What to Know About Saint Laurent’s New Creative Director, Anthony Vaccarello
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Version 0 of 1. On Monday, Saint Laurent announced that it had appointed Anthony Vaccarello as creative director, following the exit of Hedi Slimane. Here’s what to know about the 33-year-old designer, who will present his first collection for the house in October. Born in Belgium to Italian parents, Vaccarello studied at the art-and-design school La Cambre in Brussels and graduated in 2006; that year, he took home the top fashion prize at the annual Hyères Festival in France, which focuses on emerging talent. He worked on furs at Fendi for two years before founding his own brand and held his first runway show in September 2010 for the spring 2011 season. He won France’s ANDAM (Association Nationale pour le Développement des Arts de la Mode) award, for up-and-coming names, the following July. Since then, Vaccarello has continued to participate in the Paris calendar; his shows are typically scheduled for the first day of the French capital’s fashion week. It remains unclear if he’ll be shuttering his label upon taking the reins at Saint Laurent. Early in his career, Vaccarello introduced revealing dresses with up-to-there slits. After some online speculation, the designer explained that the gowns were jumpsuit hybrids: half-dresses, half-pants with a bodysuit inside to prevent wardrobe malfunctions. Over time, Vaccarello has maintained his striking silhouettes, but moved beyond his usual palette of black and navy. For his spring/summer 2015 show, he played with branding, plastering his initials across tops and the mini-est of miniskirts. Vaccarello created a capsule collection in 2014 for Donatella Versace’s Versus line and soon after was appointed the brand’s creative director, which also marked his first foray into men’s wear. In a September 2015 interview with The Telegraph, Vaccarello said of his work at Versus: “The idea is to build a vocabulary; it’s not going to be a revolution every season. We want to focus on the girl so that she can mix pieces she already has with the new ones.” Of the partnership, Versace noted, “We chose each other. What Anthony does is very close to my work. My woman is cool and sexy, and to combine those two things is not always easy.” On Sunday, Versace announced Vaccarello’s departure; he’d doubled Versus’s retail sales between 2014 and 2015. Over the years, the young designer has amassed a long list of supporters. His runway regulars include the hard-to-book models Karlie Kloss, Anja Rubik and Joan Smalls; and Rihanna, Jennifer Lopez and Gwyneth Paltrow have worn Vaccarello ensembles on the red carpet. What’s more, thanks to rumors that Vaccarello was next in line at Saint Laurent, his fall/winter 2016 show was packed. (Elizabeth von Guttman, an editor of System magazine, told Vanessa Friedman: “They kept asking us to reconfirm we were coming because they said they had more requests than ever before.”) |