An unleashing of resources: never before has luxury gone to so much trouble as in May, June and July 2022 to impress. After a two-year forced break due to Covid-19, fashion brands have multiplied events in Europe and the United States, with Asia still remaining inaccessible. Vuitton organized a show in a brutalist building in San Diego (California), Balenciaga took over the New York Stock Exchange, Dior showed in Seville, Dolce & Gabbana unveiled the hidden treasures of Syracuse… To conclude this epic season, Saint Laurent made an impression with a spectacular show in the Moroccan desert of Agafay.
On Friday July 15, the French brand gathered some 200 guests – journalists, influencers and clients – in Marrakech for its spring-summer 2023 men’s show. For the past three years, artistic director Anthony Vaccarello has presented his summer men’s collection abroad, outside fashion week calendar. “I had never made a man before arriving at Saint Laurent and I didn’t feel comfortable in Paris. Getting away from where I live gave me courage. It has become a habit to get away once a year, to take people out of the Parisian parades”, explains the designer. Before the Agafay desert, he strolled his world on a beach in Malibu (California), in 2019, then in an abandoned cloister, in Venice, in 2021. Marrakech is a logical destination for the label: after discovering the city in 1966, the founder Yves Saint Laurent settled there for part of the year to escape the hustle and bustle of Paris. Today, Saint Laurent has a museum and a foundation there.
Unlike other houses where the place and the collection are intimately linked – in Seville, for example, Dior worked with local craftsmen to develop a resolutely Andalusian wardrobe – Saint Laurent allows itself more freedom: “These are not looks for the desert”, warns Vaccarello. The collection is an extension of the one presented at Paris women’s fashion week in March 2022, all in coats and evening jackets worn next to the skin, or on a light silk dress like a nightie. A program that may seem surprising for a summer men’s collection, but that Anthony Vaccarello masters with skill.
Make opposites coexist
Some of the women’s looks are taken over as they are, like the inaugural tuxedo, entirely black, or a long coat with a wide build. Others are slightly reworked, an ivory dress becomes flowing satin trousers, blouses with lavallière are lengthened. Low-cut wrap-over tops in velvet or jersey, tunics worn over trousers, heeled boots or even pumps complete this wardrobe filled with borrowings from the feminine register, but which, by its sobriety, remains largely masculine.
The color palette is limited to black, sand and ivory. There are no jewels, few accessories apart from a few pockets, very graphic. Vaccarello does not seek to achieve genre fluidity with versatile pieces, but rather to make opposites coexist. These elegant, slender silhouettes are reminiscent of those of Yves Saint Laurent, open shirt and belted high-waisted trousers, strolling Jemaa el-Fna square, and of his muse, Betty Catroux, imperial in her evening tuxedos. “It’s a return to classic chic, a man without aggressiveness, who does not try to pass on a message and assumes who he is”summarizes Anthony Vaccarello, who specifies that this is his “favorite collection”.
If sobriety is required for the clothes, it is not the same for the installation of the parade which reserves surprises. In the middle of the Agafay desert, Saint Laurent dug a vast circular pool of water around which the models circulate. Once the last silhouettes have passed, a monumental and luminous ring emerges from the oasis and rises vertically. “I wanted a door that opens onto a new world”, says Vaccarello, who called on the English artist Es Devlin to realize his vision. Despite the means deployed, the Kering group, which owns Saint Laurent, affirms that this parade achieves carbon neutrality: the equipment is rented, reused, recycled or given to local associations; the water from the oasis (not drinkable) is intended to irrigate the olive trees in the Agafay region. In 2022, luxury has never been so extravagant, nor so aware of the consequences of its actions.