiful architecture that reminds me of the fifties, although less and less, because LA has changed a lot in the last twenty years. The quality of life here is something we do not have in Paris, and it is so different that I need it. But I could never create outside Paris.”

At forty-three, Vaccarello considers himself, and proudly, an old-school designer. For him that means refusing to court TikTok personalities, to chase trends, or to hitch his work to viral moments or an It bag. In his view that is the fashion game of the twenty-first century, and he does not hide his disdain. Shy and quiet, Vaccarello has managed to run one of the great houses without becoming a household name or a dazzling public persona like John Galliano or Marc Jacobs. In his uniform of jeans, T-shirt, and worn sneakers, it is almost impossible to picture him in the menswear he designs. “I am a father now,” he says. “Why would I wear an orange shirt with shorts? Why? For whom?”

From the start, Vaccarello invited people who interested him, the Argentine director Gaspar Noé, actors Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, building an expanded version of the original Saint Laurent circle whose center included three muses, Catherine Deneuve, Betty Catroux, the Brazilian society figure married to interior designer François Catroux, and the Anglo-French aristocrat and jewelry designer Loulou de la Falaise. He has also worked with and befriended American actresses who inspire him such as Zoë Kravitz, Chloë Sevigny, and Gwyneth Paltrow, as well as younger models like Hailey Bieber and veterans like Frankie Rayder.

“Not influencers, real stars who have something real,” he says. “Women who have something to say, women with depth.”

He peels away the strip of tape holding cotton to the crook of his elbow, having had a vitamin infusion earlier that day at his rented house in Laurel Canyon, a standard Hollywood treatment. “I do not want to be cool. I do not want to be everywhere on social media or do pop-ups. I do not think the YSL customer is looking for that. I have always imagined a more refined customer, not a superficial one. Lines outside a luxury store are not luxury. The idea that you have to queue for something is not chic.” Like Yves Saint Laurent, Vaccarello focuses on women who do not come to the house to be taught taste, they come with fully formed style. “They know their bodies, they know which piece to buy so they do not look silly, so they do not follow a trend blindly,” he says. “Those women inspire me more.

I am not obsessed with youth. If the product is good, younger women will come on their own. I do not make things to impress them.”

Although he has not reopened a haute couture atelier at Saint Laurent, Vaccarello regrets the democratizing impulse, since he sees fashion as essentially elitist. “I think, I hope, fashion is becoming a bit harder to access, more intimate. We made people believe fashion is for everyone and that anyone can buy a piece from a big house. I hope we return to the older idea of luxury, because this is killing the idea of fashion for me a little.”

Yves Saint Laurent once said he wanted to give women “the fundamentals of a classic wardrobe, avoiding the fashion of the moment.” For him that wardrobe consisted of the house’s androgynous codes on which he built his name, the tuxedo, pea coat and safari jacket, trousers, women’s suits, blazers, and trench coats. Working through the archive, Vaccarello has built a similar logic with clean, pared-back, seductive pieces, a uniform for sophisticated women today. “Saint Laurent covered so much,” he says, “that it is easy to take something you like and make it modern. Saint Laurent was never about surface sparkle, it was always real clothes with a twist, defined by the person who wears them and by her attitude.”

Sevigny, who has shot several campaigns with Vaccarello, admires the way his designs pay discreet homage to Saint Laurent. In early September she wore a black lace bodysuit under a short black satin bubble skirt at the Venice Film Festival, a look from Vaccarello’s spring–summer 2018 collection inspired by Yasmeen Ghauri’s appearance in Saint Laurent’s fall–winter 1990 show. “There is a real sensuality in Anthony’s clothes that many of the new minimalist stars, no names, do not have,” Sevigny says. “They do not celebrate the female body. If you look at the last collection, there were shapes others were not touching, with color combinations and big beads, always something Saint Laurent did, and always with a touch of darkness or gothic, which keeps it contemporary.”

One June afternoon Vaccarello presented Saint Laurent’s menswear for summer 2026 in the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, once a commodities exchange and now home to François Pinault’s art collection, Pinault being the owner of Kering, Saint Laurent’s parent company. On the same day, a few streets away at the Centre Pompidou, Beyoncé attended the Louis Vuitton men’s show and immediately became the headline. Vaccarello usually avoids such spectacles. At the Bourse, the French sound artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot made a reflective pool in which floating porcelain bowls drifted and chimed, and around the pool, to melancholy pianos and strings, Vaccarello’s models circled slowly, hands in pockets, wearing glittering suits with sharp shoulders and narrow waists. A palette of plum, muted orange, and lime green echoed his women’s fall–winter collection from March, a reminder that his ideas flow from show to show regardless of gender rather than shifting radically. “I realized the men I was showing were a bit weak next to the women,” he said after the show.

