Saint Laurent Pre-Fall 2023 Collection

If you’ve had a hankering for big shoulders—as in really, really, really big—you can thank Mr. Anthony Vaccarello for that. For several seasons now, and for both the women’s and men’s collections, Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent has been pumping them way up. It’s a look that rests on a squared-off line with a lot of impact. It’s also been a neat way to underscore his and the house’s exemplary tailoring skills which are, it is safe to say, pretty darn considerable.

Saint Laurent women’s pre-fall, which is arriving in stores now, sketches out the look, if in perhaps less extreme terms. There those shoulders are on masculine inflected overcoats, their swagger exaggerated by dark glasses, door knocker hoop earrings, and spike-heeled black boots. There they are again on leather and shearling jackets, some cut with a curvy blouson-y look that would have gladdened the heart of Tess McGill—”Six thousand dollars and it is leather!”—or natty aviator versions, with featherweight shawls knotted at the neck to trail in the wind, leaving everything and everyone in their wake.

The high-gloss, high-power era of fashion, roughly the late ’70s to the just dawning ’90s, is something that Vaccarello’s YSL has long been tapped into. Yet his smartness with it has been to amplify the look while also denuding it of some of its associations. Yes, he might be evoking that time with his second-skin black dressing, the wrists weighted with hefty golden cuffs, or with the roomy boardroom coats over sliver-thin pencil skirts that finish a fraction above the knees. But this isn’t a historicist retreat; there’s no desire here to create clothing shellacked with outmoded notions of power and status.

Instead, Vaccarello’s attitude reads as modern: a touch of dishevelment with the hair of his models, a certain androgynous beauty, a kind of casual offhandedness about the whole proceedings. Vaccarello is designing for someone who’s curious about wearing chicer, glossier, more structured clothing, but who is still firmly living in, and dressing for, the world today.

Speaking of time, this collection is actually the predecessor of the chic-y chicness of his fall, which was shown in Paris a few months back. As with all of the pre-collections calendar, there can sometimes be a bit of a Christopher Nolan syndrome going on: Did we just see that, or not? Was this first, or did it come after? Nevertheless, for all the moving back and forth, we’re never in any doubt that when it comes to Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent, it is only ever about the here and now.