Anthony Vaccarello Takes Saint Laurent to the Next Level
The creative director of Saint Laurent has brought his signature sexy-yet-sophisticated chic to the storied French house, driving it to become a nearly $3 billion brand.
By Rory Satran
Oct. 31, 2022 8:30 am ET
Anthony Vaccarello is wearing all black—a T-shirt and jeans of his own design. He often wears head-to-ankle black (with white sneakers), all the better to recede into the background. Plus, his father died earlier this year, so he’s still in mourning. This summer, he traveled to Sicily, where his parents are from, and was flooded by memories of his grandmother wearing her black widow’s garb many years after her husband died. “You want to show your sadness,” he says. It’s a thought that’s making its way into his work, including the Saint Laurent spring collection shown in Paris in September, heavy on sharp coats layered over fluid silk-knit jersey dresses.
At the creative helm of the Kering-owned luxury house since 2016, Vaccarello still hasn’t completely emerged from the wings of the iconic brand. That’s intentional. Speaking by video chat from the company’s 140,000-foot headquarters in a renovated centuries-old abbey on Paris’s Left Bank, with crystal chandeliers and delicate molding, the 40-year-old designer seems ambivalent about the very idea of an interview.
“I’m not looking for celebrity,” he says. “I love my job, I love doing clothes. But it’s not about me; it’s about what I’m doing.”
But as was the case with Yves Saint Laurent, the Algerian-born French design prodigy who founded the brand with his partner Pierre Bergé in Paris in 1961, the clothes are too good to not inspire curiosity about the introverted man who makes them. And the business, with CEO Francesca Bellettini, is on target to hit 3 billion euros ($2.9 billion) in annual sales for the first time, after growing by double-digit percentiles for several quarters.
Born in Brussels to Italian parents, Vaccarello speaks French, Italian and English, all of which are helpful to a career in fashion. During stints at Fendi (under Karl Lagerfeld) and Versus Versace (under Donatella Versace ), he used his Italian, and as he’s the head of a Parisian brand, French comes in useful when communicating with the storied atelier, full of petites mains, old-school couturiers who have been churning out tailoring and chiffon masterpieces for decades.
Growing up, Vaccarello did not think that a creative career was necessarily on the table. “Even when I was a kid, I always loved fashion, but didn’t know it could be a job,” he says. As a teen, he furthered his fashion education through MTV, becoming obsessed with designers including Gianni Versace, Azzedine Alaïa and Jean Paul Gaultier, and musicians like Madonna and Tina Turner. “In the ’90s, music and fashion were very linked,” he says.
A year in law school led to a pivot to the prestigious Brussels art school La Cambre, where he first studied sculpture, then fashion. His graduate collection won top prize at the Hyères Festival (a major launching pad for new talent), and his eponymous collection garnered the 200,000 euro ANDAM award in 2011 (around $290,000). But even as he began accumulating famous fans of his sharp, daring clothing, including model Anja Rubik and actor Charlotte Gainsbourg, he flew under the radar.
Clues about who Vaccarello is are tattooed on his restless hands: “Luca,” the name of his son with his partner, Arnaud Michaux, who works at the design studio with him; and tiny stars forming the shape of the constellation of Capricorn. He identifies strongly with his astrological sign. “I think when [Capricorns] have a goal, we go toward it, but not in a rush,” he says. “We know that it will take time, and we are not afraid of climbing the stairs slowly to achieve the goal.”
Six years into a creatively consistent and commercially successful tenure, Vaccarello is applying that laser focus to his next chapter. His fall 2022 collection, inspired by the British poet, heiress and activist Nancy Cunard, was a level up. A progression of striking coats (pea, faux fur, tuxedo) were shown layered over pieces including slinky bias-cut satin dresses. Cunard—an inspiration to Constantin Brâncuşi, who sculpted her—often wore chunky bangles, another motif in the collection. (Mostly gone were the slightly-too-short skirts and slightly-too-high heels that had given some editors pause in previous seasons.) These were enduring pieces, to be treasured in cedar closets.