“The woman was strong, the man a bit like her son.

Now the man is a lover or a friend. He is not a teenager anymore. They can talk over dinner.”

The show notes included an old photo of Yves Saint Laurent in Oran, Algeria, around 1950. He wears shorts with turned cuffs that reveal most of his thin thighs. Vaccarello says that image was a starting point. He imagined a small fantasy in his head, what if Yves Saint Laurent had spent a summer on Fire Island in the seventies, even though he never went, and neither has Vaccarello. The previous season imagined another meeting, this time between Saint Laurent and Robert Mapplethorpe, one artist who sublimated his desires and another who celebrated them. The over-the-knee black leather boots from that menswear collection appeared on a few guests today and are reportedly selling out despite a price of 4,500 dollars.

“Sex and distance,” is how Vaccarello sums up two key themes in Yves Saint Laurent’s work. “Sex and pudeur, a blouse with a bow at the neck, then you pull the bow and suddenly she is naked before the mirror while Helmut Newton photographs her.” Vaccarello values the tension between surface effects and what he calls the non-dit, the unspoken. That tension is an explicit theme in “Belle de Jour,” whose heroine, the bourgeois housewife Séverine Serizy, flees a passionless marriage by spending her afternoons pleasing clients in a brothel. Saint Laurent himself, equally drawn to beauty and decadence, hinted at this split in Deneuve’s wardrobe, from a prim black dress with white collar and cuffs to a black vinyl trench. “That duality is what I love at Saint Laurent,” Vaccarello says,

“the idea of sexuality, but a cool sexuality. You think you can have her, but you cannot.”

Vaccarello talks often about the thrill that danger carries, danger in how Paris looks at night, danger in Los Angeles and its history of famous crimes, danger in the neo-noirs of Abel Ferrara, a certain danger in Angelina Jolie’s witchy style, danger in the narcotic nights of the seventies. It is a sensibility he shares with the house’s founder. “When Yves Saint Laurent made his Scandale collection in 1971,” he says, “and everyone was shocked, because it was about the prostitutes of the forties, that was the inspiration. They had a free way of dressing that is still very appealing. Jessica Rabbit was what we saw in the nineties, Madonna wearing a cross between her huge breasts. That kind of bad taste matters in fashion, because it leads to something new.” Saint Laurent himself credited his friend Paloma Picasso, who combed flea markets for wartime fashion, as a spark for Scandale.

It is hard to avoid sex when discussing Vaccarello’s clothes, rich in leather and often touching on skin and lace. The dress that put him on the map was a white silk evening gown with a diagonal slash across the bust and a slit to the hip from his namesake label, worn to the 2012 Met Gala by his close friend Anja Rubik. Rubik remembers talking with Vaccarello about Basic Instinct, another cornerstone of the nineties, while he was making that dress.

“Many people think his clothes are sexy,” Rubik says. “But that is not the point. The clothes are not provocative in a big, loud way. They provoke because they are restrained. There is a focus on proportion, and if you do not understand design, you might miss the beauty behind those proportions, behind the details. The clothes never overpower the person. If a woman walks into a room who is bold and unapologetic, she becomes the sexy thing.”

As for himself, Vaccarello was the least wild in a wild teenage group. “I had a lot of fun,” he says. “I did plenty of stupid things, but more as an observer than a participant, drugs and nights out, but in the cool nineties way, not as extreme as now. It is scary to be a teenager today, no?”

His parents emigrated from Agrigento in southern Sicily to Belgium, where his father worked as a waiter and his mother held office jobs. He remembers his early life with affection, a loving family and the sense that he could do whatever he wanted. He enjoyed being an only child and believes that because he had no siblings he developed a talent for friendship. Growing up, he visited Sicily every year with his parents and grandparents, and the Italian music of that era still brings a sweet melancholy. He now summons those memories by spending part of each summer in Sicily, at a big house outside Noto, known for Baroque buildings and almond granita, where he gathers old friends for what he calls a grand bazaar.

Directors cut
Vaccarello’s move into film production represents both a personal quest and an expansion of the brand. “It’s great to do shows and campaigns, but they’re fleeting. Twenty or thirty years from now, the film will still exist, and the name Saint Laurent will still be on it.”

