A year on since taking Saint Laurent off the fashion week calendar, Anthony Vaccarello continues to dazzle us with his fashion shows taking place in breathtaking locations. Last season was filmed against a seemingly endless desert, this season, there were slabs of steaming volcanic rock, pebbled beaches, lichen-carpeted slopes, waterfalls, icebergs, rocky cliffs and foreboding skies shot in the stern landscapes of gloomy Iceland.
“When I was thinking about this collection, I had this place in mind, like a movie director”, Vaccarello said on a call to Vogue. “It’s the idea of a girl in a landscape where she doesn’t belong. I knew I wanted a wintry location”, he went on to say, “one which showed how strong nature is; how we are really nothing next to it, how ephemeral we are. It’s not a place where anyone is going skiing, but Saint Laurent should do something that’s like a dream: What the F?! Why is she there?”.
Entitled “Where the Silver Wind Blows” and inspired by ’90s musical artist Peaches (whose own style closely resembles that of David Bowie), the collection was a beautiful extension of the signature aesthetic Vaccarello has spent the last five years developing – a modernised take on the house codes first mastered by Yves Saint Laurent himself.
Silvery bodysuits paired with tweed skirts and jackets informalized the Maison’s historically bourgeois sensibilities, generating a more street style appeal. Tailored women’s jackets were streamlines and worn with mini shorts. There were sequin embellished tailored evening jackets, velvet Bermuda shorts, and jersey bodysuits with risque cutouts.
Fur headbands, chunky costume jewelry and the sheer black hose brought to mind Robert Palmer girls and ’80s fashion shoots, though Vaccarello had in mind other musicians and periods – the edgy Canadian songstress Peaches, synonymous with metallic leather HotPants and skimpy bodywear, and the ’60s, a time of pert, fur-trimmed tweed suits with gold buttons.
“I wanted to push the line which separates bad and good taste, blurring each other’s limit”, he told WWD. “It’s very French to walk that line between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad.’ It’s about the shapes of the ’60s with the colors of the ’80s”.
