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.
While building his family, in the last few years Vaccarello has also expanded the cultural reach of the fashion house he runs. In 2023 he launched Saint Laurent Productions to support the work of independent filmmakers, beginning with short films by Pedro Almodóvar and, posthumously, Jean-Luc Godard. Three Saint Laurent Productions feature films appeared at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024: Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, and Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope. In late summer, Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother premiered at Venice, and Claire Denis’s The Fence had its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Vaccarello designed the wardrobes, and in this one respect, Saint Laurent Productions is an extension of Yves Saint Laurent’s work as a costume designer for theater and film—most famously for Catherine Deneuve in Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de Jour. But the principal aim is to connect the artists he admires to the house he leads, and in doing so make Saint Laurent bigger than fashion.
“It’s driven through the director,” Vaccarello says of the films he underwrites—“those directors who made me grow when I was a kid, who made my vision what it is today; not to give back, exactly, but to help them to continue to do what they do. I don’t do blockbusters. I’m not attracted to Marvel. This is really to support independent film, but also to expand the brand to something more popular, more visible, something that stays. It’s great to do shows and campaigns, but they’re disposable. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but in 20 or 30 years, a film will still be there, and the name of Saint Laurent will still be on it.”
Jarmusch, whose film won the Golden Lion at Venice, was first approached by Saint Laurent in 2021 to make a short film for the house. Called French Water, it assembled a sparkling cast including Julianne Moore, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Indya Moore, and Chloë Sevigny. Vaccarello subsequently cast Jarmusch in an ad campaign. The director reached out to Vaccarello as soon as he began dreaming up Father Mother Sister Brother. “Aesthetically, it was fantastic, because they just trusted me,” Jarmusch recalls. “I didn’t make a new film for five years—I had become frustrated with the financing mechanisms. I always have artistic control completely, or I don’t do it, but there were pressures about going over budget, and it was just too much for me. The thing about working with Saint Laurent is, they just want to facilitate. They are not film people putting their two cents into the production. It was more like having a patron in the Renaissance.”
When Vaccarello arrived at Saint Laurent in the wake of Hedi Slimane’s departure in 2016, the house had recently closed the LA design studio that Slimane, enamored as he was of the city’s music scene and of its stylish young denizens, had opened several years earlier. To be very clear, Vaccarello is not here to work—he finds little inspiration in the city. “I’ve always loved LA,” he says, “the weather, the beautiful architecture that reminds me of the 1950s, though less and less, because LA has changed a lot in 20 years. We have a quality of life here that we don’t have in Paris, and it’s so different that I find I need it. But I could not create outside Paris.”
At 43, Vaccarello regards himself—proudly—as a designer of the old school. For him, this means refusing to court TikTok personalities, to pander to trends, or to tie his star to a viral moment or an It bag. This, he feels, is the 21st-century fashion game, and he is not diffident about his contempt for it. Vaccarello, shy and soft-spoken, has managed to reign at one of the great houses without becoming a household name or a glittering public personage in the manner of John Galliano or Marc Jacobs. With his uniform of jeans, T-shirts, and beat-up sneakers, it is nearly impossible to imagine him wearing the men’s clothing he designs. (“I’m a father now,” he explains. “Why put an orange shirt with a short? Why? For who?”)
Out of the gate, Vaccarello invited people who interested him—the Argentinian filmmaker Gaspar Noé, the actors Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, for starters—to form an expanded version of the original Saint Laurent clique, at the center of which were the trinity of Deneuve; Betty Catroux, the Brazilian-born socialite and wife of interior designer François Catroux; and the Anglo-French aristocrat and jewelry designer Loulou de la Falaise. Vaccarello has also worked with and befriended the American actors who excite him, such as Zoë Kravitz, Sevigny, and Gwyneth Paltrow, along with young models like Hailey Bieber and veterans like Frankie Rayder.
“Not influencers—real celebrities who have a real thing,” he says. “Women who have something to say; women with depth.” He tugs at the tape hugging a cotton ball to the crook of his elbow—he had a vitamin infusion earlier today at his rental in Laurel Canyon, quintessential Hollywood pampering. “I don’t want to be cool. I don’t want to be constantly present on social media or going to pop-up stores. I don’t believe the YSL customer is attracted to that. I’ve always seen the customer as more elevated, not stupid. And I find these things very stupid. A line outside a luxury store is so not luxury. The idea of having to queue for something—it’s not chic.” Like Yves Saint Laurent, Vaccarello has his eye trained on women who come to his brand not looking to be given good taste but in full possession of it.
