Not often does something so perfectly imperfect make much sense. Your tongue feels tied even announcing it. The French have coined the term je sais ne quoi, rendering that moment or magical thing that someone has that just can't be put into words. And je sais ne quoi is just the summary to describe how we felt about Anthony Vaccarello and Saint Laurent's Womens Winter Collection 21.
It seems that every designer is dreaming of a party. With new restrictions and city lockdowns happening every other week, it comes to no surprise that every collection is inspired by the freedom to kiss, touch, dance and embrace that is putting everyone's pen on paper.
Saint Laurent's creative director Anthony Vaccarello injects a different mindset. He has dreamt of the girl in the present and not of the girl for the future. Cut to the show and we open to an expansive, almost extra-terrestrial vast landscape, breathtaking in its grandiose and stunningly perfect as it sets its scene. Eerie beats that backs as soundtrack gives you chills as Saint Laurent girls storm out from the hills and clouds, marching in lethally sky high stilettos and skirts with hemlines so short they could easily double as a waist belt.
“It’s the idea of a girl in a landscape where she doesn’t belong... The shapes of the 60s with the colours of the 80s,” says Vaccarello.
Inspired by codes drawn by Monsieur Yves Saint Laurent in the 60s and the fuck the pain away 90s electro rock icon Peaches, Vaccarello has revived and reimagined the fashion house's bourgeois code for the woman of today. Metallic stretch body suits, faux fur trimmed mini skirts, sequinned suits all embellished and drenched with diamonte four leaf chokers, the collection demonstrated the perfect amalgamation of the chic and trashy, seductive and modest, the elegant and the progressive. A brilliant clash of it's so wrong it's so right - Saint Laurent Womens Winter Collection 21 was an all round intoxicating concoction of true, je sais ne quoi.
View the show and collection on ysl.com and all official Saint Laurent channels.