Customers are saying, “If I buy this now, I will own it and wear it forever,” says Nordstrom’s women’s fashion and editorial director, Rickie De Sole, of the pieces in the fall collection, which is resonating particularly well with Nordstrom clients at the moment. De Sole bought a pair of the diamanté-buckled kitten heels and has her eye on the cocoon-like peacoat and the bangles.
Bellettini, 52, the brand’s Italian CEO, is often credited with channeling Vaccarello’s talent into strategic success. An investment banker by trade at banks like Goldman Sachs, she shot up the ranks at the Kering Group with stints at Gucci and Bottega Veneta before taking the top job at Saint Laurent in 2013. With sales reaching $2.8 billion in 2021, and consistently increasing, Bellettini aims to get to $5 billion, a radical goal for a brand that hadn’t even reached $1 billion in annual sales when she arrived nine years ago. By comparison, Bottega Veneta’s annual sales hovered around $1.7 billion last year, and Gucci’s achieved $11 billion.
It’s an ambition she can’t imagine reaching without Vaccarello. “I love him!” enthused Bellettini at a recent Caring for Women dinner hosted by the Kering Foundation in New York City at The Pool, with Salma Hayek and François-Henri Pinault alongside a cavalcade of Hollywood types and luxury clients. “We work together in a very seamless way, and he is the person I rely on the most for every important decision we need to take for the company,” she continued later.
Vaccarello was her only pick for the creative director job when his predecessor Hedi Slimane decamped in 2016. Having slashed the “Yves” from the brand’s name and administered his brand of stark, rock ‘n’ roll cool to the house, Slimane paved the way for a contemporary, post–Yves Saint Laurent era (Saint Laurent died in 2008, Pierre Bergé in 2017).
Vaccarello’s first shows for Saint Laurent, for spring 2017, paid homage to certain unavoidable tropes of the house, such as sweetheart-neckline evening dresses, the tuxedo and sheer tops, all injected with the slightly ’80s, sexy party-girl feeling he’d honed with his own brand. The model Binx Walton wore a leather, one-breasted minidress with a heart-shaped pastie on her left nipple. The one-breast-out look was a trick Slimane had employed in 2015, sans pastie, and Tom Ford in 2002 (the designer between Ford and Slimane, Stefano Pilati, appears to have resisted the style). All three owe a debt to Monsieur Saint Laurent himself, who freed the nipple decades before.
Yves Saint Laurent had taken over the design department of Dior at age 21 and was pushed out by 24. The house of Yves Saint Laurent was created in part thanks to 680,000 francs that Saint Laurent received from Dior after being ousted, in addition to $700,000 in capital from the American millionaire investor J. Mack Robinson. It would go on to be considered the birthplace of contemporary ready-to-wear, even as Saint Laurent himself descended into drugs and mental illness. Kering, then PPR (Pinault-Printemps-Redoute), acquired the brand in 1999 via Gucci Group.
Vaccarello has a healthy respect for Saint Laurent’s larger-than-life, troubled founder but isn’t haunted by him. “He knew exactly the tradition, the couture, how to make things. But I like how he always perverted it in a way, or twisted it…mixing things that were not supposed to be mixed together, or playing with bad taste.”
That mixture of shock value and bourgeois sophistication, a combination also favored by Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, is distinctly Parisian. And Saint Laurent, which in various incarnations has tacked “Rive Gauche” (Left Bank) to its name and has been worn by French stars including Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert, is very, very French.
Does Vaccarello ever feel pressure, in the age of globalization, the tourist economy and chasing new markets, to make it less specific? “I never think it has to be global,” he counters. “Everyone is intrigued by Saint Laurent because [it] has that Parisian French image. And you like it or you don’t like it.”
Erwan Rambourg, luxury analyst for HSBC, says that Saint Laurent’s ultimate goal is not necessarily to be the biggest brand. (Within Kering, that role is taken: It’s Gucci, by a mile.) “I think the endgame is to be the reference of Parisian chic,” he says. So they have no intention to be big in limited-edition sneakers, putting out puffy, neon streetwear magnets like certain other luxury brands. “They are quite dogmatic about what they can and cannot do. But I think that’s a phenomenal strength,” says Rambourg.
