Anthony Vaccarello came up through La Cambre in Brussels, where he enrolled in 2000 to study sculpture before switching to the fashion course and graduating with honors in 2006. His graduate collection at the Hyères festival drew the attention of Karl Lagerfeld, who offered him a fur design position at Fendi, where he spent two years working on pelts and shearling under Lagerfeld in Rome.

The signature that emerged from those Fendi years and the eponymous label that followed was a short, hip-cut dress in black leather, asymmetric at the shoulder or hip, sliced open along the thigh, the body of the woman treated as the line of the garment itself.

Vaccarello unveiled his first women’s collection in January 2009 and began showing during Paris Fashion Week in March 2011, the same year he won the ANDAM Fashion Award and a €200,000 endowment in July 2011. The clothes traded in cut-out jersey, single-shoulder mini dresses, and slashed leather, a vocabulary worn most visibly by Anja Rubik, including the hip bone-baring dress at the 2012 Met Gala.

Where Phoebe Philo at Céline was reworking proportion through camel coats and flat shoes, Vaccarello took the opposite tack, pushing the late-1990s Tom Ford Gucci silhouette into something starker and more graphic, with the prize money following the work rather than preceding it.

By September 2014 he was producing a capsule for Versus Versace, named creative director of the diffusion line in 2015, then appointed creative director of Saint Laurent in April 2016, at which point he closed his own label.

Vaccarello took over Saint Laurent in spring 2016 at the age of 34, hired by Francesca Bellettini, and the house has since grown into a $3 billion business within the Kering portfolio, succeeding Hedi Slimane.

His debut, shown at the Saint Laurent headquarters on the Rue de Bellechasse, a former monastery, opened with a puff-shouldered black leather dress with a sweetheart neckline and plunging V, a nod to a 1982 Yves Saint Laurent collection, followed by lamé minis, smoking suits, and cigarette pants in the same hard, nocturnal palette.

Across nearly a decade he has reactivated the 1980s Saint Laurent codes that Slimane had set aside, expanded the house into film through Saint Laurent Productions, which presented The Shrouds by David Cronenberg, Parthenope by Paolo Sorrentino, and Emilia Pérez by Jacques Audiard at Cannes in 2023, and staged shows at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, placing the house inside the Parisian frame Yves Saint Laurent himself had occupied.