This season he was all about lace, sometimes as-is or covered in silicone—a blouse, a pencil skirt, a mini dress. Plus, a black suit and a fur jacket (sometimes over the former, at times flying solo with a pair of stilettos). It was striking and convincing. Aspirational, even, when placed against the backdrop of the shimmering Eiffel Tower at night. Vaccarello knows sexy, his Saint Laurent woman is the kind that lives and breathes it, and employs it to her advantage. There was an air of fetish emanating from this collection, a sense of danger. One can appreciate Vaccarello’s focus at a time in fashion in which most designers put everything but the kitchen sink on the runway, simply to see what sticks. If only his silhouette wasn’t so reliant on thinness on the runway, too.
If Saint Laurent spoke to the decadent side of desire, of the way in which fashion, and the wealthy, close their gilded gates in times of communal distress. Then Chemena Kamali of Chloé, who was once Vaccarello’s deputy at Saint Laurent, was aiming for the opposite, looking for empathy and humanity, she said, by way of folklore. She made sheer dresses that weren’t sexy or beguiling, but rather set forth a sense of warmth. It was Kamali’s best-rounded outing since she joined, even if she stuck a bit too closely to a singular silhouette.
“This sense of humanity, community spirit, and empathy feels essential right now,” Kamali wrote in her collection notes. What she meant by right now, exactly, is not clear, but one feels encouraged to read between the lines.