Le Smoking has appeared in every Saint Laurent women's collection since 1966. Over sixty years, it has been reinterpreted in every possible register — as a shrunken evening jacket, as an oversized tailored suit, as a velvet double-breasted, as a sequined closing gesture. Under Vaccarello, Le Smoking functions not as a museum piece but as a living argument: that the most powerful garment available to a woman remains the one that the world originally said was not hers to wear. Winter 2026 — organized around the anniversary of Le Smoking's introduction — opened with a phalanx of black suits, strongly shouldered and narrowly cut, closing with a reimagined Le Smoking delivered with "an insouciant shrug over a traditional swagger." The set: a glass and wood modernist residence, an oversized replica of the bust from Yves Saint Laurent's own apartment at center stage, the Eiffel Tower visible through the transparent walls. A reminder, in Vaccarello's own words, that "the true home of Saint Laurent will forever be Paris."

Spring 2026 showed approximately one third of its looks in black leather — tailored bomber jackets, pencil skirts, trench coats, bustier tops, vests, belts, and caps in heavy black leather. Vaccarello described the models in the show notes as "black leather-clad princesses à la Mapplethorpe." The reference was to Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs: black leather as both armor and second skin, power as formal gesture rather than performance. The remainder of the collection deployed Rive Gauche silhouettes in bold jewel tones — emerald green, blackberry, saffron — the full-blooded Left Bank bourgeois glamour of the 1980s translated for 2026. Oversize bows, big shoulder pads, high-volume gowns. The collection was an argument for fashion as discourse: "a language that transcends the boundaries of art, society, and politics," Vaccarello wrote. The Saint Laurent woman as "singular yet multifaceted, a figure of strength and sophistication." Le Smoking had said the same thing in 1966, in black wool. The vocabulary has not changed. It has only accumulated depth.

For Winter 2026, Vaccarello stripped Saint Laurent to its most foundational elements: structure, purity, uncompromising tailoring. The cinematic reference was Romy Schneider — specifically her role in Claude Sautet's 1971 film Max et les Ferrailleurs, with its "signature elegance tinged with ennui." Literary touchpoints came from Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. The dominant silhouette: strongly shouldered black suits, single and double-breasted, their severity echoing the late 1970s and early 1980s while remaining precisely contemporary. The formal innovation: silicone-coated sheer lace that held its form with the severity of tailoring — "fragility as force," as one reviewer described it. The palette broke from the black with painterly hues of burnt sienna, teal, French blue, and deep brown. "Bourgeois stillness with urban vulnerability" — Vaccarello's working phrase for a collection that positioned the Saint Laurent woman as permanently between two registers, always exactly herself.

In April 2023, Saint Laurent launched Saint Laurent Productions — a production company for art cinema, with Anthony Vaccarello designing costumes for every film produced. The company's first projects were two short films: Pedro Almodóvar's Strange Way of Life, which premiered at Cannes 2023, and Jean-Luc Godard's posthumous Phony Wars. Subsequent projects included David Cronenberg's The Shrouds, Paolo Sorrentino's Parthenope, and Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez — which received a Jury Prize at Cannes 2024 and an Academy Award nomination at the 97th ceremony. The move is deeply coherent with the house's history: Yves Saint Laurent dressed Catherine Deneuve for Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour, Helmut Newton photographed the smoking for French Vogue in 1975, and the relationship between this house and cinema has always been structural rather than opportunistic. Saint Laurent Productions makes it permanent.

Vaccarello's Saint Laurent has its own formal vocabulary, distinct from the YSL archive without departing from it. Sheer: the Fall 2024 "Collant" collection was constructed almost entirely from hosiery-weight transparency, garments suggesting "the mere idea of clothing" — what Vaccarello called "the opposite of commercial — everything was ephemeral and fragile." Leather: the permanent material, the skin before clothing, deployed season after season in increasingly precise formal propositions. The body: Vaccarello's collections consistently address the body directly, never disguising it, always framing it. Night: the Saint Laurent register since Yves himself. And black — the house's most essential color, chosen, in Vaccarello's words, "for its ability to hold contradiction: classic and iconoclastic, empowering and vulnerable simultaneously." The soundtracks by SebastiAn, who has scored most of the runway shows, complete the cinematic atmosphere that Vaccarello considers as essential to the collection as the clothes themselves.

Spring 2025 — shown in the courtyard of the Saint Laurent headquarters in Paris, under a golden oculus — was described by Vaccarello in his own words as "a version of Yves's own look — the suit, the dress shirt, the tie, the sunglasses — but worn by a woman. It was as though there were an army of Yves Saint Laurents on the runway." The collection taught a lesson in power dressing that was both a historical homage and a contemporary argument: that the most modern thing a woman can wear in 2025 remains what the most radical thing a woman could wear in 1966. The Saint Laurent house code has never required reinvention. It has only required fidelity — and the conviction that the woman who wears it deserves to be treated as Yves Saint Laurent described her: not as a fashion client, but as someone he wanted "to accompany in the great movement for liberation."