It’s unlikely Vaccarello will start churning out logo T-shirts or flash-in-the-pan collaborations anytime soon. His friend the model Anja Rubik says, “He’s very resistant to any sort of pressure from the outside world when it comes to trends or what he should be doing…. He hates hypocrisy—that’s, like, his main thing. So, when he does something, it’s really because he believes in it. He’ll never do something because it’s easy to get attention.”
Which does not mean that he’s completely isolated, toiling away in his garret. He’s cognizant of the pop-cultural power of the brand. After all, the brand was built by a man who was part of Andy Warhol’s inner circle and hobnobbed with folks including Helmut Newton, François-Xavier Lalanne, Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger, Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux. Catroux and Deneuve still sit front row at the show and are friends with Vaccarello.
“Anthony is like Yves,” Catroux wrote in an email. “He adapts everything to the modern world, which is exactly what Yves did for his time. It is more than fashion, it is history.”
Part of that contextualization comes from the brand’s image, which has been burnished by spare, chic ad campaigns during Vaccarello’s reign. Recent campaign stars include Jerry Hall, Al Pacino, Zoë Kravitz and house-favorite models like Freja Beha Erichsen and Hailey Bieber. Often shot in black-and-white by David Sims, with a graphic evocation of Hedi Slimane’s time at the brand, recent ads by Juergen Teller have become more colorful and mischievous.
The marketing extends to buzzy in-person events, too. This year alone, Vaccarello took a harem of stars, clients and editors to the desert outside Marrakesh, Morocco (Saint Laurent’s spiritual home), for the spring 2023 men’s show. Just a couple of months later, he hosted a dinner and public screening at the Venice Film Festival for Deneuve. This fall, he invited chef Peter Park of the Los Angeles sushi restaurant Sushi Park for a Paris pop-up restaurant, including ceramics by the artist Daeyong Kim.
Vaccarello’s Self series supports artistic projects including a short, erotically charged film from writer Bret Easton Ellis; an exhibition with photographer and artist Vanessa Beecroft; and a film and screen installation in Shanghai directed by Wing Shya and curated by Wong Kar-wai.
Next up, Saint Laurent is producing a Pedro Almodóvar–directed short film, a queer western called Strange Way of Life starring Ethan Hawke and Chilean actor Pedro Pascal. Vaccarello will design the costumes for the film, too.
When asked about a moment that made him feel that he’s made it, Vaccarello didn’t mention a fashion show but a film from the Self series. In 2019 Saint Laurent produced a Gaspar Noé film called Lux Æterna, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Béatrice Dalle, which screened in the midnight slot at the Cannes Film Festival. “I always dreamed about that slot at the festival of Cannes because for me it was the naughty, disturbing directors that were selected for that hour. And being there with Gaspar Noé for me was the ultimate thing. I was like, OK, wow, that’s important.”
His friend Rubik suggests that all the glamour and polish might obscure Vaccarello’s true self. “His designs are so elegant and can be sometimes quite cold and very chic,” she says. “And so, I think people don’t understand that the man behind those designs is actually very warm and family-oriented.” He’ll travel with Rubik and other friends, like Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk or friends from La Cambre, to Los Angeles or Mallorca, where Rubik has a house. He’ll cook pasta pomodoro, and they’ll jump off the rocks and swim.
In Paris, he and Michaux are renovating a hôtel particulier in the 7th arrondissement, not far from the Saint Laurent headquarters. Vaccarello is designing it himself, inspired by Jean-Michel Frank, “very classic Parisian, very simple.” Since he knows exactly what he wants, he says it would be strange to give it to a famous architect to work on. He and Michaux play with Luca until about 10 a.m., then head to the office. He keeps more regular hours now that he has a family, coming home every day to give Luca his bath and put him to bed. This year, they spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, where he likes being “very alone and quiet” once Europe signs off for the day.
It can be hard to get Vaccarello to totally disconnect, though. “He really lives fashion,” says Rubik. When on holiday, he’ll talk about fittings, color palettes, dresses and lengths, past collections or the upcoming show. “I don’t think he really treats it as a job. It’s part of his life.”
