Saint Laurent’s Champs-Élysées store showcases Anthony Vaccarello’s monumental vision

Yves Saint Laurent opened his first Rive Gauche store in September 1966 at 21 Rue de Tournon, in Paris’ 6th arrondissement. Located in a former antique store in a Left Bank neighbourhood largely known at the time for its distinctly bohemian clientele – the arrondissement is also home to the Beaux-Arts de Paris art school – it would be the first boutique to sell ready-to-wear clothing by an haute couture designer. ‘I’d had enough of making dresses for jaded billionaires,’ said the designer, who went on to open Rive Gauche stores in London and New York. In 1969, he opened an outpost for men.

A 2011 exhibition on Rive Gauche, subtitled ‘La révolution de la mode’ (the fashion revolution), proves the fashion store is as much a part of Saint Laurent history as cut or silhouette. It’s a mantle picked up by the current creative director Anthony Vaccarello, who each season reinterprets elements of Yves Saint Laurent’s oeuvre in his own seductive style – befitting the house’s Parisian origins, the Belgian designer’s collections have largely been shown with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop, breaking into its glimmering light show at the collection’s climax.

Saint Laurent’s monumental new Paris store

In 2019, Vaccarello opened his own version, Rive Droite (‘Right Bank’), across the River Seine on Rue Saint-Honoré, taking over the former location of cult concept store Colette. Inspired by Rive Gauche’s democratic approach, the wunderkammer- like store houses one-off projects and collaborations, which might span exhibitions, art books or various Saint Laurent-branded ephemera, from skateboards and bicycles to speakers and coffee cups. Meanwhile, a sister store was opened later that year on LA’s Rodeo Drive. ‘Saint Laurent was a very youthful brand in the 1960s and 1970s,’ Vaccarello said at the time. ‘It shouldn’t become something sacred and untouchable.’

The house’s latest opening is more ambitious in scale. Located on historic Paris shopping boulevard Champs-Élysées, it marks the first full-scale showcase of Vaccarello’s reimagined ‘store concept’ for the house (a teaser came in 2022 with the opening of a store on Boulevard Saint-Germain, offering ‘a first glimpse of what will evolve into his new architectural vision for Saint Laurent’). It comes as the Champs-Élysées enjoys something of a renaissance as numerous fashion openings, alongside some major renovations – like the vast new Louis Vuitton ‘project’ at number 103 – anticipate the arrival of the Olympics this summer.

‘I wanted to realise one of Yves Saint Laurent’s wishes when he arrived in Paris and said he wanted his name to be written in fiery letters on the Champs-Élysées,’ says Vaccarello of the outpost, located at number 123. Behind the 19th-century building’s decorative Haussmannian façade – itself renovated for the project – are several stone-clad rooms that house Vaccarello’s latest collections and reflect the designer’s rigorous, monumental approach to design, so often defined by the visual impact of a silhouette. His recent menswear shows, with their dramatically pitched shoulders and narrow-waisted tailoring, are a good example of this philosophy, set against modernist, temple-like show locations, such as Tadao Ando’s concrete-clad rotunda in Paris gallery Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection or Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1968.

Indeed, the stark architecture of the latter (Van der Rohe’s last major construction and an enduring emblem of the modernist school) inspired Vaccarello’s monumental S/S 2024 womenswear show set, produced by Bureau Betak, which featured a series of enormous stone and marble walls lining the runway. ‘A modernist set of kaleidoscopic, mineral surfaces, affording views of the Eiffel Tower while highlighting its soft elegance,’ is how the house described it at the time. 

This same fixation with surface and materials extends to the store, which can be seen as an architectural continuation of the set (Vaccarello noted that the S/S24 collection signalled something of a shift in approach, moving towards simplicity and pragmatism, albeit instilled with the ‘assertive sophistication’ synonymous with the house). Undulating textures of marble and stone dominate the double-height foyer space and can be found throughout the four-floored store, which is punctuated by simple rails of clothing. The result is a seductive assemblage of surfaces: some raw, cracked and brutal, others softer, like a vast grey carpet flecked with blue, evoking hunks of lapis lazuli still embedded in rock. Vaccarello says he hopes to capture a mood of ‘sophistication, modernity and timelessness’.

The space is also populated with works by American sculptor Donald Judd, including a pair of painted aluminium chairs, while wooden seating by Austrian-born American architect Rudolph Schindler and enormous custom-made marble display tables continue the mood of architectural reduction. On the upper floor, a VIP suite (a contemporary evocation of Yves Saint Laurent’s haute couture salon) features an enormous circular mirror, while glass doors lead out to a lush private garden. Vaccarello says he hopes people ‘forget about their phones, [and just] enjoy the experience of the space’.

And, if Yves Saint Laurent’s name is not entirely ablaze in the fiery letters that he desired, then a neon light sculpture by Welsh conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans hanging in the foyer – an illuminated collection of intertwining shapes and forms – offers a gleaming waymarker for Vaccarello’s luminous architectural vision ahead, where he reimagines the couturier’s legacy anew.

A version of this article appears in the March 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper* available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.