How Anthony Vaccarello and Francesca Bellettini took Saint Laurent to €2bn
With their strategies in alignment, the creative director and CEO have revived the French fashion house
Saint Laurent’s creative headquarters, a hôtel particulier on the rue de l’Université on Paris’ Left Bank, is markedly, stylishly monochrome, accented with white marble and square-backed Louis XVI chairs upholstered in black leather. A black-clad assistant brings a white Stockman mannequin downstairs, pinned with a black leather brassiere — part of creative director Anthony Vaccarello’s Autumn/Winter 2020 collection, due to be unveiled in a few weeks. She opens a white door and vanishes into a room piled high with black bolts of fabric.
You think of black with Saint Laurent not just because of the style of its founder, Yves Saint Laurent — all sleek tuxedo suits and black velvet gowns captured in moody black-and-white magazine shoots by Helmut Newton — but because of its current financial state. After decades in the red, Saint Laurent is now firmly in the black. The latest financial results of Kering, its parent conglomerate, reveal Saint Laurent’s turnover has risen to €2.05bn. It’s the first time the company has exceeded the €2bn milestone, cementing its status as one of the bestselling brands in luxury fashion globally and as Kering’s number two brand after Gucci. That growth has been achieved while almost doubling operating margins, from 13.8 per cent in 2013 to 27 per cent in 2019.
Much of the credit for that is undoubtedly due to Vaccarello, 37, whose souped-up and sexed-up clothes, riffing on the house’s signature style while updating it for an image-hungry era, grab attention. They practically sell themselves — as well as the all-important handbags and leather goods — which together account for 69 per cent of sales, according to Saint Laurent.
But credit is also due to Francesca Bellettini, Saint Laurent’s 49-year-old chief executive, who joined the house in September 2013 after her predecessor Paul Deneve left for Apple (where he helped launch the Apple Watch). She inherited a business already on the up: turnover in December 2013 stood at €556.9m, already a considerable uptick from €237.5m in 2009. In 2012, Hedi Slimane (now at Celine) was appointed creative and image director, and he began an expansive and even aggressive rebranding campaign, most notably shearing “Yves” from the brand’s name to the sleeker Saint Laurent, and making over the brands’ stores — untouched since first devised by Tom Ford in the early 2000s — at significant expense.
When Bellettini joined Saint Laurent, she met co-founder Pierre Bergé, and told him she had a vision to push Saint Laurent to sales of €3bn — a bold projection for a brand doing less than €500m. “You join this brand, you see what is there — you see that everything is already there,” Bellettini shrugs. “We have all of those goods. We just need to make sure that we find the right way to boost this engine that we have,” she says. “Between the two of us, that’s a normal conversation.”
The “two of us” refers to herself and Vaccarello, who sits beside her when we meet. A few years ago, interviewing the creative director and CEO of a fashion house together would be unthinkable. Traditionally, those figures have been viewed as adversaries, arguing respectively in favour of artistic freedom and commercial nous. But latterly, the correct coupling of creativity and commerce has become a cause for mutual celebration. Alongside creative director Alessandro Michele, Marco Bizzarri has powered Gucci to revenues exceeding €8bn; Pietro Beccari, chief executive of Dior, recruited his former colleague Kim Jones to revitalise Dior’s menswear arm in 2018, with spectacular results.
Bellettini and Vaccarello share several traits. They are both wearing black, for starters, and they speak the same language not only Italian, but also business. “I like to call Francesca to know the figures,” says Vaccarello. “To know, how are the company sales going this week? I like to know what’s working, what’s not working.” Vaccarello is concerned with how his clothes sell — prior to Saint Laurent, he helmed his own label, and focused on clothing rather than accessories. The clothes had to sell to keep him in business. “The beauty of the house of Saint Laurent, it’s that creativity supported by the rest of the company, since [Monsieur] Saint Laurent,” says Vaccarello. “It’s not a crazy house where you do experimental clothes. So we know what’s a caban, what’s a coat, we know what trousers have to look like. So there was no fight with a commercial strategy. When I’m doing the collection, I think about the street. I think about women.”
