If you were a child of the ’90s, you didn’t dream about Yves Saint Laurent. By then, the preeminent fashion genius of the third quarter of the 20th century and the designer so often credited with inventing the modern woman’s wardrobe had handed prêt-à-porter over to his assistants, who clung as if by commandment to the house dogma of bourgeois Parisian elegance. For a child of the ’90s, newer thrills abounded: the minimalism of Helmut Lang and the grunge of (early) Marc Jacobs, the full-blooded glamour of Versace, the humor and irreverence of Jean Paul Gaultier, the deconstructed shapes of Yohji Yamamoto.
Then again, Anthony Vaccarello was not the sort of future designer who had pages from Vogue Italia pasted to his bedroom walls as a teenager, though maybe he doodled a high-heel shoe or two in his notebook during math class. For him, music and its MTV-fueled visual culture provided the inroad into fashion: Björk in “Violently Happy,” and above all, Madonna in Gaultier’s eternal pink Blond Ambition cone bra.
“To be honest, when I was a student, Yves Saint Laurent was never someone I looked at,” says Vaccarello, who marks a decade at the helm of Saint Laurent next year. “He was already a bit old for me, more linked at the end to the perfume, to that woman – very elegant, very sophisticated – that he always did. But the same clients were very loyal to him, and he never gave up on those amazing women, a bit hors du temps. I really love that, and I’m more attracted now to the ’90s moment when he was into that perfect woman. I like the idea of taking that DNA and putting it on a woman today – taking a flower and putting it in a jersey yoga look, for example, for someone you might come across at Erewhon.”
We are not at Erewhon this morning, but we aren’t far in terms of distance or demography. The late-spring marine layer casts a steely light through the palms in the garden of the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, where athleisurely couples nurse oat milk lattes. While this part of town, with its Easter egg Lamborghinis and exuberant party people, is a bit much for Vaccarello, he is partial to the Chateau’s decidedly Californian breakfast of fried eggs and sliced avocado.
Vaccarello, who was born and raised in Belgium to Sicilian parents, spends a month in Los Angeles twice each year, usually in March and November, a recuperation from the semiannual exertions of the women’s collection. It’s a tradition that began with the birth of his son, Luca, four years ago. He and his husband, Arnaud Michaux – who is also his creative partner in the design studio at Saint Laurent – had matched with a surrogate in Colorado on account of the prohibitively long pandemic-era waiting lists in California. (Surrogacy is illegal in France.) After Luca was born, the new family spent his first month in LA before returning to Paris. The experience was so beautiful for all parties, birth mother included, that they replicated it last year, when a daughter, Lola, was born.