Saint Laurent. Pre-Fall 2022 . (A.Glass. January 14th 2022)

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(Images:  Saint Laurent 2022)

After Anthony Vaccarello’s return to his beloved Eiffel Tower runway shows for Saint Laurent Spring 2022, it was his first live showing and celebration of Europe after lifting itself out of the pandemic restrictions of 2020 and 2021. The grandiose presentation was by all, in its directive, an uber opulent Vaccarello affair, that now, after the spread of a new variant of Covid-19 known as Omicron, feels like a redux of 2020 or at least stranger times within a predominately vaccinated world, now coping with a mutation that, despite governments reluctance to lockdown and implement restrictions again, by its nature, the virus maybe doing this by default. Will we see massive runways continuing into 2022? Possibly, but we are living in uncertain times and Vaccarello’s hyper-drive of the amorous carries on despite all this uncertainty. 

But, why not be enticed by Vaccarello’s escapism of the nightclub at the End of the World. To which his adored supermodel-esque muses do indeed echo Vaccarello’s more tailored and structured collections, drawing upon the Spring 2022 Paris show, further representing his skills developed over seven years at the helm with Saint Laurent. And there is no doubt that the Belgian designer has gone from strength-to-strength whilst honing, as mentioned, his obsession with the tail end of the 1960s that is the Los Angeles Boulevard of Broken dreams to the imprint of 70’s New York City “Studio 54” era and the impact it had aesthetically of the aspiring feminine. Yet, in all his collections appears, without invoking any negative connotation, in what could be a deeper meaning, a tragedy of the hungry ghost who has been left in the wake of four decades of over ambitious dreams and their crushing disappointments. 

For Saint Laurent Resort 2022 collection, Vaccarello’s romanticism and love affair of the late 1960s and 1970s hedonistic is maintained, in fact it has been revved up into an hyper-real fervor, like an alternative reality time line of sex and drugs. To which the fanaticism of the styles and the reflection of what could be possible, at least from Vaccarello’s perspective, seen as a more stable time – except it wasn’t any more or less, just less hyped and not as laded with an over inundation of information via the digital relays, in all of its real-time time discord. Still, this collection hits hard like a serotonin fueled sucker punch, it is by the most revealing and tantalizing with a sex appeal on overdrive, that, in reflection of our, and one has to say, conservative society that we all live in, which is a mix of 1950s institutionalized family values with 1990s entrepreneurialism, the styles feel slightly out of place, yet, paradoxically, is refreshing in its simulacrum of aesthetics. Regardless, it is Vaccarello’s Eros sophistication, as you would expect, which has elevated his latest offering out of the gaudy as an reinvigoration of the sensual and maudlinism for a bygone era.

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A.Glass.  January 14th 2022 

Ready-to-Wear 2023 review soon.