“They know their bodies, they know which piece to buy to not look ridiculous, not follow the trend,” he says. “I’m more inspired by those women. I’m not obsessed with youth. If the product is right, they will come too. But I’m not doing things to excite them.” Though he has not reopened the couture atelier at Saint Laurent—yet—Vaccarello laments the democratizing impulse, given what he regards as fashion’s intrinsic elitism. “I think, I hope, that fashion is turning into something more hard to get, more private. We made people believe that fashion is for everyone and that everyone can buy a piece of clothing or a bag from a big house. I hope we’ll go back to an old-school way to treat luxury, because this kills a bit the idea of fashion for me.”
Yves Saint Laurent once said that he aimed to give women “the basics of a classic wardrobe…escaping the fashion of the moment.” While for him this wardrobe consisted of the androgynous house codes on which he built his name—tuxedos, peacoats and safari jackets, trousers, pants suits, blazers, and trenches—Vaccarello, working his way through the archives, has built a similar argument out of his sleek, pared-down, and coolly seductive clothing, a uniform for the sophisticated women of his moment. “Saint Laurent covered so many things,” he says, “that it’s easy to take something you find interesting and make it contemporary. For Saint Laurent, it was never something flash—it was always real clothes with a good twist, defined by the person who wears it and the attitude.”
Sevigny, who has now done several campaigns with Vaccarello, admires the way his designs seem to offer Yves Saint Laurent a respectful wink. In early September she wore a black lace bodysuit under a short black satin bubble skirt to the Venice Film Festival; the look, from Vaccarello’s spring-summer 2018 collection, was inspired by an outfit worn by the model Yasmeen Ghauri in Saint Laurent’s fall-winter show of 1990. “There’s a real sensuality to Anthony’s clothes, which a lot of these new minimalist stars, without naming names, aren’t doing,” Sevigny says. “They don’t celebrate women’s bodies. If you look at the last collection, there were shapes that other people aren’t visiting, and those color combinations and big beads—there’s always something that Yves did, and there’s always a tinge of some darkness or goth-ness that makes it feel modern.”
On a late-June afternoon, Vaccarello presents Saint Laurent’s summer 2026 men’s collection in the rotunda of Paris’s Bourse de Commerce, once a grain and commodity exchange that now houses the art collection of François Pinault, owner of Kering, Saint Laurent’s parent company. (On the very same day, at the Centre Pompidou a few blocks away, Beyoncé attended the Louis Vuitton Men’s show and instantly became the biggest news about the show. Vaccarello tends to avoid such spectacles.) At the Bourse, the French acoustic installation artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has created a reflecting pool in which floating porcelain bowls clink at random, and around the pool, against a soundtrack of plaintive piano and strings, Vaccarello’s models make slow circles, hands in their pockets, in big shimmering suits with sharp shoulders and cinched waists. The palette of plum, burnt orange, and chartreuse reads as a slightly muted version of the color blocking in his fall-winter women’s collection, presented in March; instead of sea changes, Vaccarello’s ideas distill from one show to the next, across genders.
“I realized that the men I was showing were a bit weak compared to the women,” he says afterward. “The woman was strong, and the man was a bit like her son. Now the man is a lover or a friend. He’s no longer a teenager. They can talk at dinner.”
Slipped into the show notes is an old photo of Yves Saint Laurent in Oran, Algeria, dating from about 1950. In it he wears a pair of shorts, pleated and cuffed and revealing most of his narrow thighs. Vaccarello explains that this image was his starting point. In his head, he spun a little fantasy: What would it look like if Yves Saint Laurent spent a summer on Fire Island in the 1970s—never mind that Saint Laurent never visited Fire Island, and neither has Vaccarello? Last season’s collection imagined another encounter, this time between Saint Laurent and Robert Mapplethorpe, one artist who sublimated his desires and another who celebrated his. That collection’s black leather over-the-knee boots for men can be seen on several of today’s invited guests. They are reportedly selling out despite a $4,500 price tag.
“Sex and distance” is how Vaccarello summarizes two key themes of Yves Saint Laurent’s work. “Sex and pudeur: a shirt with a bow at the neck, but you pull the bow and suddenly she’s naked in front of a mirror being photographed by Helmut Newton.” Vaccarello appreciates the tension between surface effects and what he calls the non-dit, the unspoken. That tension is the explicit subject of Belle de Jour, whose heroine, the bourgeois housewife Séverine Serizy, escapes a sexless marriage by spending her afternoons satisfying clients in a brothel. Saint Laurent, himself attracted equally by beauty and seediness, telegraphed this split in Deneuve’s wardrobe, from a demure black dress with the white collar and cuffs to a black vinyl trench. “That’s the duality I love at Saint Laurent,” Vaccarello says, “the idea of being very sexual but always a cold sexuality: You think you can have her, but you cannot have her.”
