Anthony Vaccarello Departs Saint Laurent: Defining a Decade of Liberation, Sensuality, and High-Octane Glamour

Following a shimmering swan song at Paris Fashion Week, Anthony Vaccarello’s departure from Saint Laurent was confirmed this morning (October 9). During his decade-long tenure, the Belgian designer slowly reshaped the historic French luxury fashion house, setting out a seductive vision of liberated sensuality defined by languid, body-skimming silhouettes and androgynous tailoring. His collections were meticulously designed for slipping out into the sultry Paris night, with the glittering Eiffel Tower acting as a permanent backdrop to his nocturnal universe.

Vaccarello’s most successful and enduring designs were always deeply rooted in physical sensation. These were garments created for feeling good just as much as they were about looking good. Articulating this philosophy last month on Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis podcast, Vaccarello explained that the Saint Laurent woman “isn’t trying to please anyone or have sex with someone else. She can have sex with herself. She doesn’t need someone to do whatever she wants.”

Her wardrobe functioned as a personal toolkit for pursuing pleasure and expressing hidden desires. Sharp, corporate-adjacent officewear was regularly paired with dominatrix latex or sadomasochistic leather to complete the vision of what he famously termed “bourgeois perversity.” This aesthetic struck a delicate, thrilling balance between elegance and abandon, between acceptable “good taste” and a pulse-racing fetish. Because Vaccarello’s entire era was marked by unapologetic sensuality and high-octane glamour, his departure provides an opportune moment to look back at the seven defining collections that shaped his decade at the helm of the brand.

An Agenda-Setting Debut

When Vaccarello took over the house in 2016, he inherited a complex and weighty legacy. His predecessor, Hedi Slimane, had controversially slashed the “Yves” from Yves Saint Laurent in a bold bid to modernize and streamline the brand identity for a younger, indie-leaning demographic. To put his own distinct stamp on this new era, Vaccarello boldly reintroduced the classic YSL branding right from the start, hanging a massive neon logo from a construction crane hovering above his debut runway venue.

The iconic monogram was subtly reintroduced into the clothing and accessories as well, most notably with the Opyum shoe, which replaced the classic stiletto heel with the interlocking YSL logo. This agenda-setting accessory became an instant commercial phenomenon and a street-style staple. It signalled a decisive stylistic shift away from Slimane’s West Coast-inspired indie grunge aesthetic toward a more grown-up, sophisticated vision of after-dark Parisian glamor. The debut show also offered early hints of the design codes that would eventually become Vaccarello staples: exaggerated 1980s power-suiting, dark and seductive fabrics, and barely-there, leg-lengthening micro-minis.

Latex and Lust

Saint Laurent’s AW20 collection stands as Vaccarello’s most explicitly sexual runway presentation up to that point. It was during this cycle that he firmly coined the phrase “bourgeois perversity,” channeling the cinematic spirit of Catherine Deneuve in Luis Buñuel’s classic erotic psychodrama Belle de Jour—a film whose iconic wardrobe had been originally costume-designed by Monsieur Saint Laurent himself. For the AW20 collection, Vaccarello playfully weaponized the tension between good and bad taste. Tailored double-breasted blazers and prim, pussy-bowed blouses were unexpectedly paired with latex leggings, thigh-high boots, halter-neck tops, and ultra-tight turtlenecks that clung to the body like a lustrous second skin.

Despite the collection’s overt sadomasochistic elements, it also marked a notable departure from Vaccarello’s heavy reliance on an all-black palette, introducing lurid, jewel-toned purples, rich reds, and deep blues. Presented mere weeks before the global fashion industry and the rest of the world plunged into the isolated, sexless months of pandemic lockdowns, the collection served as a potent reminder of the raw, sustaining power of the erotic imagination.

