There were plenty of very fine black pantsuits in Milan, but they don’t quite carry the same mystique and pulse-pounding chic as one from Saint Laurent, marking the 60th anniversary of “Le Smoking,” one of founder Yves Saint Laurent’s most iconic signatures.
“It made women more powerful — in their conquest,” the legendary couturier told WWD in a 2005 interview, recalling how controversial his softened version of the masculine tuxedo was in the 1960s. “I remember when Françoise Hardy wore a Smoking to the opera in Paris: scandal. People screamed and hollered. It was an outrage.”
Anthony Vaccarello, marking his 10th anniversary at the design helm this year, said backstage he had already started working on tuxedos for fall 2026 when he became aware of the milestone.
“But since there’s still this past that haunts me a little bit at Saint Laurent, I feel it’s an obligation to be connected to something, to the history of this house,” he mused. “But I always try to move beyond that nostalgia to make it contemporary.”
Vaccarello has put Smokings on the Saint Laurent runway before, but this time he also created daytime suits with the same sensual, elongated cut and plunging neckline in fluid pinstripe fabrics and minimal interlining.
The other half of that main idea was to give structure to lace by hardening it with latex, and tailoring it into cardigan-like jackets and straight skirts. He also delivered sultry, barely-there lace slipdresses in those offbeat color combinations that are as immediately identifiable at YSL as the Opium fragrance piped into the vast runway theater, set up like a home Ludwig Mies van der Rohe might have built.
Sleek chignons, smokey eyes and chunky gold jewelry, including dove-shaped earrings as big as brooches, also telegraphed the spirit of the house, while the sexy slingbacks with long snouts were pure Vaccarello.
As an interlude, there were opulent shearlings as enveloping as a blanket, batwing bomber jackets and vaguely medieval tunics, belted low on the hips.
The designer acknowledges that numerous brands are turning out Smokings, “but I think a Saint Laurent tuxedo is still something else.”
Why?
“Because it’s better cut,” he replied. “There’s always that sleeve.…I think you can recognize a Saint Laurent jacket and Saint Laurent pants. On the street, I see copies of Saint Laurent, but I can tell you it’s not the same.”
And what gives the real thing that je ne sais quoi?
“It’s the house secret,” he said with a grin.
It’s no secret that Saint Laurent under Vaccarello is one of the rare houses to never feature handbags on the runway, even if they are, along with shoes, the bread and butter of the business.
But wait, aren’t those models in the finale Smokings toting clutch bags?
“It’s a wallet,” Vaccarello clarified. “She has a phone, a credit card, a photo of her children, and that’s it.”
