Top: comparison between MZR derived from VANDELS (black squares and error bars) and from predictions of two SAMs: orange diamonds represent the median masses and metallicities of GAEA galaxies in five bins of stellar mass defined as for the observations. Blue contour regions indicate the fraction of galaxies in the SAM of Menci et al. (2014) with different Z_* at a given mass, according to the 2D bins defined in the text. Bottom: comparison of VANDELS results with the UV-slope-metallicity relation predicted by the GAEA models. The large orange diamonds were derived with the same method of the upper panel. We highlight the best-fit relation for the VANDELS sample with a dashed black line, while the shaded gray area encloses its 1σ uncertainty region.