From the front row, a pair of bristling, enveloping faux fur coats caught the eye of Italian designer Romeo Gigli, a recent ‘Marrakshi’ who decamped to the city mere months before the pandemic. ‘When I first showed my own collection in Paris in the 1990s, Pierre Bergé was furious,’ he laughed, recalling comparisons to Yves’ work long ago. There in the desert, along with crystal 4-leaf clover brooches, jewelled buckles and patent envelope clutches, those coats were the kind of opulent statements that embellished the severe wardrobe of Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent garçons with a camp elegance. Their solemn march, interjected by electronic crescendos and choral interludes, formed a constant loop around the central pool until the show’s finale: a visceral shock of cinematic proportions that recalled the architectural grandeur of an altogether different 1990s desert film: Stargate.
As the final model circled the reflective pool, a ring of white light appeared just beneath the water line. Increasing in luminescence until it burst through the surface, the light framed a black metallic ring that rose from horizontal to vertical and back in a 60-second ascent and descent billowing with white smoke. The effect was magistral, seeming to harness all the elements at once as water and smoke sprayed off its bright halo in the evening wind, casting a lunar reflection on the water below. Uniting Saint Laurent past and present in an ouroboros of earth, water, wind and light, Vaccarello’s (carbon-neutral) gesture of epic proportions was a daring statement poised on the knife edge of history: Yves’ history, his own history, and our collective willingness to embrace and evolve the bygone tenets of menswear in today’s swirling, universal landscape of identity and style.
Watch the Saint Laurent Men’s Spring Summer 2023 runway film by Nathalie Canguilhem below.