Anthony Vaccarello On Nearly A Decade At Saint Laurent, His Famous Muses, ⁘ What's Next

There is a legend that has long enveloped the house of Yves Saint Laurent: The designer, over his more than four-decade-long career, produced revolutionary, elegant fashion while his business partner, Pierre Bergé, made sure that an incredibly sophisticated image swirled around it all. But since the spring of 2016, when then 34-year-old Anthony Vaccarello was named creative director, something equally impressive has happened: Saint Laurent has managed to combine fashion excitement with commercial success. Thanks to Vaccarello and the company's president and CEO, Francesca Bellettini, who hired him, it now has a significant amount of fashion credibility and has become a $3 billion business.

"Yves Saint Laurent was always someone who influenced fashion, who all of the other designers followed," explains Vaccarello. "He designed haute couture, but it was not turned to the past—he was connected to the people of his era. It was almost always something new, exciting, and fresh for the time."

The Saint Laurent design studio where Vaccarello works is in a grand 17th-century townhouse at 24 Rue de l'Université, on Paris's Left Bank. Parked solo in the courtyard is his sleek black sedan, a Mercedes-Maybach S-Class. Up the marble staircase, the designer is sitting in his office, with its modernist furniture in black leather and views out to the historic garden. "When I arrived here, I tried to put myself in the place of Yves, to ask myself, 'What would he have done to reach a younger audience?' " says Vaccarello. "That meant changing fabrics, for example, using materials that are more modern, taking elements from the past but adapting them to the world in which we live today." To get a sense of his vision, we asked Vaccarello to pore over his own Saint Laurent archives, selecting some of his standout work from the past nine years.

From a studio in the Marais, Vaccarello quickly built his reputation for strong, sexy designs, picking up the endorsement of fashion plates like Lou Doillon and models like Anja Rubik. In 2011, he was given the ANDAM Fashion Award, the top French design accolade, which came with an endowment of €200,000. For the 2012 Met Gala, he caused a sensation with a stunning white satin dress he designed for Rubik, slashed to reveal her hip bone.

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