The Power Suit

Moving out of the bedroom and directly into the boardroom, Vaccarello had been experimenting with 1980s power silhouettes since his very first collection, but the AW23 presentation offered the most distilled, mature version of this vision. Razor-sharp power dressing was entirely reimagined as a tool for dominance and seduction. Sculptural blazers commanded physical space while knee-grazing pencil skirts featured suggestive, high-cut slits down the middle.

This specific collection played a massive role in catapulting the "corpcore" and "office siren" aesthetics into industry-wide lifestyle trends. A few seasons later, Bella Hadid cemented this cultural footprint by opening the SS25 show dressed as Yves Saint Laurent himself—sporting a sharp black double-breasted suit and thick-rimmed glasses—encapsulating once more the sensual androgyny that sat at the core of Vaccarello’s time at the brand.

Sensual Stockings

Opaque tights are rarely considered erotic items; traditionally, they are viewed merely as a practical, necessary evil against winter cold. However, with the striking opening look of his AW24 collection, Vaccarello completely upended that perception by reworking the exact same material into a sheer, micro-mini bodycon dress. What followed was a breathtaking succession of transparent looks in subtle nude tones that walked a razor-thin line between underwear and outerwear, each crafted from the hosiery fabric.

Vaccarello noted that his inspiration came from sources as diverse as Bianca Censori and the modern street-style omnipresence of athletic yoga pants, alongside the famous Jean-Louis sheer dress worn by Marilyn Monroe to sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" to JFK—a silhouette famously revisited by Kim Kardashian at the 2024 Met Gala. In Vaccarello’s hands, this provocative aesthetic was transformed into a modern expression of sensual luxury. Because fine tights tear, ladder, and fall apart easily, they inherently represent fleeting ephemerality, which was precisely the point. Reflecting on the collection, Vaccarello remarked that while everyone else in fashion was trying to produce increasingly commercial pieces, he genuinely wanted people to dream about something unrealistic. Suddenly, sheer nude tights became the ultimate object of desire.

The Boys in Berlin

Berlin has long been celebrated as the historic home of some of the world’s most daring androgynous fashion icons, which naturally makes it a breeding ground for exceptional tailoring. For the SS24 menswear collection, Vaccarello decamped to the German capital, paying direct homage to cultural legends like Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie through precise, gender-fluid tailoring. Sharp skinny tuxedos, heavily structured shoulders, and plunging necklines proved conclusively that the Saint Laurent man was just as sexually liberated as his female counterpart.

When Yves Met Mapplethorpe

The AW25 menswear collection was built around an imaginative conceptual meeting between legendary, boundary-pushing photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and Monsieur Saint Laurent. The resulting garments brilliantly married classic Savile Row-style tailoring with fetishistic leather accents. As Vaccarello playfully quipped backstage, the looks were “respectable on the top, but dirty on the way down.” Office-appropriate blazers were aggressively paired with kinky, thigh-high leather wader boots, while Patrick Bateman-esque corporate suits were layered beneath weathered, vintage-style leather aviator jackets. In this collection, straitlaced bourgeois virtue was revealed to be nothing more than a fragile facade.

Shrouded Sexuality

The way the human body moves beneath garments can be an inherently sensual act. In modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham’s pioneering 1930 solo piece Lamentation, she famously writhed inside a tubular stretch of jersey fabric as a physical expression of profound grief. For Vaccarello, however, this minimalist concept served as the starting point not for an exploration of sorrow, but for an intense celebration of nocturnal Parisian elegance.

For the SS23 women’s show, the designer dove deep into the house archives, successfully reviving the hooded capuche dress that Yves Saint Laurent had helped popularize in the mid-1980s. These languid, gossamer-thin silk dresses were contrasted with oversized, masculine outerwear, once again marrying traditional masculine tailoring codes with pure feminine sensuality. These jewel-toned hooded gowns quickly evolved into a dominant red-carpet favorite embraced by global style icons including Kate Moss, Jenna Ortega, and Beyoncé, marking a fitting visual legacy for a decade defined by uncompromised glamour.