Vaccarello talks a lot about the thrill of danger: a danger in the way Paris feels at night; the danger of Los Angeles and its history of famous crimes; Abel Ferrara’s dangerous neo-noir filmmaking; a certain danger in Angelina Jolie’s witchy style; the danger of druggy 1970s nightlife. It’s a sensibility he shares with the house’s founder. “When Yves Saint Laurent did his Scandale collection in ’71”—its green fox-fur coat is an icon of the house—“and everyone was shocked, it was all about the prostitutes of the 1940s,” he says. “They had a kind of free way of dressing that’s very attractive to us. Jessica Rabbit is what we saw in the ’90s, Madonna doing a cross in the middle of big boobs. That kind of bad taste is important in fashion too, to go through that to create something.” (Saint Laurent said that his friend Paloma Picasso, who combed through flea markets for wartime fashion, was the inspiration for the Scandale collection.)
How to avoid talking about sex when talking about Vaccarello’s clothes, with their celebration of skin and their frequent excursions into leather and lace? The dress that put him on the fashion map was the white silk evening gown with a diagonal cutaway across the torso and a slit up to the hip bone, from Vaccarello’s eponymous label, that his dear friend the model Anja Rubik wore to the Met Gala in 2012.
Rubik recalls talking with Vaccarello about Basic Instinct, another ’90s touchstone, while he was working on the dress. “A lot of people think about his clothing and say, ‘Oh, it’s sexy.’ That’s not what he does,” Rubik asserts. “The clothing is not provocative in the sense of being big and flashy. It’s provocative for being quite pulled back. There’s a lot of focus on proportions, but if you don’t understand design, you might not see the beauty behind the proportions, the details. The clothes never dominate the person. If you have a woman come into the room, and she’s bold and she’s confident and she’s unapologetic, she becomes sexy.”
For his own part, Vaccarello was the least wild in a wild group of teenagers. “I had a lot of fun,” he recalls. “I did a lot of stupid things—but more voyeur than actor: Drugs, going out, but in a cool ’90s way, not as hard as now. It’s scary to be a teenager now, no?”
His parents emigrated from Agrigento, in the south of Sicily, to Belgium, where his father worked as a waiter and his mother had office jobs. Vaccarello remembers his early life with great fondness: a loving family, a sense that he could do what he wanted. He relished being an only child, and he believes that without siblings, he developed a talent for friendship. Growing up, he visited Sicily every year with his parents and grandparents, and Italian music from that period still brings him a kind of sweet sadness. Now he approximates these memories by spending time each summer in Sicily in a big house outside Noto, famed for its Baroque edifices and almond granitas. He invites a group of old friends for what he calls a big bazaar.
No one talked about sexuality when Vaccarello was growing up—not his family, or even his friends. “It was kind of a non-dit,” he says, “where you know and you don’t care, and you live your life with your friends but you don’t say, ‘I’m gay.’ It was the same with my parents—they never asked me anything. I guess they understood, but they never put a word to it. So it was kind of cool, because you didn’t have to explain. My parents were Catholic, and I was baptized.” Vaccarello found in Madonna a way to be Catholic and to be himself. “It was always an ironic kind of thing with her, and I kind of understood that way of criticizing religion but still believing in something.”
He always loved fashion, but he couldn’t conceive of it as a job. “Brussels,” he explains, “is a pragmatic city: You are a lawyer, a doctor. It’s not at all a chic place. I guess that’s why we have so many Belgian designers, because you get so bored. But I never dreamed of Antwerp. The cities are only 30 minutes apart by train, like Brentwood and West Hollywood. It’s ridiculous. But it’s another world.”
