Anthony Vaccarello Leaves Saint Laurent After a Decade

The designer’s departure closes a chapter spanning runway collections and cinema, as Saint Laurent prepares to announce new creative leadership.

Anthony Vaccarello is leaving Saint Laurent after a decade as creative director, the house announced on October 9. His departure closes a chapter that stretched from the Paris runway to film production, with new creative leadership still to be announced.

Kering’s statement credits Vaccarello with strengthening the house’s identity and cultural influence during his tenure. Kering chief executive Luca de Meo and Saint Laurent president and chief executive Cédric Charbit both thanked him for his contribution. The announcement gives no reason for the departure and names no successor, saying that the next creative leadership will be announced soon.

The starting point is documented in Kering’s 2016 financial report: Vaccarello’s appointment was announced on April 4, following Hedi Slimane’s departure. Before joining the house, he had led his own label, established after two years at Fendi. That background matters when considering the balance every incoming Saint Laurent designer must negotiate between an individual practice and an unusually recognizable archive.

A decade in conversation with the archive

Few references are more recognizable than Le Smoking. The Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris dates the founder’s women’s tuxedo to his autumn-winter 1966 collection, explaining how it adapted the conventions of men’s eveningwear to the female body. The museum also records its contrasting early reception: limited couture sales, followed by success with the younger clientele of the Rive Gauche line. Experiment and recognition were intertwined from the beginning.

Vaccarello’s final collection now carries the weight of a farewell. Vogue’s account of his departure identifies the September 29 Spring 2027 show as his last for the house. Staged beneath the Eiffel Tower, the presentation moved through 49 gold looks before ending with 10 in black. Its trenches, pencil skirts and evening dresses returned to familiar Saint Laurent forms in a deliberately concentrated sequence.

Watch Anthony Vaccarello’s Women’s Summer 2027 show for Saint Laurent, presented in Paris on September 29, 2026. Video: Saint Laurent.

Read in that context, a change of designer invites more than a search for a new signature. It raises a practical creative question: which proportions, gestures and associations should stay recognizable, and which can move? A fashion house’s archive offers material for those decisions, but each collection still has to make its own case in the present.

The image beyond the runway

Cinema became a concrete part of Vaccarello’s tenure. The house’s Saint Laurent Productions announcement describes a film subsidiary envisioned by the designer and introduced at Cannes in 2023 with Pedro Almodóvar’s Strange Way of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal. The announcement positioned film production as an extension of his creative direction and specified that the company’s films would feature costumes by Vaccarello for Saint Laurent.

Kering’s 2023 activity report also records the Cannes presentation of Jean-Luc Godard’s unfinished Phony Wars. In the same year, the house staged menswear shows at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris and Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. These projects provide specific examples of how clothes, cinema and cultural settings met during his leadership, beyond the language of a departure statement.

That leaves the next creative director with an expansive inheritance: garments, imagery and relationships with other creative fields. The immediate question is who will take responsibility for it. The longer one is how the next collections will interpret what has accumulated. For now, the confirmed news is the end of Vaccarello’s decade, and Saint Laurent’s announcement of its next leadership is the development to watch.

 

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