Inside The New Saint Laurent

Word comes that Anthony Vaccarello, the new creative director of Saint Laurent, would like to meet at the house. His own house, I wonder? No. The house of Saint Laurent, as in the headquarters of the label? Yes. But which? There are three houses of Saint Laurent, scattered across Paris. Each is different, in usage and in mood: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. This is “Saint” Laurent we’re talking about, bestower of the contemporary wardrobe, the man who put women into pantsuits, a tortured artist in couture and the inventor of 20th-century style. No designer has ever been closer to godliness, in the eyes of the fashion industry, and specifically the French, than he. The first house of Saint Laurent is located on the tony Rue de l’Université on Paris’s Left Bank — the Rive Gauche, which Saint Laurent named his ready-to-wear line after in 1966. It’s around the corner from the apartment of Karl Lagerfeld, the designer’s sometime friend and most-of-the-time bitter rival; Yves Saint Laurent himself lived in an apartment on the Rue de Babylone, just a few blocks away. This location is the creative hub of the company, housed in a 17th-century hôtel particulier, painstakingly refurbished and planted with one of those coldly geometric, Le Notre-ish box-hedge gardens. Vaccarello’s predecessor, Hedi Slimane, determined the décor and the general ambience of sleek modernity and distinctly French formality. But Slimane was based in Los Angeles. Today, it’s where Vaccarello works, with his studios traditionally divided into tailleur and flou, like a true French haute couture house. Read more at The New York Times.