Sexuality was never discussed when he was growing up, not at home and not among friends. “It was a kind of non-dit,” he says, “where you know, and you do not care, you live your life with your friends, but you do not say, I am gay. It was the same with my parents, they never asked me anything. I suppose they understood, but they never named it. Which was cool, because you did not have to explain. My parents were Catholic, and I was baptized.”

In Madonna he found a way to be Catholic and be himself at once. “With her it was always ironic, and I understood that mode of criticizing religion while still believing in something.”

Fashion always attracted him, but he could not picture it as a job. “Brussels is pragmatic,” he says. “You are a lawyer or a doctor. Not a chic place. I guess that is why there are so many Belgian designers, because you get so bored. I never dreamed of Antwerp. The cities are thirty minutes apart by train, like Brentwood and West Hollywood. It is funny, but it is another world.”

At eighteen Vaccarello did not know what to do with himself, so he enrolled in law school. He loved the series Ally McBeal, which seemed reason enough. “I thought it was cool to sing in the bathroom,” he says, recalling the scenes where the lawyers dance and lip-sync Barry White in the shared restroom. “That was how I imagined the job, a fantasy. It was nothing like that. I hated it.” After two years he quit and entered La Cambre, the art academy in Brussels whose alumni are now leading French fashion. Alongside Vaccarello there are Julien Dossena at Rabanne, Nicolas di Felice at Courrèges, and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, all La Cambre graduates.

Antwerp had the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, which produced the Antwerp Six in the eighties, including Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester, but in Vaccarello’s mind it kept an aura of cerebral minimalism that did not suit him. “I had the courage to go to fashion school because I remember Olivier Theyskens dressing Madonna in the ‘Frozen’ video in 1998 when she was in her goth phase, I am a Madonna fan as you can tell. I thought, if he can dress her and he is from Brussels, after La Cambre, then there is hope for me. That is how it started, Madonna, Olivier Theyskens, La Cambre.”

After fashion school he moved to Rome to join the design team at Fendi, translating Lagerfeld’s drawings into furs. Meanwhile he launched his own label, which quickly drew the support of Maria Luisa Poumaillou and a following among models like Rubik. In 2013 Donatella Versace tapped Vaccarello to lead Versus, replacing Jonathan Anderson, who left to become creative director at Loewe. Saint Laurent felt like a distant dream, even though Vaccarello said it was the only house he would give up his label for, which he did when Saint Laurent chose him to succeed Slimane.

“I never considered anyone else,” says Francesca Bellettini, then president of Saint Laurent and now Kering’s deputy CEO for brand development. “His work always felt relevant, sharp, and timeless, but beyond the clothes I wanted someone who could express the brand’s values in an authentic way, not repeat history but reinterpret it. Anthony respects the essence of Saint Laurent, freedom, sophistication, desire. I wanted evolution, not revolution, and absolute clarity and consistency that allow a brand to build for the long term.”

We have dinner at Sushi Park, a modest restaurant on the second floor of an unassuming strip mall on the Sunset Strip. Food critics mostly ignore it, yet for years it has held a loyal following of sushi lovers and movie stars on discreet dates. It is Vaccarello’s favorite place in Los Angeles. “Maybe it is my fault,” he says, meaning the occasional paparazzi outside. “I brought Hailey Bieber, she brought Kim and Kendall. Then the paparazzi came.”

Saint Laurent Productions is his most ambitious venture outside the studio, but not the only one. Vaccarello opened the Babylone bookshop on Rue de Grenelle, in a former Saint Laurent accessories space, and started a small imprint called SL Editions dedicated to artists and photographers who inspire him. Earlier this year he opened a branch of Sushi Park in the basement of the restored Saint Laurent Rive Droite boutique on Rue Saint-Honoré. The Paris location is endlessly elegant, dim and dark-toned, but the food is almost identical.

Since it is a Saint Laurent restaurant, the opening was announced with a short film by Pierre-Ange Carlotti starring Lourdes Leon and the Palestinian musician Saint Levant. For those who need a souvenir, ebony Saint Laurent chopsticks retail online for 495 euros. “When he loves something, he wants to share it, to invest in it, to protect it,” says Kravitz, who met Vaccarello when he invited her to star in a 2017 Saint Laurent campaign. “He brings the things he loves into the brand. Saint Laurent is a community, we all know each other, we support each other, we watch each other grow. If every year it is a new group, whoever is popular on Instagram, everything becomes soulless.”

Denis, who describes herself as reserved, used to attend Saint Laurent shows and hurry out as soon as they ended. Their friendship began when Vaccarello invited her to a birthday party he hosted for Dalle at a hotel in Venice. “I was surprised and thrilled when I learned he wanted to be part of my film, not only as a co-producer but also as costume designer,” she says. “There is no better way to begin working with an actor on a character than through costume. If you start with clothes and shoes, little by little the character takes shape.”

