The statement ran four lines and arrived on a Friday morning. After ten years, Anthony Vaccarello and Saint Laurent are parting.
Saint Laurent confirmed the split on 9 October. Vaccarello had led the house since April 2016, when he took the studio over from Hedi Slimane. Days before the announcement, he closed Paris Fashion Week with his spring/summer 2027 womenswear show. That collection is now the last of his tenure.
Kering framed the parting in the language houses reserve for long departures. Vaccarello had shaped the identity of the maison and widened its reach across fashion and culture. New creative leadership would be named shortly. Luca de Meo, who took over as Kering's chief executive this year, offered his thanks for the decade.
The build
Vaccarello inherited a house Slimane had rewired around skinny tailoring and a rock register. He kept the sharpness and stripped away the noise. The tuxedo came back to the centre. Shoulders squared off. Hemlines rose, then fell. Black did most of the talking, cut sheer or draped or hard, and the woman it dressed was built to be looked at after dark.
He liked a horizon behind the clothes. Shows went up at the Trocadéro with the Eiffel Tower lit beyond the runway, water sometimes between the audience and the models. The setting stayed grand and the collections stayed tight. Over the decade Saint Laurent grew into one of Kering's steadiest earners, a house whose handbags and ready-to-wear did the quiet financial work behind the spectacle.
Cinema came too. Through Saint Laurent Productions, Vaccarello backed films by Pedro Almodóvar, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch and others, and carried the house name onto screens at Cannes. The label became a producer as well as a wardrobe. Few designers extended a fashion house that far outside its own showroom.
He found the house loud and left it exact. Whatever comes next has to be written in a different hand.
The Splendid EditWhat follows
The house has not named a successor. Fashion's reporting has settled on one name faster than Kering has: Chemena Kamali, now at Chloé, who spent seven years inside the Saint Laurent women's studio under Vaccarello before leaving in 2023. Kering has said only that an announcement is coming. Until it does, the chair is officially empty.
The exit lands inside a wider reshuffle. De Meo arrived at Kering this year with Gucci already mid-change under Demna and the group leaning on its largest houses to steady the numbers. Moving Saint Laurent now, weeks after a show that drew warm notices, reads as a decision about the next decade rather than a reaction to the last one.
For ten years the house spoke in Vaccarello's accent: nocturnal, precise, sure of its own glamour. The spring/summer 2027 looks will reach stores under his name. The woman who walks in after him will have to decide how much of that voice to keep.
Saint Laurent, Fall 2026 campaign. Courtesy of Saint Laurent