24 Nov 2025
There are places that hold a certain charge, as if memory itself lingers in the air. Earlier this season, Saint Laurent returned to one such place: Villa Oasis, the Marrakech home where Monsieur Yves Saint Laurent once reshaped his vision of color. For Winter 25, Anthony Vaccarello chose this charged landscape not for nostalgia, but for its power—an origin point of chromatic intensity that still vibrated with creative force.
The campaign unfolded not as a tribute, but as a confrontation. Sharp silhouettes cut across planes of intense color, photographed by Drew Vickers in compositions that felt almost tectonic. Every surface carried the sensual contradiction of Marrakech: ochre walls radiating heat, zellige tiles saturated to near surrealism, the fuchsia glow of dusk folding into the dense blue of the garden. These were not memories. These were elements alive again, burning in the present.
Villa Oasis had not hosted a campaign since Yves’ passing, and its return stirred an emotional tension between the historical and the contemporary. Vaccarello centred this tension deliberately. Rather than soften the legacy, he stripped away sentiment, allowing the setting’s visual extremes to collide with silhouettes as sharp as shards. The result was a Winter 25 aesthetic defined by friction—color pushed to its electric limit, lines drawn to their most essential form.
Arnaud Michaux’s collages deepened the intensity. Images were sliced, duplicated, layered like chromatic echoes. This treatment dismantled the idea of a single viewpoint; instead, color became kinetic, rhythmical, closer to a sensation than a surface. Winter, in the Saint Laurent universe, was no longer muted—it was incandescent.
The talents—Ajus Samuel, Lota Blaskovic, Noor Khan, Libby Taverner—moved through these planes like embodiments of the palette itself. Their presence grounded the visuals, giving the campaign a human pulse within the saturated abstraction.
Winter 25 for Saint Laurent became more than a seasonal vision. It became a return to the moment where Yves Saint Laurent first discovered what color could do, and a reminder that such discoveries never truly belong to the past. Under Vaccarello’s direction, the campaign stood radical and electric, illuminating a truth long embedded in the house’s DNA: color is not simply chosen. It is encountered, absorbed, and then transformed.