At 18, Vaccarello didn’t know what to do with himself, so he enrolled in law school. He was a fan of Ally McBeal, the ’90s legal dramedy, which seemed as good a reason as any other. “I thought it was cool to sing in the toilet,” he remembers, referring to the show’s recurring tableau of lawyers dancing and lip-synching to Barry White in the big unisex bathroom. “I saw the job like that, a fantasy. But it was not at all like that. I hated it.” He left after two years and enrolled at La Cambre, the Brussels art school whose graduates have lately presided over French fashion (in addition to Vaccarello, there is Julien Dossena at Rabanne, Nicolas Di Felice at Courrèges, and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, all of them alumni). Antwerp had the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, which in the 1980s educated the designers who became known as the Antwerp Six (among them Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester), but in Vaccarello’s imagination, at least, it retained its aura of cerebral minimalism—not so much his thing. “I had the courage to go to fashion school because I remember Olivier Theyskens dressing Madonna in the “Frozen” video in 1998, when she was very gothic—I’m a fan of Madonna, as you can tell! I thought if he can dress her, coming from Brussels, going to La Cambre, there was hope for me. It started from that: Madonna, Olivier Theyskens, La Cambre.”
After fashion school, he moved to Rome to join the design team at Fendi, where his job amounted to turning Karl Lagerfeld’s sketches into fur coats. Meanwhile he began work on his own label, which found early support from the Paris retailer Maria Luisa Poumaillou and quickly developed a following among models like Rubik. In 2013, Donatella Versace hired Vaccarello to lead Versus, her diffusion line, replacing Jonathan Anderson, who left to become creative director of Loewe. Saint Laurent, at the time, felt like a distant dream, though Vaccarello has said that it is the only house for which he would have given up his own line, which is just what he did when Saint Laurent tapped him to replace Slimane.
“I never considered another option,” says Francesca Bellettini, then the president of Saint Laurent and now deputy CEO of brand development at Kering. “His work always struck me as extremely relevant, sharp, and timeless, but beyond his clothes I wanted someone who could express the values of the brand authentically—not repeat history, but reinterpret it in his own way. Anthony respects the essence of Saint Laurent: freedom, sophistication, desire. What I hoped for was evolution, not revolution, and the absolute clarity and consistency that allow a brand to build for the long term.”
Vaccarello and I are having dinner at Sushi Park, a Sunset Strip hole-in-the-wall on the second level of an unassuming strip mall. Ignored by food critics, the restaurant’s excellent sushi has for years enjoyed a following of high-rolling hoodied sushi bros and movie stars on date nights. It’s Vaccarello’s favorite restaurant in LA. “Maybe I’m to blame,” he says of the occasional telephoto lens positioned outside. “I took Hailey Bieber here, and she took Kim and Kendall. And then came the paparazzi.”
While Saint Laurent Productions is the most ambitious of his forays outside the design studio, it’s not the only one: Vaccarello opened Babylone, a bookstore on the rue de Grenelle, in the former Saint Laurent accessories store, and has started a small book imprint called SL Editions that focuses on the artists and photographers who pique his interest. Earlier this year, he opened an outpost of Sushi Park in the basement of the revamped Saint Laurent Rive Droite flagship on the rue St.-Honoré. The Paris digs are infinitely sleeker, dimly lit, and darkly appointed, but the food is more or less an exact replica. Because it is a Saint Laurent restaurant, the opening was announced with a short film by Pierre-Ange Carlotti, starring Lourdes Leon and the Palestinian singer-songwriter Saint Levant. (For those in need of a souvenir, the restaurant’s Saint Laurent–branded ebony chopsticks are available online for 495 euros.)
“When he loves something, he just wants to share that and invest in it and protect it,” says Kravitz, who first met Vaccarello when he asked her to star in a Saint Laurent ad campaign in 2017. “He wants to infuse things that he loves into the brand. Saint Laurent is a community, and we all know each other and support each other and watch each other grow. If every year it’s new people—whoever’s hot on Instagram—it becomes so soulless.”
Denis, who considers herself shy, had attended the Saint Laurent défilés but scurried out as soon as they finished. It wasn’t until Vaccarello invited her to a birthday party he was throwing for Dalle at a hotel in Venice that they began to develop a friendship. “I was surprised and so happy to learn that he wanted to be a part of my film—not just as a coproducer but as a costume designer,” she says. “There is no better way to start working with an actor to create the character than through the costume. If you start with the clothes and the shoes, little by little, the character emerges.”
Of course, not every venture ends perfectly. Emilia Perez, though it was a sensation, fizzled at the Oscars after bigoted tweets by Karla Sofía Gascón, who played the title character, rocketed through social media. Vaccarello rejects the idea that the Gascón affair underscores the hazards that attend Saint Laurent when it associates itself with a project outside its lane. “Producing films—there’s a risk, there’s danger, there’s all those things that excite me. The thing that upsets me with fashion today is everyone is so scared. They calculate the artist, the singer, the actress they want to be associated with because they bring them value. Of course I don’t want to be associated with a racist. That’s obvious. But doing a film—you cannot control every person.”
