Why YSL Is The Luxury Brand To Watch For 2024

Brands like Chanel and Gucci may be fixed favorites among the luxury fashion crowd, but there's another design house to watch in 2024: YSL. It's not that the label is new to the game — YSL has been blazing trails and filling closets since the early 1960s — but it is the one to follow for the latest trends and fresh wardrobe inspo.

Just look at 2023, and you'll see that YSL dominated several of the year's top fashion must-haves. Take the maxi coat trend, which the brand featured in its Spring 2023 collection, or the big-shoulder look that YSL spearheaded in its Fall 2023 line-up. Whether you realized it or not, you were probably borrowing from the label's mastermind, Anthony Vaccarello, when getting dressed this year.

The design house isn't about to lose steam in 2024, either. YSL's Spring/Summer 2024 collection, with its nods to the label's founding designer (Yves Saint Laurent, of course), proved that there's plenty more to come from the brand in the new year.

Looking to 2024, a report by The Business of Fashion and McKinsey & Company predicts that branding will be a major theme in fashion, perhaps as a departure from the logo-less quiet luxury trend of recent seasons. For fashionistas who haven't yet picked a team, YSL looks to be a strong contender.

For Spring/Summer 2024, designer Anthony Vaccarello brought back several classic looks to pay homage to YSL's history, helping to solidify the brand's image and create a clear line from its past to its future. Most notably, the collection showcased safari jumpsuits and jackets similar to the jackets Saint Laurent pioneered in the '60s. There were also plenty of androgynous pieces in line with the masculine garments that first put the brand on the map. And don't forget the label's iconic shift dress: In 2024, you won't be seeing a throwback to YSL's color-blocked Mondrian-esque dress, but you will find basic shifts in solid shades of black, white, and sepia.

This look to the past might not sound groundbreaking, but bringing back the classics is appealing to both play-it-safe types and diehard fashion devotees. Plus, consider it a reinvention rather than a redo. As Vaccarello recently shared via Vogue France, "In general, I think there's a lot of very busy things right now. I want for Saint Laurent to go back to something very clean and basic, and start a new chapter in a way. [...] It's almost, for me, like starting again."

Fashion trends once took multiple seasons or even several years to develop, but these days, fads come and go faster than you can scroll through your TikTok feed. Short-lived micro trends have become the norm, but YSL might just be the luxury brand to change all that in the new year.

First, let's make one point clear: YSL doesn't shy away from trends. But, as seen in the house's Spring/Summer collection, the trends are stripped down and transformed into timeless pieces you'll want to reach for one year, five years, or 10 years later (isn't that what you'd want from a garment costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars?). Take the brand's cargo details as an example. Classic cargo pants got a high-fashion upgrade in 2023, and YSL carried the trend forward in 2024 with pocketed pants and dresses that don't evoke a defined year or period in fashion. Similarly, the recent sheer fabric trend also got the YSL treatment with the collection's minimalist and simply cut see-through tops.

The timelessness of YSL's current direction doesn't mean the brand is without a few bells and whistles. Its first collection for 2024 featured big earrings, chunky bracelets, and buttery leather gloves that added intrigue, while its floor-sweeping evening dresses are sure to turn heads on upcoming red carpets. Don't be surprised if you start seeing other labels follow suit with fewer hyperfast trend pieces and more items that endure the test of time.