Saint Laurent. Resort 2024 - Paris Fashion Week

(Images:  Saint Laurent 2024)

Anthony Vaccarello resumes his familiarity and love for the 1970s and early 1980s timeline in all of its hedonistic glory, reinvigorating the Saint Laurent label, as a channeling aesthetic of the said eras.    Noted in my Fall 2023 review,  he has conjured the spirits of the early 1980s incorporating the sleeker, and more defined elements of 80s power dressing.   Reliving the benchmark of success and sex in its epicure kinship, which may or may not have achieved that desired outcome, yet he has paid homage to its reflection.  And for Vaccarello's Resort 2024 lookbook, there are elements of 70s minimalism  mixed with Donna Karan's quintessential minimalist 1985 capsule collection.  So, the color palette of Vaccarello's latest styles reflects those dulled neutral tones within its interchangeable array.

I did also note a coldness to his 2023 Fall collection, to which the Resort lookbook also delivers the same cold attributes, portraying a junction point between Vaccarello's counterculture interest of the 1960s and 1970s, as the sexual liberation gave rise to new found hedonism, and his experimentation of the early to mid 1980s, particularly the manifestation of the ambitiousness of greed that aspects of late 20th Century society entailed.  At least as a divisive element, before everyone got greedy in the early 2000s ala mortgages and DVD players.    And it was that clear distinction between wealthy and poor throughout the 1980s, that also heralded a narcissistic charm to the said timeline.

Yet, despite the hedonism and epicurean opulence of Vaccarello's Saint Laurent, there  also appears to be a stripping back of the late Yves Saint Laurent imprint.  Vaccarello's opulent and grandiose runway shows seem to have taken a slight step back from their over-the-top extravagance.  Could it be a moral undertaking? As the world, within a similarity of the First Cold War, which was close to the brink of nuclear annihilation.  Are we there again?  Yet, in our strange digitized simulacrum, and overconfidence that a globalized world through technology and 'smartphones' would set us all free.  Has come undone.  And as the striking similarities of what has occurred Forty years ago, is happening now.  There still is a portrayal that this is all just a temporary glitch.  And our threat, via distraction, is a clunky AI learning program that makes a lot of errors, who will kills us all. The reality is, it is us, humans that are the existential threat to humanity, and we are repeating the same old mistakes. Two major conflicts an ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Israel.  China bearing down on Taiwan.  Russia and NATO staging wargames to counter each other as a potential Nuclear armed threat.  Maybe Vaccarello is offering, through his new found minimalism, a degree of nihilistic laced humility.

And if this is the case, that an accepting, and what could be deemed as a way of counter culturing it all, in dealing with a tumultuous world is to embrace its chaos.  And there is underlying nonchalant care portrayed with Vaccarello's latest array, in its resignation to the dire predicaments of human folly, would be not to be consumed by it.  The starkness of the collection and it brutalist undertones, evokes an emotive cue, as one awaits within a concrete encased bomb shelter, whilst drinking a cosmopolitan (or Martini).    Is that all bad?  

As the late and great science fiction writer J.G. Ballard once said, "Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us." 

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(A.Glass 2024)