Visits: 22
In 1966, Yves Saint Laurent first visited Marrakech, a place that would become sacred to him for its sense of calm. He designed his collections there, visiting in June and December to find solitude away from swinging Paris. In Morocco he found color, and the work he produced there was dominated by vivid hues that had never been seen in his work before.
It was also in Marrakech that Saint Laurent, who was born in Oran, Algeria and moved to the French capital aged 18, wore some of his most iconic clothes, cementing himself not just as a designer on a mission to energetically cloak men and women, but as a style maven in his own right. Here in the Red City, he swept the private halls of Dar el-Hanch in wide-legged blue wash jeans cut tight at the thigh with matching shirts, Cuban heeled boots, and louche ivory suits. He saw the city as a quiet retreat from the world. “Yves never really left the house,” explained Saint Laurent creative director Anthony Vaccarello ahead of the brand’s Spring/Summer 2023 menswear show. “He was all about reading, thinking about clothes and spending time with friends.”
For the label’s latest menswear show, Vaccarello, who has served as creative director since 2016, left the house in a major way, transporting close to 300 editors, TikTokers and celebrities (Dominic Fike, Stranger Things heavy Jamie Campbell Bower, and Steve Lacy among them) to the hazy Agafay desert. Guests were sent on convoy, 007-style, in blacked-out vans to a camp in the centre of the desert, where they found a large-scale installation designed in conjunction with British artist-cum-set designer Es Devlin. Like some galactic cantonment out of Arrival or Dune, two high-shine metallic boxes acted as a gateway to the catwalk, which, for the first time in the history Saint Laurent’s men’s shows, was circular, wrapping itself around a makeshift plunge pool from which an enormous ring of light emerged. “I wanted something soft, even sensual, that stood in contrast to my typically straight catwalks,” Vaccarello explained.
As the buzz of the crowd settled down, a fake mist swept across the scene, while the thumps of music curated by Saint Laurent’s go-to DJ Sebastian broke the eeriness of the landscape. Vaccarello’s first model stomped his way across the grainy floor and the show began. Vaccarello didn’t just replicate or reference the aforementioned clothes—floor-length, breathable “Bougainvilleas” gowns in cobalt and scarlet, and purple caftans—that Saint Laurent put out after falling for Morocco back in the Sixties. Instead, the 50-strong collection was predominantly black—just a handful of sandy looks and one magenta jacket strayed from Vaccarello’s signature hue. When asked why he thought this was fit for summer, Vaccarello answered, “Why not? Blue, red and yellow is the Moroccan cliché. I wanted to avoid it and black is the best way to really see the body’s silhouette, especially in the desert.”
The designer, who cut his teeth at Versus Versace, explained that while the location was inspired by Yves, the clothes were Vaccarello’s most personal yet, reflecting how he dressed as a music-obsessed student in Brussels. Of course, that was intertwined with the signature codes of YSL. “I didn’t want to do a costume-y tribute act to Yves,” the designer explained. Nor did he simply want to present a collection that depicted how people have come to think you ought to dress for desert jaunts. Linen and shorts are too obvious, and while there were sandals in the collection, the majority of Vaccarello’s models marched across the sandy landscape in heeled leather boots. Models wore high-waisted crushed velvet trousers, which oozed the nonchalant sexiness so closely associated with Saint Laurent and Vaccarello, and midnight black, broad-shouldered trench coats billowed in the desert gust and wrapped themselves around their wearers. Tailoring was form-hugging, while buttery silk shirts were worn loose. “It’s how I dressed and I wanted to recreate that spirit,” he said. “I was missing that life.”
Vaccarello also wanted this sleek collection of clothing to seamlessly twin with the SS23 womenswear line he dropped earlier this year. So important was this to him that he actually took the clothes from said collection and draped them on male models. “I had seen men buying the women’s clothes we create and I wanted to sort of dissolve the collections,” he remarked, explaining that for him, “dissolve” is a more appropriate term than fluid. “The clothes in that women’s show were masculine, and you wouldn’t immediately know if the suits were designed for men or women,” he said. This collection speaks generously to the men in conversation with their feminine side: a chiffon pussy bow blouse was tucked into high-waisted, butt-hugging trousers; vests were cut from soft silk and a waist-cinched coat was flung over a floaty white shirt.
Elsewhere shorts were worn dangerously high, chests were bare and arms were on show through sweater vests. The Le smoking jacket, arguably Yves Saint Laurent’s most well-known creation and the epitome of his own play with androgyny, was again presented, as it’s been in Vaccarello’s previous collections. This time, however, the tuxedo jacket, which was originally designed for women in 1966, and has been sharply tailored to the body in Vaccarello’s previous collections, was relaxed and hung softly on the lithe frames of the male models. Relaxed, in tune with the way that Yves felt while residing in Morocco, but also to exhibit the loose sensuality that Vaccarello wants men to get on board with.
Indeed, while Yves was the mastermind behind women getting in touch with their masculine side—he was one of the first designers to send models down the catwalk in straight-cut trousers—Vaccarello is mastering pushing men to get in touch with femininity. “Today people are discovering the merging of men’s and women’s clothing that was apparent in the 2000s,” Vaccarello said. “But it isn’t a new thing to me.”
This story originally ran in British GQ with the title “In Morocco, Saint Laurent felt at home”
