It was in 1966 that Yves Saint Laurent introduced Le Smoking, the tuxedo that recalibrated the codes of eveningwear by borrowing the rigour of masculine tailoring and refining it to the female form. Sixty years on, the house returned to that provocation as Anthony Vaccarello marked a decade at the helm of Saint Laurent with a collection that reaffirmed the suit as the brand’s axis.

The show opened with eight bare-chested trouser suits, their structure was softened only by skin. The lapels climbed high and close to the neck, framing the face before plunging into sharply cinched waists. Shoulders were exacting, trousers elongated and fluid, flaring androgyny and undeniably sensual

The collection unfolded with cinematic intentionality, a mode Vaccarello has increasingly made his own. This season, the narrative hovered between bourgeois composure and urban fragility. The specter of 1970s European cinema loomed large, particularly through the lens of Romy Schneider in Max et les Ferrailleurs by way of elegance and ennui.

Literary references deepened the mood. Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, with reckoning of desire and homosexual identity, and Tennessee Williams’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, a portrait of a drifting widow, gave this season an undercurrent of introspection.

Vaccarello distilled the emotional intensity of each text into material contrasts: lace lacquered with latex, its delicacy held taut, pulled into alignment with a discipline similar to tailoring. Accompanied by sucubus slips harnessed at the womb by a strapy leather belt, reminding us that sex isn’t back; it’s forever.

Hulking shearling coats were slung over shoulders, some fastened with leather bows studded like jewelry. Capacious furs, belted low at the hip, turned outerwear into shelter, as if protection itself were a luxury. Elsewhere, boxy patent raincoats in saturated burgundy and caramel offered pragmatic glamour.

If black anchored the tailoring in its familiar nocturne, color elsewhere bloomed with painter’s finesse: siennas, teals, French blues, and the deepest, grizzled browns. 

Heightening the cinematic mood is Vaccarello’s set, a modernist, streamlined dream of a modernist glass, wood and leather residence, privacy and intimacy revealed, a place which could be anywhere in the world. Yet Vaccarello places an oversized replica of a bust which once stood in Yves Saint Laurent’s apartment centre stage, while through the glass walls can be glimpsed the Eiffel Tower, reminding us that the home of Saint Laurent is always and forever Paris.