Saint Laurent blooms with oversized drama, ’80s power and Madonna in Paris show

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PARIS (AP) — At Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello dialed up the drama Monday night at Paris Fashion Week with a set of gigantic white flowers that loomed like a cinematic backdrop. If the blooms hinted at delicacy, the clothes told another story: big, bold, and unafraid of excess. Madonna was in attendance, and at times she stole the focus — a burst of razzmatazz on and off the runway that amped the show’s already operatic charge.

Floor-sweeping gowns rippled with frills, evoking 1970s archival pieces and petals unfurling at twilight. They weren’t garments so much as visual arguments — “beauty as plural,” the house notes declared — gowns that embodied Vaccarello’s belief that esthetics are a language.

The designer’s penchant for oversize, a through-line of his tenure, reached new heights. Giant crisp bow collars, sharp enough to cut the air, swung the silhouettes firmly into the early ’80s, echoing the exaggerated power shoulders that have become a Saint Laurent signature under his watch. Sheeny trench coats, meanwhile, clung lean and skeletal, their crinkled fabric folding like the contours of a rose.

Vaccarello mined Saint Laurent’s heritage — echoes of John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X,” of Mapplethorpe’s leather-clad heroines, of Rive Gauche’s bourgeois chic — but stripped it of nostalgia. He prefers what he has often called “no ornamentation, no decoration, no … nothing,” letting the silhouette itself speak.

It was pure theater. A Saint Laurent woman who is both heroine and classic, a figure of resistance and allure, swept across the runway. Vaccarello reminded the industry why his Saint Laurent is not just about clothes, but about style as discourse — garments as arguments, couture as conversation.