Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/1546381
Vaccarello is the complete embodiment of the current moment, in which fashion has reached far beyond the runway. FROM TOP Stills from Saint Laurent Productions' The Shrouds, a film by David Cronenberg (2024), and Father Mother Sister Brother (2025), written and directed by Jim Jarmusch; the 2023 debut collection of Saint Laurent haute bijoux Laurent. Connor Storrie, a breakout star of Heated Rivalry, signed an early exclusivity deal with the house that must have garnered billions of impressions. Madonna is another recent A-list alignment. Her Vaccarello connection runs from a 2022 Art Basel Miami Beach exhibition curated with the designer (around a re-edition of her 1992 book "Sex"), through her scene-stealing presence at the September 2025 Spring/Summer 26 runway show, to posing alongside Vaccarello at this year's Met Gala. And then there's Sushi Park, which might be the single-most charming (if not irreverent) thing Vaccarello has done in a decade full of sly gestures. For years the designer was simply a regular at the unassuming strip-mall celebrity-haunt omakase counter on Sunset Boulevard; in 2025 he brought it to Paris, installing a full Sushi Park outpost—the restaurant's first permanent home outside LA—in the basement of Saint Laurent's Rive Droite flagship. It is a fairly minute, kind of humorous, and deeply sincere gesture from a designer who has otherwise built an empire on meticulous creative control and grand precision: proof that Vaccarello's taste extends well past the catwalk and into the things he simply and personally loves. That same appetite for cultural expansion built Saint Laurent Productions, a film financing arm Vaccarello launched in 2023—the first of its kind from a luxury house—which has already backed work by Pedro Almodóvar, David Cronenberg, and Jim Jarmusch, who, last year, took home the Golden Lion for Best Film for Father Mother Sister Brother at the Venice Film Festival. Suffice it to say, 10 years on, Saint Laurent is less a fashion house than a way of life. And Vaccarello is one of the world's only designers for whom this thinking—that a creative director can really and truly world-build away from the runway—is one hundred-percent proof of concept. C O U R T E S Y ( T H I S PAG E A N D O P P O S I T E ) O F S A I N T L AU R E N T 181 181