Lines of Power: Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent Winter 2025
Photographed by Drew Vickers
The room falls silent before the first look appears. What follows is not spectacle, but precision. Anthony Vaccarello’s Winter 2025 collection for Saint Laurent feels like a meditation on form, a study in how power can exist without noise.
The silhouettes speak first. Broad shoulders, sculpted waists, coats cut close to the frame. It is a gentle nod to the structured power dressing of the 1980s, but rewritten in the language of restraint. Gone are the lacquered finishes and electric bravado. In their place, an almost monastic control. The Saint Laurent woman no longer needs to declare her strength. She embodies it.
Vaccarello builds from the house’s architecture, exploring line, balance, and proportion. Jackets curve into hourglass shapes. Fabrics move between the sensual and the severe. Leather is tailored like silk. Wool drapes with the weight of memory. Every element feels deliberate, pared back to its essence.
Color becomes punctuation. Black, ivory, and olive dominate, with sudden jolts of garnet and amber appearing like breath between words. Texture carries the emotion, matte against gloss, cashmere against patent. Vaccarello uses absence the way some designers use excess. He lets quiet moments linger.
There are no trousers this season. Skirts fall to the knee or below, their shapes echoing sculpture more than fabric. Evening gowns unfold in fluid jersey and velvet, often anchored by sharp jackets resting across the shoulders. It is a study in opposites, strength and softness, concealment and exposure, yet nothing feels conflicted.
When asked about his philosophy for the house, Vaccarello explained, “When I arrived here, I tried to put myself in the place of Yves, to ask myself, ‘What would he have done to reach a younger audience?’ That meant changing fabrics, using materials that are more modern, taking elements from the past but adapting them to the world in which we live today.”
This collection is not nostalgic. It remembers the 1980s only as a foundation, a whisper of power beneath something calmer and more assured. Vaccarello understands that true control does not need armor. The modern Saint Laurent woman does not fight for space; she defines it.
By the finale, the collection settles into a kind of stillness. The light fades, but the outline remains, a silhouette carved from shadow and discipline. Saint Laurent Winter 2025 is power rendered as poise, proof that strength, when quiet, is unforgettable.
