Anthony Vaccarello (Saint Laurent) announces collaboration with Helmut Lang

Saint Laurent‘s Anthony Vaccarello announces collaboration with Helmut Lang which is launching at the Saint Laurent Rive Droite store at Rue St. Honoré in Paris after which the show will travel to the Rive Droite store in Los Angeles.

“I’ve been fascinated by Helmut for years,” agreed Vaccarello. “For my generation, he is the ultimate designer of the ’90s. I consider him at the same level as someone like Coco Chanel for the way he brought realness into fashion, something that everyone is still copying. Helmut was the first to stand up against artificial promotional messages, his vision and art direction brought everyone back to the real and meaningful essence of fashion.”

Since his retirement show in 2005, Lang has been an inscrutable Garbo-esque shadow in fashion. “I’m always attracted to those mysterious impossible guys,” Vaccarello said, laughing. “I like things that are not easy to do, when they take time. You need to seduce, to go there.” So, two years ago, he made the pilgrimage to Lang’s rustic pile on Long Island, by the ocean, where, as a side line to his art practice, Helmut famously breeds heritage fowl. “All these black chickens,” Vaccarello marvels. “Everything black. It was a dream.”

His original idea was a collaboration with Lang on a denim collection. “I associate him with denim, with workwear pieces of clothing,” said Vaccarello. “I didn’t think about that amazing couture he did.” But Lang wasn’t interested in doing clothes – but he wanted to make art.

The official title for the collaboration is “Helmut Lang x Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent Rive Droite.” The essence of the resulting artwork is the same iconoclastic alchemy that Lang applied to his own archive, reducing it to shreds, moulding it into primal totem pole shapes. “When I work on collections, some pieces unfortunately don’t fit in,” Vaccarello explained. “There are some defects or they’re not well-done so we take them aside. I gave Helmut these leftovers, accessories too, going back to the first season.” Lang shredded them, mixed them with a pigmented resin and sculpted similar totem forms using aluminium moulds. Look closely and you might see the embedded glimmer of a YSL brooch or earring or chain.

The sculptures are stark, scorched, as inscrutable as their creator. “I like those primal hard shapes,” said Vaccarello, “especially associated with Saint Laurent which is so about elegance and so raffiné. I like the idea of rude, hard and brutal.” I wondered how much this same attitude had coloured his approach to his own designs for Saint Laurent. “I like the tension,” he answered. “I’m not interested in softness. I like beauty, but when it’s disturbing, not easy.”

When Lang made “fabric confetti” of the 8,000 or so pieces that remained in his archive after a 2010 fire, his acolytes clenched at the sacrilege. The gesture seemed wilful to people contemplating closets filled with Helmut pieces worn to barest thread.

“I understand what Helmut did, because for me clothes should not be sacré. It’s only cotton, silk, gauze… I like that idea of finishing a period like he did and destroying everything. I really respect someone who isn’t stuck in something he did amazingly. It’s better to stop at the right time than doing something less good or too repetitive.”

Vaccarello said “I am a nostalgic guy, but more in an emotional way. It’s the Belgian in me. I’m more attached to a feeling, an emotion I had in the past. I am very lucky I was surrounded by love in my childhood. I don’t care about material things.” His attachment to the peak moments of past emotions manifests itself in the way he feels about music — Depeche Mode or David Bowie rather than some radiant newbie — and maybe even fashion itself. “Because there was a certain freedom in creativity, or maybe everything was new and exciting in the ’90s. I have the feeling now everything is a bit more flat and commercial. Maybe it’s because I’m not young anymore. I’m missing that ’90s feeling that made me want to do fashion now: Helmut, Versace…”

” What I like about doing my job here is being inspired by Saint Laurent without feeling the pressure of the legacy, that is more important for people over 50. I really wanted to take it in a very light and easy way, more like the way he inspired fashion in general without being stuck in the past. I take what I think is still very cool and relevant without doing a copy of him, I’m not interested in being Saint Laurent. I have a lot of respect for him because he was a genius but I want to be me working for Yves Saint Laurent, inspired without being literal.”

“I think being anti-bourgeois is something we had in common,” he said, “playing with those codes, wear the jacket or the lavallière in latex to bring a woman out of her comfort zone.” I thought the presentation was a powerful expression of fashion at its fetishistic best.  “When I do these clothes, I never think about sexualisation because, for me, a woman should be able to wear a latex dress without evoking sex in the mind of the men who look at her. Sexualisation is something that is through the eyes of men. We are still stuck in the idea that a girl who dresses sexy is a girl who sends a message she’s looking for sex. We need to change that.”

”For me, fashion needs to be fresh and light. Of course, it has to reflect the time we’re living in, a time when something’s changing, but I think we should not lose sight that we are only doing clothes. We are not saving lives. Sometimes, there are heavy moments in the day and we just need to calm down and do our job properly.”

“I really feel I’m independent here,” he agreed. “I talk about freedom, though in the end it’s not about freedom because I’m working for François-Henri Pinault [Chairman and Chief Executive of Kering]. It is more about trust and respect. I can really act at Saint Laurent like I’m working for myself because they trust me and I feel lucky that I’m in charge of everything here. I feel very privileged because I know that in any other house it may not be like that.”

One measure of Vaccarello’s reach was that, in the first ghastly flush of the pandemic, he chose to remove Saint Laurent from the Paris fashion calendar. “My first feeling was about being human and not being a tyrant and telling my team we need to do a collection in two months. For me, it was not human to say, ‘We’ve been stuck, now go to work, we need to sell clothes.’

adapted from BOF

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