Anthony Vaccarello’s tribute to the late Yves Saint Laurent's enduring love affair with Marrakech comes full circle with a powerful statement of the future that lies ahead for the venerable French fashion house.
By HASSAN AL-SALEH
The circle is a universal symbol with inextricable meaning. It has no beginning and no end. It represents evolution as a process of transformation. It symbolizes, eternity, infinity, unity, totality, timelessness, the self. It is omnipresent.
In many ways, Anthony Vaccarello’s presentation of the men’s Spring-Summer 2023 collection for the illustrious house of Saint Laurent came full circle. It was held for the first time in the majestic and ancient desert city of Marrakech, a place of particular resonance for the late Yves Saint Laurent - a spiritual escape where he found inspiration and solitude. The collection was a beautiful, moving and mesmerising exploration of fashion where the lines of masculinity and femininity elegantly dissolved - firmly set in the future but harking back to a bygone era of timeless elegance entirely devoid of clichés.
The show was visceral and profound with the juxtaposition of the dramatic rocky landscape of the Agafay desert and the futuristic set designed in collaboration with London-based artist and designer Es Devlin, which included a vast illuminating disk emerging from a pool of water in a makeshift oasis as a metaphor for life’s fascinating complexity. Otherworldly by any measure.
In the words of American writer and composer Paul Bowles in his novel of alienation and existential despair, The Sheltering Sky, “We think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
Limitless. Limitless bounds of possibility was precisely what Vaccarello displayed. A powerful statement of the future that lies ahead, in rhythmic and cyclical movement.