Capture from Saint Laurent YouTube video, watch the full runway below.
Anthony Vaccarello’s Spring/Summer 2027 show for Saint Laurent was covered in gold and ended in black. Read as a farewell, it was also a very precise one.
On September 29, as dusk fell over the Trocadéro, Anthony Vaccarello presented what much of the industry believes was his last collection for Saint Laurent. The house has confirmed nothing. Vaccarello has said nothing. But fashion reads signs, and this show was full of them.
The first look
The first look didn’t walk. It was revealed.
As the livestream began, the camera moved slowly through the setting until the frame aligned: one of the three enormous gold chandeliers hanging over the runway settled at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, glittering behind it, and became a skirt. For a moment, the tower appeared to be wearing a gown of gold and crystal.
The French have long called the Eiffel Tower la Dame de fer, the Iron Lady. For more than a century she has been the most photographed woman in Paris, and arguably in the world, and for years she has been the silent witness to Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent shows. Before dressing anyone else, he dressed her. It was a gesture of courtesy, almost chivalry: the first gown of the evening went to the lady of the house.
The choice of a chandelier adds a further layer. It is the emblem of the couture salon, the room where clothes were once presented to clients one by one. Hung on the city’s monument, it brought the salon out into the night and dedicated the collection to the place that had framed it. And for a designer fluent in film, opening the show with a camera movement was no accident. The story began with a shot. It would end with a cut.
A collection made of one colour
Then came the gold. Forty-nine of the 59 looks were gold. Rather than a theme, it was a discipline: gold in every texture the atelier could find. There was lamé and brocade, bubbling cloqué and guipure lace, metallic cotton, and latex coated in real gold leaf. Some golds were bright, some burnished almost to brown, some crinkled like foil. On them were the house’s foundations, the saharienne, the trench, the blouse and the wrap skirt, cut with the broad shoulders and long, assured lines that have defined Vaccarello’s decade at the house.
Restricting a collection to one colour is a familiar Vaccarello method: take a single idea and exhaust it. But the choice of gold, this season, of all seasons, invites another reading.
The last coat
In the decorative arts, gilding is the final gesture. A frame is carved, sanded and prepared, a statue cast and finished, an icon painted, and only then is the gold leaf laid on. It’s the moment when an object stops being a work in progress and becomes a finished work. Gold is what you apply when there is nothing left to add.
Seen this way, the collection reads less like a celebration than like a conclusion. After ten years, Vaccarello seems to have taken the house’s vocabulary, the jackets, coats and silhouettes he has refined since 2016, and gilded it, as one would a finished body of work. The gold-leafed latex makes the idea almost literal: the gilder’s technique, applied to clothing.
It also explains why gold rather than any other colour. Gold doesn’t tarnish. It’s the material we choose for what we intend to keep. The show notes put it with unusual melancholy: “What passes sometimes leaves more light than what remains.”
Cut to black
Then the gold stopped. The last ten looks were black, opened by Anja Rubik in an ’80s velvet skirt suit. Velvet suits with crystal buttons and taffeta bows followed, ending in sheer evening dresses. Against the night sky, they almost disappeared into the lacquered runway, visible only in the reflections of the chandeliers and the tower.
In cinema, the end has a name: cut to black. The reference is not idle here. Vaccarello is the designer who took Saint Laurent into filmmaking, founding a production company within the house and backing directors such as Pedro Almodóvar and David Cronenberg. A designer fluent in the language of film ended his show the way films end.
The black is also a homecoming. Black is the colour of Saint Laurent itself: the colour of Yves’s Le Smoking, and the colour Vaccarello has returned to more than any other. After the gilding comes the essence. If this was a farewell, he handed the house back as he found it at its core: in black, intact.
The keys
The final gestures were in the same register. Charlotte Gainsbourg performed over the finale, before a front row that included Kate Moss, Rosé and Zoë Kravitz, and the audience rose to its feet. As he took his bow, Vaccarello walked to the front row and handed his young son something that looked like a set of keys. His team later described it as a good-luck charm. Whatever it was, few in the room missed the image of someone passing something on.
A signature, either way
Whether or not Saint Laurent announces a change, the collection stands on its own as a statement about endings: how to finish something well. It opened with a camera movement that dressed the Iron Lady in gold, then laid gold over ten years of work like a final coat, and closed in black, the colour of the house and of the moment the screen goes dark. A farewell told entirely in fabric, colour and light, framed like a film from the first shot to the last. Exactly the way Saint Laurent would have wanted it.
