fashion · Vaccarello
Anthony Vaccarello Made Saint Laurent Sexy Again by Showing Less
While every other house chases the next viral three seconds, Anthony Vaccarello has spent a decade at Saint Laurent proving the oldest, dirtiest secret in fashion: the most erotic thing you can do is not show it.
By Damon King
There is a sentence Anthony Vaccarello put in the program of his most recent Saint Laurent show, and it is the most honest thing anyone in fashion has said in years: Nobody is trying to seduce you.
Read it twice. It's a taunt disguised as a disclaimer. Because of course the entire collection was trying to seduce you — that's what Saint Laurent is for — but Vaccarello understands the mechanism the rest of the industry has forgotten in its scramble for the feed: seduction that announces itself isn't seduction. It's advertising. The real thing works by withholding. By making you wait. By covering the body precisely enough that your eye is forced to do the undressing itself. He said the quiet part, and the quiet part was: I don't have to try. That's the whole point.
saint laurent — the show in full
This is why, ten years into his tenure, Vaccarello is the most quietly radical designer working — and why this magazine has been circling his house all season without quite saying why. Madonna in red lace in his front row. Charli XCX in his slip dresses. Carine Roitfeld, the last true editrix, seated at his shows like a benediction. Connor Storrie in the thigh-high boots. They all come to Saint Laurent because Vaccarello is running the one house that still believes desire is an intelligence, not a volume level.
Consider the Spring 2027 men's show this June, because it was a thesis delivered in fog. Vaccarello staged it inside a cloud — an actual mist sculpture by the Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya — so that the models emerged, half-dissolved, and vanished again. You caught a shoulder, a strip of bare ankle, a throat wrapped in a small scarf, and then the fog took them back. Critics reached, correctly, for the word restraint. One called it "the sensuality in withholding and the romance in waiting." Another: the collection "never begs for attention." A third pinned the whole philosophy to a single Vaccarello line — that Saint Laurent lives on "that fine line between classic and kinky."
That line is the most Kovert sentence a designer has ever handed us, so let's honor it. What Vaccarello grasps is that propriety and perversion aren't opposites — they're a circuit, and the electricity is generated by the distance between them. A suit buttoned to the throat with nothing underneath. A trench that covers everything and suggests worse. Leather briefs under a tailored jacket. The fog that "covers, but does not erase." He builds the tension between what a body is permitted to show and what it wants to, and then he refuses to resolve it — and the refusal is the seduction. This is the exact opposite of how the attention economy works, which is why it reads as radical. Everyone else is maximizing speed, sight, sound. Vaccarello lit a cigarette, declined, and let the imagination do the labor. And here's the tell that this is real and not just a mood board: for SS27 he cited Marguerite Duras as an inspiration. Duras — the writer who built entire novels out of the unsaid, the withheld, the desire that lives in the gap. When a fashion designer reaches for Duras instead of a decade or a subculture, he's telling you his subject isn't clothes. It's longing.
What makes it more than beautiful is that it's a position, taken against the current. Fashion in 2026 is having an identity crisis — houses resetting themselves every six months, chasing the sugar rush of the next viral silhouette, terrified that a season without a meme is a season that didn't happen. Vaccarello, as one critic put it, simply "declines." He has polished the same codes for a decade — the nocturnal palette, the sharp shoulder, the femme fatale who is "covered, armored, and in control," whose desire is "born of tension and suggestion, not exposure." It's step-aside dressing, not come-hither. Presence felt before it's seen, like a supercar heard before it rounds the corner.
The industry keeps demanding he reinvent. He keeps declining, and the declining is the flex. In a landscape addicted to novelty, consistency held with this much conviction becomes the most confrontational move available — an identity so complete the labels fall off. He doesn't need to shock you next season. He needs you to keep waiting, keep looking, keep doing the work his restraint assigns you. That's not a man running a fashion house. That's a man running the longest, coolest seduction in the industry, and letting you think it was your idea.
Nobody is trying to seduce you. Sure. And the fog isn't a wall — it's an invitation to lean closer, into exactly the place where the image refuses to resolve.
Lean closer. That's where he's always kept the good part.
Anthony Vaccarello has been creative director of Saint Laurent since 2016. His Spring/Summer 2027 menswear collection was shown June 23, 2026, at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, staged within Fujiko Nakaya's fog installation, with Marguerite Duras, Tina Chow, and Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley cited as references. Details and quotations drawn from the public record, including WWD, Vogue, nss magazine, Flaunt, and the Saint Laurent show program; all quotations as published. Hero image: a credited runway or show image via wire service or the house — no unlicensed copies. Related to our Roitfeld, Madonna, Charli, and Connor Storrie coverage — the whole Saint Laurent orbit.