Of course, not every undertaking ends perfectly. Emilia Perez, while a sensation, stumbled at the Oscars after transphobic tweets from Karla Sofía Gascón, who played the lead, flooded social media. “Film production involves risk and danger, all the things that excite me. What annoys me in fashion today is that everyone is so afraid. They calculate which artist or singer or actor will add value. I do not want to be linked to a racist, that is obvious, but when you make a film you cannot control every person.”

Saint Laurent Productions now receives scripts regularly, yet for now, apart from his directorial debut on a Gainsbourg video, Vaccarello has not found a new project that grabs him. “My bar is pretty high,” he says. “I do not have any new crushes at the moment.” The Saint Laurent universe is expanding exactly as he wishes, at a time when luxury is in a clear downturn. After years of growth, Saint Laurent posted a ten percent sales drop in the first half of 2025, which would have been bigger news if Gucci, Kering’s largest brand, had not fallen twenty-five percent. The reasons are likely many: geopolitical uncertainty, inflation, tariffs, a slowing Chinese economy. In September Kering appointed a new CEO, Luca de Meo, who previously led Renault and drove its turnaround. He is not a fashion insider, which may be the point.

“I do not feel pressure. It is not on my shoulders,” Vaccarello says of the business. “It is becoming a little ridiculous to swap designers after one bad season or because executives make the wrong calls. When things go wrong, they always blame the creative director. We are making art and building something. We were too high, and it is normal to dip.” This sense of drift between shoppers and luxury brands has defined the past year, when studios became a carousel, Demna to Gucci, Pierpaolo Piccioli to Balenciaga, Matthieu Blazy to Chanel, Louise Trotter to Bottega Veneta, Jonathan Anderson to Dior and Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez to Loewe, Dario Vitale to Versace, Simone Bellotti to Jil Sander, Michael Rider to Celine, Glenn Martens to Maison Margiela, Haider Ackermann to Tom Ford. Vaccarello is not going anywhere. “I have had offers to move to other houses, but I have not accepted them, because for me Saint Laurent is the ultimate house,” he says. “Everything you see today relates to what he did, danger, bourgeoisie, show and hide, masculine and feminine. For me there is Chanel and Saint Laurent. That is culture. That is French heritage. Why would I go elsewhere, for more money or more fame? Fame does not interest me. I am very happy to be at a house where I have complete control over the artistic side, and I would never risk losing that somewhere else.”

Last year Vaccarello and Michaux bought a hilltop house in Brentwood, a glass box with an unreal view stretching from the glittering lights of downtown to the Pacific, designed by mid-century modernist Craig Ellwood. A major renovation by Marmol Radziner, known for restoring modernist landmarks, is underway. Although his mind rarely switches off, life in Los Angeles mostly consists of doing nothing, as he puts it, time at home, reading, watching films, going for walks and to the beach, but not into the water, he does not like to swim. For now he thinks it is fine to pull Luca out of school during LA stays, though he knows that cannot last forever.

“This is the last year I can be a little punk.

What crucial things does a four-year-old learn in school? He learns more by traveling, speaking English in America, and playing with kids in the street. In school he would learn to cut a banana with a knife.”

By the time you read this, Vaccarello and his family are likely settling back into their Los Angeles rhythm. Paris Fashion Week has just wrapped. In July, when we speak, he is thinking about tougher clothes in colors, black and navy, that he sees as foundations. His womenswear has lately been softer and more playful, but now danger is back in his mind. He imagines a show on the Trocadéro where women seduce one another, the way men used to do at night in the Tuileries. “It is a tougher collection,” he says. “I try not to do politics. It is not that I do not see the world. There has to be a connection with that. I have a daughter now, she is one year old, and I want her to be stronger.”

Will people like it? Vaccarello is a designer whose confidence in his vision comes with patience for his customer. He does not rush to win her, she will join when she is ready. “The magic of this job lies in creating desire,” he says. “If you follow trends, you kill fashion. Every time a brand is good at something, all the brands do it, the same bag, the same coat. I think you succeed when the customer does not know what she will need tomorrow. Because essentially we do not need anything. You need to eat, pay rent, and be good to your children. Then you think you need this, and that is the most magical thing in this work.”

Hair: Lorenzo Martin
Makeup: Georgie Eisdell
Grooming: Jenna Nelson. Detalje potražite u ovom izdanju.
Manicure: Ashlie Johnson. 

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