Saint Laurent Pre-Fall 2024

Monsieur Yves Saint Laurent was a designer who not only flou-ed with the best of them, he was the best of them. And in the ever fascinating way that Anthony Vaccarello continues to intuit the raison d’etre of the house—dress women, do it chicly, and sometimes bring a somewhat (and very YSL) eroticized edge to the proceedings—he has alighted (no pun intended) on the intricate delicacy of Saint Laurent from the past. That means the house’s use of lace, and lingerie, and a certain languorous silhouette scented with the heady bouquet of the 1920s and 1930s. To make them work in 2024, Vaccarello has thought in terms of oppositions—the weighty with the gossamer light, the substantial over the soft, and transparency contrasted with toughness.

Vaccarello’s fall rests, then, in some part on its rugged iteration of outerwear. There were plenty of great weathered leather coats, blousons, and belted utility jackets here, some with a big shouldered swagger, or punctuated with gleaming biker snaps and zippers. There were also, it’s worth noting, two absolutely to die for le smokings, particularly the one suit whose tux jacket was faced with lace. Yet more lace turned up in the form of a peignoir-like trench coat. But essentially the drama was wrung out of the power of contrast—and what lies beneath those statement-y top layers…

You’re familiar, no doubt, with the winter 2024 collection, which caused a bit of a stir. It was built on sheer stocking dressing, with fake furs casually thrown over it all: a cinematic spectacle of a runway show shrouded in brocade drapes which evoked Martha Graham by way of the Le Sept nightclub, that 1970s den of iniquity beloved of YSL and his gang back in the day. (In the time-shifting way that fashion often works these days, Saint Laurent, like other houses, choses to show the pre-collections which precede its runway shows after those shows. So you saw winter this past February, and are seeing fall now.

There were definitely pre-echoes of winter in this fall collection: the ’80s-inflected pairings of gauze-y draped bodysuits with pencil skirts with more of the faux fuzziness in the form of wraps or chain strap bags. Emphasizing the delicacy of the lingerie-esque pieces, Vaccarello partnered richly detailed black lace hose with just about everything, such a classically, undeniably, naughtily playful and firmly tongue-in-chic Parisian gesture. It’s more French than Catherine Deneuve, than Gauloises, than Jean-Luc Godard—and all at the same time.

Elsewhere, Vaccarello’s dominant silhouette, lean yet yielding, was repeated in lace and satin, and in the same color palette, which moved from the house classic black to blush pink, a pebble-y gray, a shade of rose tinged with taupe, and a brown which shimmered and shone. The period boudoir vibe was played up with a slew of gorgeous screen siren satiny long dresses, sinuous little slip dresses, and a new iteration of the jumpsuit, conjured out of a skinny-strapped lace-edged camisole, all of which were variously worn with stacks of chunky bangles and pointy satin-y sculpted shoes.

In much of his fall, Vaccarello delivered a sense of fragility, yet it was fragility armored with strength. These clothes stretch, they move, they don’t encumber. And they can, as Vaccarello so deftly demonstrates, when mixed up with filmy cardigans, tapering leather trousers and that terrific outerwear, then worn with low-heeled slingbacks, work in a real world which isn’t about putting on a show.