Ring-leaders: Saint Laurent’s winning Everlast collaboration

The multifarious products housed at Saint Laurent’s Rive Droite boutique in Paris have been on fighting form ever since creative director Anthony Vaccarello opened the label’s concept store last summer. The Vaccarello-curated items range from vintage furniture sourced at Galerie Patrick Seguin to branded millennial merch like lighters and condoms, rare books to speakers and drinking glasses designed in collaboration with Bang & Olufsen and Baccarat. ‘I wanted to show something else beyond the typical four collections per year,’ Vaccarello told us in the November 2019 issue of Wallpaper*, of the idea behind the boutique, which is housed in the former home of Parisian retail legend Colette.

Now, in a winning combination, Saint Laurent has teamed up with fitness experts Everlast on an exclusive range of boxing accessories, including a leather punchbag, satin shorts, gloves and protective headgear. In their retail research, Vaccarello’s team scour the globe for rare monographs, and sold a signed Andy Warhol book on the day of Rive Droite’s opening. Warhol too has inspired the Everlast partnership, with pieces in the capsule collection nodding to a series of images shot by Michael Halsband in 1985, of Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat sparring, clad in Everlast branded trunks. One of the duo’s most famous collaborative pieces ‘Ten Punching Bags’ depicted a version of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper across ten white punchbags.

So if you’re ready to throw in the towel with your 2020 fitness resolutions, these boxing accessories might just get you back in the ring.  ‘My choices are all very instinctive’, Vaccarello told us back in November of his merchandise choices. ‘I don’t want to intellectualise it too much. Just keep it in the moment – Rive Droite is really about l’air du temps.’ It’s an intuition that is proving to be a knockout.

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