Saint Laurent’s fashion show transforms Tadao Ando’s Bourse into a fluid and luminous stage

Anthony Vaccarello, creative director of Saint Laurent since 2016, keeps following the footsteps of the young Yves Saint Laurent, crossing—with the Spring/Summer 2026 collection presented on June 24 at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris—the tiny refuge off the south coast of Long Island that has been home to the American LGBTQ+ community since the 1940s: Fire Island.

Escapism, voyeurism, and elegance intertwine in a collection that pays homage to the artists who whizzed around the villages of The Pines and Cherry Grove on their bikes, gazing at the buildings of Horace Clifford. And it does so within another symbolic piece of architecture: the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, restored and transformed in 2021 by Tadao Ando with the addition of a new exhibition space. Now the Parisian home of the Pinault Collection of contemporary art, the Bourse is hosting “Corps et Âmes” until August 25, a journey through the iconic works of entrepreneur François Pinault's collection.

This isn't the first time Vaccarello has chosen Ando's reinforced concrete cylinder standing under the incredible 18th-century dome of the Bourse for his fashion shows: he did so in 2023 for the debut of his first men's collection as creative director of the fashion house. Back then, the atmosphere was completely different: the DS-600 modular sofas ran along the perimeter of the exhibition space (29 meters in diameter, 9 meters high), while the clothes were designed as a tribute to the sculptural geometry and sartorial precision typical of the architecture of the guest editor of Domus 2021.

This time, Vaccarello's show takes place during the day – or rather, at sunset – to highlight another facet: the luminous quality of the Japanese architect's work and to do justice to the incredible alignment of planets – architectural and artistic – that has led to Ando's work being filled with water.

Since June 5, the Bourse rotunda has been hosting clinamen, an installation by artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, who represented France at the 2015 Art Biennale: a circular basin dug into the floor of Ando's cylinder and filled with water, where white ceramic bowls float very slowly—as in the Epicurean “clinamen,” that unpredictable deviation of atoms that here recalls the random movement of waves off Fire Island.
The Saint Laurent fashion show thus unfolds in a sort of elegant visual “matryoshka.” The monumental neoclassicism of the nineteenth-century frescoes, the light filtered through the dome of the Bourse, the materiality of reinforced concrete, the pool of water inhabited by scattered objects, and a sandy palette—inspired by outfits Yves Saint Laurent might have worn on Fire Island—blend surprisingly seamlessly, accompanied by the soundtracks of French electronic music veteran and long-time collaborator of the fashion house, SebastiAn.