Text & Illustrations by Alessio Nesi
At Paris Fashion Week, Anthony Vaccarello reinvents Saint Laurent for SS26. Leather, nylon and romantic volumes shape a woman who appears powerful and self-aware. The Trocadéro becomes a nocturnal stage for a renewed vision of power dressing, where seduction meets rigor.
Beneath the Parisian stars, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, a garden of white hydrangeas forms a cinematic backdrop — a quiet declaration that the night still belongs to Saint Laurent.
Vaccarello revisits the house’s codes and sharpens them with urgency. The opening looks arrive with precision: black leather suits, sculpted shoulders, pencil skirts and pointed slingbacks cutting across the gravel. White pussy-bow blouses, exaggerated almost to insolence, reject any idea of docility. This is a “louche aristocrat” moving confidently through the dark, somewhere between libertine suggestion and the photographic memory of the 1970s — yet unmistakably contemporary.
Gradually, the tension softens into a more controlled sensuality. The trench coat and the day dress, classic bourgeois archetypes of the house, are reimagined in thin, fluid nylon, clinging from neck to knee with the ambiguity of a veil that both conceals and reveals. Nudity is not scandal here but a position: the body returns to the center as a space of awareness. It is an elegant dialogue with the present, reaffirming the autonomy of desire.
The final movement turns romantic, almost historical: voluminous dresses, sleeves and skirts drifting in the wind, a wavering procession of color moving through the night. Nylon surprises again — light, compressible, practical — allowing the woman to crumple the dress and move on.
From radical leather to fluid drapery, the protagonist remains the same: strong, lucid, never tamed.
In my illustrations, metropolitan signs intertwine with Art Nouveau lines. Graphic black and white — etched like an urban manifesto — meets soft volumes and flashes of scarlet butterflies, evoking a vibrant Parisian romanticism suspended between discipline and poetry.A new vision of power dressing emerges: essential, sensual, subversive. Saint Laurent SS26 does not look to the past out of nostalgia, but to reaffirm a timeless idea of feminine freedom — one that feels more necessary than ever.
