This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.


FADE IN:

A young man stalks through the gloomy ballroom in a long leather duster. Underneath, he wears a dignified gray business suit, double-breasted, with a striped dress shirt and a dark red tie firmly knotted at his throat. He is listening to the thumping bassline of “You Want It Darker.” The eye is drawn to his legs, which are clad in kinky, thigh-high leather boots. Hands in pockets, the man, on the hunt for a dangerous encounter, disappears into the night.

This was the opening scene of Tuesday evening’s Saint Laurent Winter 2025 runway show, masterfully produced by Anthony Vaccarello, who premiered an unforgettably twisted men’s fashion moment under the soaring glass dome of the Bourse de Commerce. Based on Vaccarello’s costuming alone, you can picture the movie as an American Psycho-meets-Cruising fever dream directed by Gaspar Noé (who was sitting in the front row, wearing dark sunglasses).

It’s not the most far-fetched notion. Yves Saint Laurent himself designed clothing for films like Belle de Jour, but Vaccarello has taken the house’s cinematic legend much further with Saint Laurent Productions, a new division of the fashion house established in 2023 to produce films by the designer’s favorite auteurs. Now, Vaccarello is a rising player in Hollywood; at Cannes in May, Saint Laurent Productions premiered David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope, and Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, which won the festival’s Jury Prize and went on to become the surprise breakout film of the year. Last week, the contemporary opera nabbed 13 Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, directing, and actress in leading role—the most Oscar noms in history for a foreign language film. “Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent” is listed as a producer and costume artistic director.

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ZHUXIAN CHEN

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Ironically, Emilia Pérez wasn’t nominated for costume design, though there’s such a strong sense of character in Vaccarello’s runway collections that it seems like only a matter of time before he takes home a little gold man with his name on it. At the Bourse de Commerce, every starlet clutching a champagne flute in the front row seemed to have stepped into a dramatic narrative: Steve Lacey in the dark overcoat of a mob boss, Lennon Gallagher the taupe suit of a London private eye. At YSL, Vaccarello has cornered the market for strong shoulders, but his designs are elegantly shaped, more heartthrob than heavy. He is a master of generating sex appeal by covering someone in more clothing rather than less (though he’s good at that too).

This season, Vaccarello’s script emerged from a fantasy encounter between Yves Saint Laurent and Robert Mapplethorpe in the early 1980s, which played out in an intense tryst between the couturier’s fastidious uniform and the New York artist’s taste for fetish and kink.

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