Saint Laurent Productions now regularly receives scripts for potential investment, but for the moment—aside from making his directorial debut with a music video for Gainsbourg—no new project has called to Vaccarello. “The level is kind of high,” he says. “I don’t have any new crushes.” The Saint Laurent universe is expanding in exactly the ways Vaccarello would have it expand at a time when luxury is in an undeniable slump. After years of unprecedented growth, Saint Laurent saw a 10 percent drop in sales in the first half of 2025, which might have been bigger news had it not been eclipsed by a 25 percent drop at Gucci, Kering’s biggest brand. The reasons are likely manifold: geopolitical uncertainty, inflationary pressures, tariffs, China’s languishing economy. In September, Kering welcomed a new CEO, Luca de Meo, who ran Renault and was instrumental in the turnaround of the French car company. He is not a fashion person, which may be precisely the point.
“I don’t feel any pressure. It’s not on my shoulders,” Vaccarello says of the business. “It’s becoming a bit ridiculous to change designers because of one bad season or because CEOs make bad decisions. When things go bad, they always blame the creative director. We are making art and building something. We were too high, and it’s normal to be a bit down.” It’s partly a reflection of this sense of stalemate between consumer and luxury brand that the last year has seen a frenzy of movement in the design studio: Demna to Gucci and Pierpaolo Piccioli to Balenciaga, Matthieu Blazy to Chanel and Louise Trotter to Bottega Veneta, Jonathan Anderson to Dior and Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez to Loewe, Dario Vitale to Versace, Simone Bellotti to Jil Sander, Michael Rider to Celine, Glenn Martens to Maison Margiela, Haider Ackermann to Tom Ford. Vaccarello is going nowhere.
“I received propositions to go to other houses, but I didn’t take those because, for me, Saint Laurent is the ultimate house,” he says. “Everything you see today is linked to what he did: There’s danger, there’s the bourgeoisie, there’s showing-not-showing, masculinity-femininity. For me, there’s Chanel and Saint Laurent. It’s culture. It’s le patrimoine français. Why go somewhere else? For more money or more fame? I don’t care about fame. I’m so happy to be in a house where I have control of the artistic aspect one hundred percent, and I would never risk losing that somewhere else.”
Last year, Vaccarello and Michaux purchased a house on a Brentwood hillside, a floating glass box with views spanning from the sparkling lights of downtown all the way to the Pacific, designed by the midcentury master Craig Ellwood. A major renovation by Marmol Radziner, a firm known for restoring modernist masterpieces, is underway. Though his mind is rarely off-duty, life in Los Angeles consists mainly of “doing nothing,” he says: spending time at home, reading, watching movies, hiking, going to the beach (but not swimming—Vaccarello does not like to get in the water). For now, he is comfortable pulling Luca out of school during the LA sojourns, though he knows this cannot last forever. “This is the last year when I can be a bit punk. What do you learn at school at age four that’s so important? He’s learning more by traveling, speaking English in the US, and playing with kids in the street. At school, he’d be learning to cut a banana with a knife.”
As you read this, Vaccarello and his family are probably settling back into the rhythms of their Los Angeles life. Paris Fashion Week will have just concluded. In July, when we discuss it, he is thinking about making harder clothes, in the colors—black and navy—that are for him a sort of default setting. Recently his womenswear has been soft and flirty, but now danger is once again dancing in his mind: He imagines a show set at the Trocadéro in which women are cruising one another, the way men used to do in the Tuileries at night.
“It’s a tougher collection,” he says. “I try to never do politics. But I’m not closed to what’s happening in the world. There must be a link to that. I have a girl now, she’s one, and I want her to be more strong.”
Will people like it? Vaccarello is a designer whose confidence in his vision belies a sense of patience in his customer. He’s in no rush for her; she will join him when she is ready. “The magic of the business is creating desire,” he explains. “But if you follow the trend, you kill fashion. Every time a brand is good at something, all the brands do it: the same bag, the same coat. My thing is, you succeed when the consumer doesn’t know what they will need tomorrow. Because really, you don’t need anything. You just need to eat and to pay your rent and to be good to your kids. But you think you need—and that’s the most magical thing in the job.”
In this story: hair, Lorenzo Martin; makeup, Georgie Eisdell; grooming, Jenna Nelson; manicurist, Ashlie Johnson; tailor, Susie Kourinian for Susie’s Custom Designs.
Produced by AL Studio. Set Design: Mary Howard.