Where does Anthony Vaccarello shop for silk nightgowns? Or, how to buy "Saint Laurent Resort 2026" on the cheap.
Spotted last week: Lotta Volkova
Last March—pay attention to the date—Anthony Vaccarello, the 43-year-old creative director of Saint Laurent, ventured to Midtown East. He entered the Manhattan Art & Antiques Center, a humble emporium of more than 100 glass-walled shops selling every kind of speciality item that might have populated in a home in the past 200 years. Oddities might be a better word. (Here’s a New York Times piece on Menorah Galleries, a purveyor of Judaica in the mall.) I imagine that when he went, as I did, more than half the galleries were closed and some of their goods were strewn in the hall.
Like me, Vaccarello probably browsed as he made his way down three flights of stairs to a small lingerie store packed top-to-bottom with nightgowns and slips and step-ins from the late 19th and early 20th c. (silk, silk charmeuse, satin, crepe, chiffon, cotton, rayon, lace) and corsetry from the 1950s. The proprietor, Illisa, doesn’t have a smart phone or a laptop. (She does have a landline and a flip phone.) She has been sizing up women and handing them options to try on for forty years. This is not the first home for her store.
Illisa says Vaccarello bought an entire rack of lingerie. This clocks. You can see the fruits of his trip to Manhattan in his Resort 2026 collection, which debuted in November. Most notably—he was very inspired by the step-ins and old-school silk “underwear,” what we would now call short shorts. There are racks exclusively dedicated to both in the store, with prices falling under $500. For context, the “lingerie shorts” on the Saint Laurent site are running $2,000+. And pre-order only!
