Forty years after launching his iconic Opium fragrance in New York with a huge party in September 1978 held at New York City’s South Street Seaport, the French fashion house Saint Laurent came back to the city that never sleeps and showed for the first time its collection in the Big Apple.
For his first menswear show, the Saint Laurent designer Anthony Vaccarello choose a backdrop of illuminated Manhattan skyscrapers, in Liberty Park in New Jersey, where he had erected a huge scaffolded structure with a gleaming black marble runway. Vaccarello said he wanted to represent “the idea of New York, the idea of the icons of New York in the ‘70s”. From leather pants to animal prints, tuxedo jackets in grey snakeskin, crushed velvet, or in leather, metallic trousers and flared pants, vintage details and American Indian collars, a wind from the Wild West blew through the Belgian designer’s signature rock ‘n’ roll style on models with 1970s-style long windswept hair. And in a spectacular finale, boys came out and made their way down the runway in high-shine leather trousers sans tops, their torsos covered in silver paint and glitter, bringing the show into a sexy, liberated and definitively modern era, words that could describe the Big Apple itself.
©Saint Laurent
