With Saint Laurent Respiro, Anthony Vaccarello turns a fashion campaign into something closer to a short film you catch mid scene, all sun glare, skin, and an almost narrative sense of time passing. The cast is a sharp roll call of runway authority, Loli Bahia, SJ, Mona Tougaard, Jenn Du Puy, and Vittoria Ceretti, with Henrik Purienne behind the camera, an image maker whose work has long flirted with cinema rather than studio polish.
Saint Laurent Respiro, and the art of making a campaign feel like a movie
Purienne’s pictures have a particular signature, high contrast, salt air suggestion, bodies held in poses that feel observed rather than arranged. In Saint Laurent Respiro, that sensibility meets Vaccarello’s ongoing fascination with seduction as silhouette and attitude, hair pushed back, limbs lengthened, the horizon always nearby even when it is out of frame.
The caption calls it “a cinematic vision of summer,” and that is the accurate handle here: not a lookbook, not a catalogue of items, but a mood built from casting and lens language. The models are not styled to disappear into a concept. They are the concept, five faces that already carry fashion’s collective memory of catwalks, front rows, and campaign history.
Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent: casting as the first styling decision
Vaccarello has consistently treated casting as a form of authorship at Saint Laurent, and Respiro by Anthony Vaccarello leans into that. Loli Bahia brings an elastic, modern ease. Mona Tougaard can make a still image feel like movement. Vittoria Ceretti reads as a fashion constant because she is one. Then there is SJ, tagged as @007._.sj, and Jenn Du Puy, each expanding the project’s idea of who “belongs” in a Saint Laurent frame.
Put them together and you get a composite heroine, not one woman, but a summer cast. It is a simple trick and a sophisticated one: the audience stops looking for a single defining outfit and starts watching for tension, glances, heat, and the architecture of a moment.
Henrik Purienne, the camera, and why “Respiro” lands now
Purienne’s editorial history has made him a natural partner for brands looking to trade perfection for atmosphere. In Saint Laurent Respiro, the “cinematic” promise is delivered less through plot than through texture, the sensation of a scene caught as it is happening, before anyone can correct it. That is what makes the images stick. They do not insist. They linger.
Where to track the campaign
Saint Laurent and Vaccarello have been signaling the project through official channels. For the primary source, see Saint Laurent’s verified account at @ysl, with additional posts and context often appearing via @anthonyvaccarello and @purienne.
Why this matters beyond one season’s imagery
Luxury houses have spent the last decade inflating campaigns into “worlds,” but many still feel like mood boards with budgets. Saint Laurent Respiro succeeds because it commits to a single proposition: a summer that looks lived in, not designed around product callouts. The cast list is the headline, Purienne’s eye is the grammar, and Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent remains what it has been under his tenure, a brand that sells desire as a point of view.
For readers tracking how fashion imagery is shifting, from polished studio certainty to something more like memory, this is a clean example of the direction. And if you only take one detail from Respiro, let it be the claim embedded in the casting itself: the camera is not chasing youth, it is chasing presence.
If you are in the mood to stay in Paris’s orbit, you might also like our edit of Fragrances, or dip into Fashion for other recent campaigns shaping the season’s visual language.
Photo Credits
Cover image and additional images courtesy of their respective owners.
