Saint Laurent’s Champs-Élysées retailer showcases Anthony Vaccarello’s monumental imaginative and prescient

Yves Saint Laurent opened his first Rive Gauche retailer in September 1966 at 21 Rue de Tournon, in Paris’ sixth arrondissement. Positioned in a former vintage retailer in a Left Financial institution neighbourhood largely identified on the time for its distinctly bohemian clientele – the arrondissement can also be dwelling to the Beaux-Arts de Paris artwork college – it will be the primary boutique to promote ready-to-wear clothes by an high fashion designer. ‘I’d had sufficient of creating clothes for jaded billionaires,’ mentioned the designer, who went on to open Rive Gauche shops in London and New York. In 1969, he opened an outpost for males.

A 2011 exhibition on Rive Gauche, subtitled ‘La révolution de la mode’ (the style revolution), proves the style retailer is as a lot part of Saint Laurent historical past as lower or silhouette. It’s a mantle picked up by the present inventive director Anthony Vaccarello, who every season reinterprets components of Yves Saint Laurent’s oeuvre in his personal seductive type – befitting the home’s Parisian origins, the Belgian designer’s collections have largely been proven with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop, breaking into its glimmering gentle present on the assortment’s climax.

Saint Laurent’s monumental new Paris retailer

In 2019, Vaccarello opened his personal model, Rive Droite (‘Proper Financial institution’), throughout the River Seine on Rue Saint-Honoré, taking up the previous location of cult idea retailer Colette. Impressed by Rive Gauche’s democratic method, the wunderkammer- like retailer homes one-off tasks and collaborations, which could span exhibitions, artwork books or varied Saint Laurent-branded ephemera, from skateboards and bicycles to audio system and occasional cups. In the meantime, a sister retailer was opened later that 12 months on LA’s Rodeo Drive. ‘Saint Laurent was a really youthful model within the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies,’ Vaccarello mentioned on the time. ‘It shouldn’t turn into one thing sacred and untouchable.’

The home’s newest opening is extra bold in scale. Positioned on historic Paris buying boulevard Champs-Élysées, it marks the primary full-scale showcase of Vaccarello’s reimagined ‘retailer idea’ for the home (a teaser got here in 2022 with the opening of a retailer on Boulevard Saint-Germain, providing ‘a primary glimpse of what is going to evolve into his new architectural imaginative and prescient for Saint Laurent’). It comes because the Champs-Élysées enjoys one thing of a renaissance as quite a few style openings, alongside some main renovations – just like the huge new Louis Vuitton ‘undertaking’ at quantity 103 – anticipate the arrival of the Olympics this summer time.

‘I wished to grasp certainly one of Yves Saint Laurent’s needs when he arrived in Paris and mentioned he wished his title to be written in fiery letters on the Champs-Élysées,’ says Vaccarello of the outpost, situated at quantity 123. Behind the Nineteenth-century constructing’s ornamental Haussmannian façade – itself renovated for the undertaking – are a number of stone-clad rooms that home Vaccarello’s newest collections and mirror the designer’s rigorous, monumental method to design, so usually outlined by the visible influence of a silhouette. His latest menswear exhibits, with their dramatically pitched shoulders and narrow-waisted tailoring, are a superb instance of this philosophy, set in opposition to modernist, temple-like present places, equivalent to Tadao Ando’s concrete-clad rotunda in Paris gallery Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Assortment or Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1968.

Certainly, the stark structure of the latter (Van der Rohe’s final main development and a permanent emblem of the modernist college) impressed Vaccarello’s monumental S/S 2024 womenswear present set, produced by Bureau Betak, which featured a sequence of monumental stone and marble partitions lining the runway. ‘A modernist set of kaleidoscopic, mineral surfaces, affording views of the Eiffel Tower whereas highlighting its tender magnificence,’ is how the home described it on the time. 

This similar fixation with floor and supplies extends to the shop, which will be seen as an architectural continuation of the set (Vaccarello famous that the S/S24 assortment signalled one thing of a shift in method, shifting in the direction of simplicity and pragmatism, albeit instilled with the ‘assertive sophistication’ synonymous with the home). Undulating textures of marble and stone dominate the double-height lobby area and will be discovered all through the four-floored retailer, which is punctuated by easy rails of clothes. The result’s a seductive assemblage of surfaces: some uncooked, cracked and brutal, others softer, like an unlimited gray carpet flecked with blue, evoking hunks of lapis lazuli nonetheless embedded in rock. Vaccarello says he hopes to seize a temper of ‘sophistication, modernity and timelessness’.

The area can also be populated with works by American sculptor Donald Judd, together with a pair of painted aluminium chairs, whereas wood seating by Austrian-born American architect Rudolph Schindler and massive custom-made marble show tables proceed the temper of architectural discount. On the higher flooring, a VIP suite (a recent evocation of Yves Saint Laurent’s high fashion salon) options an unlimited round mirror, whereas glass doorways lead out to a lush non-public backyard. Vaccarello says he hopes individuals ‘overlook about their telephones, [and just] benefit from the expertise of the area’.

And, if Yves Saint Laurent’s title shouldn’t be solely ablaze within the fiery letters that he desired, then a neon gentle sculpture by Welsh conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans hanging within the lobby – an illuminated assortment of intertwining shapes and types – affords a gleaming waymarker for Vaccarello’s luminous architectural imaginative and prescient forward, the place he reimagines the couturier’s legacy anew.

A model of this text seems within the March 2024 Fashion Subject of Wallpaper* accessible in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple Information +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* as we speak.