Saint Laurent turns lace into armour

Anthony Vaccarello emptied the apartment first. He cleared the set to bare walls and a single marble torso, then filled the room with women in tuxedos and hardened lace. Saint Laurent arrived at its Winter 2026 collection sure of what it wanted to keep.

The set evoked the rue de Babylone apartment that Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé shared for close to forty years. Wood panelling. A cognac-coloured haze. Vaccarello reached for one word to describe the place, opulence, and then took the opulence away. The paintings and objects that once filled those rooms were sold in a 2009 auction that netted close to four hundred million dollars. He left the walls almost bare.

One marble torso of an athlete remained. The original dates to the first or second century. The version in the room was made only weeks before the show and blown up several times over, closer to the scale of a film set than a sculpture. Vaccarello described the space as depurated to the maximum, stripped down until only the essential stayed. That instinct ran straight into the clothes.

Smoke

He opened with the tuxedo. Le Smoking, cut close and cleared of noise. The jackets ran fluid and unlined, a construction Vaccarello said was new for him. Wedge shoulders. Black first, then almost-black: a blotted navy, a bruised marron glacé. The suits slid over bare skin rather than sitting on top of it.

This year marks sixty years since suited women first walked the Saint Laurent salons. The tuxedo for women arrived in 1966 and reset what a wardrobe could hold. Vaccarello did not plan the anniversary. He arrived at it by instinct, which at this house tends to be the same thing. He has spent his decade here paring the suit down each season, and this was the barest version yet, the jacket reduced until only the line remained.

Lace

Then he hardened the soft. Lace of every pattern was coated in silicone and given a spine. Vaccarello called it a second skin with no give, lingerie sent out to fight. The colours read like oil paint, raw umber and Prussian blue and Caput Mortuum, the deep red-brown that painters ground from iron oxide. Sheer sheaths held their shape. What should have looked fragile stood upright.

Renaissance furs came buckled low over crystalline doublets, the models' faces perched above them like pearls. The pointed toes of the shoes were drawn out past the foot, closer to an illustration than to footwear. Everything on the runway had been styled toward a Saint Laurent fantasy and then made literal. The effect was heavy and precise at once, a wardrobe that looked painted before it looked worn.

Reference

Vaccarello builds Saint Laurent out of things he knows. Doves in metal and crystal swung at the ears, a Picasso line rather than a Braque one, each beak set with a pigeon's-blood ruby. The models wore heavy makeup in the manner of Saint Laurent women from another era. One portrait was pinned to a wall of cork, a nod to the Helmut Newton photographs that shaped the house's image. Reference sat on reference, none of it explained, all of it holding weight.

Saint Laurent Winter 2026. Courtesy of Saint Laurent

The point of all the borrowing is control. Vaccarello does not quote the archive to prove he has read it. He uses it to narrow the collection down to a few ideas and then presses on those ideas until they hold. A tuxedo and a coated lace sheath look like opposites. On this runway they made the same case.

Power

Vaccarello has run Saint Laurent since 2016. Ten years in, his women are not decorative. They could have stood in for the paintings and bronzes that left the apartment, avatars of the house's past dressed up for a second life. They did not read that way. The clothes gave them mass instead, a physical presence that filled the empty rooms.

His stated aim was to give women power. A tuxedo does that easily now; the ground was won decades ago. A sheath of transparent lace is the harder case, and it is the one he set himself. He made the fragile thing carry the same authority as the suit, which is the whole argument of the collection in a single garment.

The looks reach boutiques through the summer, and the campaign follows the show's logic without softening it. Black lace over a pointed patent heel. Colour arriving in one sharp note, a chartreuse satin against a slick of burgundy. A single tote in oxblood leather does the work of a whole accessories wall. Saint Laurent spent the season taking things away. What stayed was the point.