Saint Laurent is widely considered to have invented designer ready-to-wear in the 1960s — the location of the brand’s creative headquarters today mirrors that ready-to-wear line, which was originally called Rive Gauche and sold from a boutique in the Saint-Germain area of Paris. He designed a full wardrobe of everyday clothes — including trousers, which he wasn’t the first to use but which became a signature, and leather jackets, which he was the first to present in a high fashion context. Those leather jackets appeared again and again alongside strong-shouldered tailoring and, later in the 1970s and 1980s, Yves created glamorous evening dresses, particularly short and frilled, that defined the era’s after-dark look. All of those find contemporary reflection in Vaccarello’s work for the label.
It was Bellettini, together with François-Henri Pinault, who recruited Vaccarello to replace former creative director Slimane. “Anthony was my only choice,” she asserts. “I always say I was pissed off at the beginning, because we were in the moment where we got all of these editorials with some Saint Laurent bags and Anthony Vaccarello clothes.” She pauses. “At the same time, they looked pretty good and very much in synch with the spirit of the house.” Vaccarello told me, back when he joined the label in 2016, that when he was first approached it was anonymous, for a creative director role at an unnamed house. “As a joke, I said: ‘The only house I will stop my brand for and would be interested to work with is Saint Laurent.’” Little did he know.
Aesthetically, Vaccarello’s tenure at Saint Laurent has been an evolution rather than a revolution — the slender tailoring, emphatic accessories and high-octane eveningwear established by Slimane has continued, but rinsed of Slimane’s proclivities for neo-grunge styling. He has introduced more glamour, more sexuality and more leather. He has also pulled the focus back to women — strong women — and given an emphasis to using couture techniques, such as elaborate embroidery and featherwork. “It’s couture because it’s done with attention, handmade,” says Vaccarello, of his approach and his clothes. “It’s important to also have that in store.” The prices for such pieces are high — an acid-green ostrich feather coat from his Autumn/Winter 2019 collection retailed for €24,000; while a sequinned jumpsuit for spring sells for €19,000
Those obviously won’t sell as many as Saint Laurent’s blue jeans or T-shirts, but for Bellettini it’s a valuable exercise in brand positioning. In her eyes, Saint Laurent is perceived as level-pegging with the likes of Dior and Chanel, which are bigger businesses. “No matter the size you need to feel up here with the other maisons,” say Bellettini, chopping her hand in the air.
“Because when we were €500m, other maisons, like Dior, were approximately over €2bn, and Chanel close to €10bn. But the name is the same for the people. Those three incredible couturiers are up there.” She chops again. “Then they don’t know, or they don’t perceive, the real size. So I needed somebody that could take the brand up there naturally without making it feel forced.”
This has been achieved spectacularly at Vaccarello’s fashion shows, with models walking on water or lit with the grand sweep of arc-lights in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, open air, to an invited audience of several hundred and public spectators numbering in thousands.
“I always felt that Saint Laurent was the cool brand, but maybe not the big brand,” says Vaccarello. “For me it was important to put that house at the same level of those.”
Saint Laurent’s growth has been impressive, but analysts believe there is plenty of room for more. Mario Ortelli, a luxury M&A adviser, points to the company’s limited traction in Asia and relatively low number of stores, of which there are 81 (Saint Laurent has 222 stores globally). “Usually people at our dimension have 250-plus,” says Bellettini, acknowledging the brand has been “quite late in the expansion in China”, having opened its first flagship in the country in the second half of last year. The house has already made significant inroads in that lucrative though often volatile market — APAC now counts for 28 per cent of global sales, versus 23 per cent in 2016. “That has been an advantage, because a lot of people overexpanded,” she adds.
So, what is the next stop? “We started talking about €3bn when we were €500m, and now we are at €2bn,” says Bellettini. “So I’m like, OK guys, €5bn! Why not?” She laughs, “Honestly, we have everything to be there.”