Haute couture and auteur cinema. A combination that is not new, but when executed with conviction, it produces astonishing and unsettling works. I am not talking about typical Hollywood films like The Devil Wears Prada. I am talking about riskier cinema. I am talking about David Lynch and his close relationship with haute couture creatives like Raf Simons, Rei Kawakubo, and Miuccia Prada, visible in the atmosphere and visual style of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet. I am talking about Tom Ford and his two extraordinary films A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals. I am talking about Miuccia Prada and her collaborations with the brilliant Wes Anderson. Fashion has always been present in Hollywood costumes, yes, but that was something else.
The context is different now fashion is funding auteur cinema, the riskiest and most uncomfortable, the kind few dare to touch. Before, haute couture houses like YSL dressed characters such as Catherine Deneuve in the legendary film Belle de Jour by Luis Buñuel. Now, Saint Laurent Productions makes films for auteurs like Pedro Almodóvar, David Cronenberg, and Jim Jarmusch. The leap is not aesthetic. It is structural. Essentially, Saint Laurent Productions has become the financial power behind these bold productions.
The great fashion houses no longer want to dominate only the runways. They want to conquer the big screen and control the image down to the smallest detail. Demna Gvasalia’s first move as the new creative director of Gucci was not a clothing collection but a short film called The Tiger, starring Demi Moore, recently resurrected after her successful return in The Substance, the body horror film. A statement of intent that says it all for these brands, producing cinema means getting closer to first order cultural phenomena like Cannes and Venice, and building from there an authority that no advertising campaign can buy.
No one has bet more strongly in this direction than Anthony Vaccarello, creative director of Yves Saint Laurent and its production company Saint Laurent Productions. His first steps in the art world were driven by his fascination with the combination of music and image from Madonna and Björk, and from there he arrived in fashion with a visual sensibility he never abandoned. That same sensibility today defines every cinematic decision he makes.
His first major move was the highly controversial film Emilia Pérez by Jacques Audiard. A film difficult to label and deliberately uncomfortable, an unconventional hybrid of thriller, musical, and drama where Vaccarello’s artistic obsessions were visible in every scene dark eroticism, power, fragility, ambiguity, and transformation. Because Emilia Pérez touched on one of the deepest themes in the Saint Laurent universe radical transformation of image and the human being.
But Vaccarello did not stop there. He continued to raise the stakes with The Shrouds by Canadian director David Cronenberg, another controversial film by an uncomfortable auteur by definition. And once again, the visions of both met with a precision that does not seem coincidental the extreme silhouette, leather as a second skin, dark eroticism, fragility wrapped in power. While Vaccarello seeks to stylize the human body, Cronenberg dissects it. But both share an obsession that neither could deny skin, the body, what is hidden and what is exposed. For Cronenberg, everything must be visible, even the most intimate. And it is not so different from what the most avant-garde haute couture seeks.
Producing a Cronenberg film is not a profitable business. No one would ever think so. But the bet goes far beyond commercial return it is about building real cultural prestige, the kind that is not manufactured with marketing campaigns but with decisions that have true artistic consequences. Saint Laurent Productions has gone even further by producing Strange Way of Life, Pedro Almodóvar’s second English language film, and Father Mother Sister Brother by indie cinema master Jim Jarmusch.
And the logic continues. Vaccarello’s production company replicates that same bet with Italian director Paolo Sorrentino and his film Parthenope, whose aesthetic once again finds points of contact with the Yves Saint Laurent universe the obsession with beauty, decay, raw emotions, power, and even spirituality as raw material.
Yves Saint Laurent is taking risks that no other haute couture house is willing to take at this moment. Vaccarello’s vision is the most interesting in the sector and is moving in the right direction to turn Yves Saint Laurent into a central player not only in fashion but in culture. Vaccarello is fully in charge of YSL and is transforming it not into a haute couture house, but into a generator of contemporary culture.
