On September 29, beneath the Eiffel Tower and three towering candlelit chandeliers, Anthony Vaccarello sent out 49 looks in shades of gold, then closed with ten in black. Ten days later the house made official what the room had already sensed. On October 9, Saint Laurent announced that its creative director was stepping down after a decade, and that new creative leadership would be named soon.
It was, as Vogue noted, a farewell staged ten years and two days after his debut at the house. It also leaves one of the most valuable jobs in fashion open at a moment when Paris is already rearranging its seating chart.
A goodbye in gold
The final collection revisited the house vocabulary: sahariennes, trenches, pencil skirts, brocades and evening dresses. According to Vogue, the color sequence inverted the finale of Yves Saint Laurent’s Fall 1991 Rive Gauche collection, which had ended in gold. Vaccarello’s ended in black. Hypebae reported that the gold ran through lamé, brocade, lace and even latex brushed with gold leaf.
The atmosphere was valedictory before a single look appeared. Vaccarello declined preview interviews and instead sent black calla lilies with a note describing the collection as personal and emotional. Miles Davis’s soundtrack to Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows played as guests took their seats, and at the finale Charlotte Gainsbourg appeared for a surprise performance. In her review, quoted by Vogue, Nicole Phelps called him “as strong-willed as he is soft-spoken, a designer resolutely unwilling to bend to trends,” and closed with a line from Robert Frost: “Nothing gold can stay.”
The decade, by the numbers
When Saint Laurent appointed him in April 2016, Vaccarello was 36. He arrived four days after Hedi Slimane’s departure, having led Versace’s second line, Versus, and his own small label, and having won the 2011 ANDAM Fashion Award. Raised in Brussels by Sicilian parents and trained at La Cambre, he once told Vogue Australia: “I have the Belgian way to construct clothes, to be more into construction and deconstruction of clothes, and maybe my Italian side is the sexy side.”
The commercial record is the part that will follow him. On his watch, Vogue reports, Saint Laurent’s revenues more than tripled to €3.3 billion in 2022. They then declined for three years, to about €2.6 billion in 2025, which Vogue and The National both place against a wider slowdown in luxury spending and, in Vogue’s account, the house’s 2023 move away from wholesale. Saint Laurent’s president and chief executive, Cédric Charbit, said in the announcement that Vaccarello had taken the house “to the forefront of desirability and image.”
He was never shy about the scrutiny. “Everyone has a vision of what they think Saint Laurent should be, and that’s something I knew when I started,” he told Vogue in 2018. “I knew that whatever I did, some people would love it and some would hate it.”
The designer who made movies
Vaccarello’s most original idea may have had nothing to do with clothes. In 2023 the house launched Saint Laurent Productions, a registered subsidiary that, in its own words, “marks the first fashion house to count the full-fledged production of films among its activities.” Its slate lists work by Claire Denis, Fabrice Du Welz, Jacques Audiard, David Cronenberg, Paolo Sorrentino and Pedro Almodóvar, along with a Jean-Luc Godard project and a documentary directed by Abel Ferrara. Vogue counts the double Oscar winner Emilia Pérez and Sorrentino’s Parthenope among its output.
There is a lineage here. Yves Saint Laurent designed Catherine Deneuve’s costumes for Belle de Jour. Vaccarello took the idea a step further and put the house in the business of financing the films themselves. Whoever succeeds him inherits not only a runway, but a production company with a serious art-house reputation.
Paris, rearranged
His exit lands in a season already full of new beginnings. Paris Fashion Week for spring 2027 ran to 67 shows and 34 presentations, according to Hypebae, and included two creative-director debuts. At Courrèges, Drew Henry took the house’s space-age heritage somewhere looser, with tall hats, undone neon belts, colorful bodysuits, A-line dresses and vinyl outerwear. At Carven, Kai Nesselrath worked from the archive and from the house’s founder. “What spoke to me most was Marie-Louise herself: this idea of a doer… a woman who works with her hands,” he wrote in his show notes, as quoted by Hypebae, and tucked pencils into the models’ pockets and behind their ears.
Elsewhere, Glenn Martens returned his full attention to Maison Margiela after his final show at Diesel. The message of the season was plain: Paris is in the middle of a generational handover, and Saint Laurent is now part of it.
What comes next
Kering has not named a successor. The National reported that Chemena Kamali, creative director of Chloé, is among the names already being mentioned, but that is speculation, not an appointment. What is on the record are the targets. In April, Vogue reports, Kering chief executive Luca de Meo said that by 2030 Saint Laurent aims to more than double its menswear sales, triple its jewelry sales and reach at least €500 million in entry-price categories. The next creative director will be measured against those numbers as much as against Vaccarello’s shows.
As for Vaccarello, now 46, he has hinted that his next chapter may not be in fashion at all. Asked in 2024 what could follow Saint Laurent, he said, as quoted by Vogue: “The only thing you can do is to start something completely different… We need to aspire to new dreams that I don’t necessarily have yet.” For a designer who already turned a couture house into a film studio, that is not an idle thought.
Read on: how couture and cinema shaped each other in Paris in Close-Up, and what the city looked like this season in Paris, Spring 2027.
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Sources
Photo: “Anthony Vaccarello en 2017” by YanRB, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Editor’s note: facts in this article were checked against the linked sources in October 2026. Nicole Phelps’s review, Cédric Charbit’s statement and Anthony Vaccarello’s 2015, 2018 and 2024 remarks are quoted as published by Vogue; Kai Nesselrath’s show-note quote is as published by Hypebae; the Saint Laurent Productions description is quoted from its official site. Revenue figures are as reported by Vogue and The National. Talk of a successor is reported speculation; Saint Laurent had not named one when this was written. The featured photograph was taken at Cannes in 2017.
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