The fuller picture was that he did not speak Flemish, Antwerp’s lingua franca, and that the avant-garde leanings of the Royal Academy did not reflect his taste. “I can’t understand what it means to be ugly,” he said. “It doesn’t feel fair to wear a three-sleeved jacket or four-legged trousers—it’s pretentious, snobby, like a parody of fashion.” How about being a clown? “I feel differently,” says Vaccarello, acknowledging that there will always be naysayers who think his conventional expressions of beauty are less intelligent than his experimental counterparts. “I never considered whether what I was doing was good. I just thought it was right.” When La Cambre rejected his fashion application, Vaccarello turned to sculpture, a skill that came in handy two years later , when he was finally admitted to the program. “Some colleagues never worry about what’s going on on the back of the clothes,” he said. “But every angle is important to me.”
Vaccarello met Michaux on the dance floor of an electric shock concert and married in 2016. They had only started dating for two years, but their professional relationship immediately began to develop. Vaccarello is a skilled but self-proclaimed lazy tailor with big ideas. Michaud was a year ahead of him at school and knew how to execute them. Artist David Alexander Flinn, a close friend of the couple and who has modeled for Saint Laurent, called Vaccarello’s clothing “their vision” and likened the distribution of labor to “a wonderful And a deep stew”. Vaccarello is responsible for the look and smell of the dish, he said. “That’s what Arnold smells like.” Michaux, Saint Laurent’s image director, declined to be interviewed for this article, refusing to discuss fashion with her husband after 6 p.m. “Even if I wanted to gossip about something,” says Vaccarello, “he’d say, ‘ Yeah, I don’t want to ‘don’t care.’”
In September 2006, Vaccarello got a call from the office of Karl Lagerfeld, who had seen his leather-focused graduate collection and offered him a job at Fendi’s fur atelier in Rome. “The job was basically sitting at the fax machine waiting to execute Carl’s sketches,” he said. “In the process, I felt a little useless. It could be me, it could be someone else.” (Vaccarello hasn’t attended the Met Gala since 2021 — “It’s become a joke,” he said. “I don’t want to be associated with that”—but he did visit the Costume Institute’s recent Lagerfeld show, where he was surprised to find one of his coats with patchwork fur and butterflies.)
After two years at Fendi, Vaccarello was encouraged by French retailer Maria Luisa Poumaillou to create her own collection for her Rue Cambon boutique in Paris. It was then that he and Michaux moved to the French capital and founded Anthony Vaccarello. But just as the skinny, black-heavy label found its way – top models walked his shows for free and in 2011 he won an award from a jury that included Bergé and Emmanuelle Alt, Donatella Versace, then editor of French Vogue and an early advocate of his work, summoned him to her suite at the Bristol Hotel. For Vaccarello, meeting Versace is like meeting Madonna. There are bodyguards and a table of candy. “When she arrived, the room was filled with the smell of perfume,” he recalls. “I was totally seduced.” At Fendi, Lagerfeld spent most of his time working at Chanel, but Versace “really wanted to create something with me,” he said. Vaccarello reminded Versace of his brother Gianni, who was killed in 1997. “None of them felt safe,” she said. “Only a genius would be so humble.”
