Anthony Vaccarello’s supposed swan song for Saint Laurent ran on pure bullion. And the final message: “Subtle? Never heard of her”

This is not Trump World. There is only so much gold one can display before it ceases to be wealth and becomes a hoarding disorder. But Anthony Vaccarello did prove that gold can do more than dominate an entire collection—it can practically demand sunglasses, at night. For his Saint Laurent spring/summer 2027 collection—widely rumoured to be his final season—Mr Vaccarello sent out enough gold-coloured clothes to put Poh Heng (宝兴) in perpetual envy. The sheer abundance of gold was not only blinding as an aesthetic thesis, but also as a potential sign-off. The speculation was still whispered up to the show that this was Mr Vaccarello’s last collection for the house. It is not clear why a swan song, if it really was, needed a perilous line where absolute opulence collapses straight into high-octane vulgarity. Some fans online read it as confidence. It sure was, but what was Mr Vaccarello confident about? That intensity could substitute for distinction? But fashion is not the firing up of a furnace and watch gold melt. The irony is that Yves Saint Laurent’s greatest strength was not only about volume and saturation. It has been about precision without the chromatic concentration.

In these wild political climes, the surfeit of gold, even of the adhesive-applied kind, is a symbol of wealth and power, perhaps it is unsurprising that fashion, too, required a similar, even more imbued ostentation. There is a vast, unbridgeable gulf between the gilt-drenched maximalism of a private Palm Beach ballroom and the understated, sovereign reserve that French luxury ought to command and hold on to. Historically, the allure of Parisian maisons—even during their most decadent eras—has always been of a certain insular restraint. It whispers, not shrieks. Yet, here we have the quintessential French luxury brand drenched in the most radiant of the metallics. So what happens if Saint Laurent becomes a precious metal? Not a garment painted gold, but an entire house transmuted into gold. The collection was built around trench coats, safari jackets, pencil skirts, cocktail dresses, gilded to the last square inch (except, curiously, ten outfits in black). Most designers use gold as punctuation. Mr Vaccarello used it as grammar. A little gold suggests prestige. Too much gold starts offering insecurity

This was not Valentino of the past with an entirely red collection. Red is a rather ‘traditional’ colour and it is extraordinarily mutable. A Valentino red dress and a Valentino red coat can still read very differently because red interacts dramatically with volume, shape, proportion, and movement. The eye can still perceive silhouette. Red absorbs; it breathes, and it allows the eye to trace the architecture of a dart or the fall of a heavy crepe. Gold behaves differently. To call gold a mere colour is to underestimate its power—its surface condition. It reflects, glints, and shines. It offers light to the viewer or admirer. Therefore, it competes with form and detail, rather than serving them. It was hard not only on the eyes if one watches the entire show, it was a challenge to make out what the clothes really were and what they entailed. When the model walked in liquid gold lamé, metallic brocade, gilded leather, or reflective organza, we frequently saw the gold first and the garment second. And it became clear to us: Gold is greedy. It demands attention. Because every look was competing on the same visual register. When we were putting together the runway photos for this commentary, our optic nerves wanted to retire to Johor Bahru.

If we strip away the spectacle, the collection amounted to a fairly straightforward proposition: let’s look back at Anthony Vaccarello’s tenure. A gold-dipped greatest hits album. He did not show a new Saint Laurent woman, not a new silhouette, and certainly not new tension. Instead, he assembled familiar Saint Laurent pieces, and ran them through a single metallic filter. This was not just Mr Vaccarello repeating his favourite trenchcoat or pencil skirt. Repetition itself is not necessarily a problem. Many, many designers these days repeat. When Martin Margiela revisited tailoring, we often learned something new about it. When Miuccia Prada goes back to bourgeois dressing, we often acquire something new about that too. The question is whether repetition generates meaning. Many fans saw it as “rich”. For us, compressed. Self-archiving under the glare of gold. If the gold is functioning as a greatest-hits framework, then it isn’t just flattening individual garments. It is levelling the history of the house.

Screen shot: saintlaurent/YouTube. Photos: Saint Laurent