Wallpaper* Design Awards '25: Saint Laurent’s designer doppelgangers

Saint Laurent S/S 2025 glasses which won a Wallpaper Design Award 2025

The glasses which featured in Saint Laurent’s S/S 2025 runway show, recalling house founder Yves Saint Laurent’s signature thick-rimmed frames

(Image credit: Photography by Neil Godwin at Future Studios for Wallpaper*)

By Jack Moss

published 27 January 2025

in Features

There was a feeling of circularity to Anthony Vaccarrello’s S/S 2025 show for Saint Laurent, held at the house’s Left Bank headquarters for the first time since the Belgian designer staged his debut there eight years prior. In the time between, Vaccarrello has proved increasingly adept at translating the codes of the Yves Saint Laurent – a mood of powerful sensuality and gilded opulence, a clash of the masculine and feminine, an unabashed use of colour – into a sharp, contemporary vision which often centres on the impact of a singular silhouette.

Design Awards 2025: Saint Laurent’s designer doppelgangers

Saint Laurent S/S 2025 runway show — Bella Hadid, in her return to the runway, became an Yves Saint Laurent doppelganger, donning the couturier’s signature tailored uniform

For S/S 2025, Vaccarrello evoked Yves Saint Laurent more directly, sending out a cast of models wearing riffs on the couturier’s personal uniform: louche, often double-breasted tailoring, wide across the shoulders and fluid in shape, worn with a tie. Among them was the model Bella Hadid in a rare runway appearance, donning a pair of Yves Saint Laurent’s signature thick-rimmed glasses.

‘No other house is as linked to a quintessential female archetype as Saint Laurent, whose ideal woman is more complex than the seductive perfection of classic muses,’ said Vaccarello of his era-spanning homage, a collection we’ve chosen to award for its dramatic doppelgangers. ‘As Yves Saint Laurent could have said: I am the Saint Laurent woman.’⁠

Find all the Wallpaper* Design Award 2025 winners in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

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Jack Moss is the Fashion Features Editor at Wallpaper*, joining the team in 2022. Having previously been the digital features editor at AnOther and digital editor at 10 and 10 Men magazines, he has also contributed to titles including i-D, Dazed, 10 Magazine, Mr Porter’s The Journal and more, while also featuring in Dazed: 32 Years Confused: The Covers, published by Rizzoli. He is particularly interested in the moments when fashion intersects with other creative disciplines – notably art and design – as well as championing a new generation of international talent and reporting from international fashion weeks. Across his career, he has interviewed the fashion industry’s leading figures, including Rick Owens, Pieter Mulier, Jonathan Anderson, Grace Wales Bonner, Christian Lacroix, Kate Moss and Manolo Blahnik.