Yves Saint Laurent, the iconic French fashion designer was considered a living legend for his unprecedented singlehanded influence upon women’s fashion during the last half of the 20th century.
Yves Saint Laurent, deemed by many to be the last of the great 20th century French designers and the founder of modern fashion for women, died at his Paris home last night after a long illness, aged 71.
His death was announced by Pierre Bergé, his business partner from when the two launched the famous brand in 1962, through to Saint Laurent’s retirement in 2002 and his almost wholly reclusive later life. “Gabrielle Chanel gave women freedom. Yves Saint Laurent gave them power,” Bergé told France Info radio. “Like all creators, Yves Saint Laurent had two faces, a public face and a private face.”
Throughout his time at Dior and much more so under his own label, Saint Laurent coined styles for women that changed the way they dressed in the postwar era and his influence can still be seen today, arguably more so than Chanel’s and Dior’s.
For fellow designer Christian Lacroix, the reason for Saint Laurent’s success was his versatility. “Chanel, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga and Dior all did extraordinary things. But they worked within a particular style,” he said. “Yves Saint Laurent is like a combination of all of them. He’s got the form of Chanel with the opulence of Dior and the wit of Schiaparelli.”
Diana Vreeland, the legendary American fashion magazine editor, dubbed him the “Pied Piper of fashion. She said: “Whatever he does, women of all ages, from all over the world, follow.”
Saint Laurent’s nipped-in trouser suits, slinky tuxedos and safari jackets still look perfectly modern decades after their shocking debuts on the runway. In an industry where most clothes are deemed passé after six months, such longevity is as rare as a healthy looking model. Saint Laurent’s influence can still be seen on any high street in any western country.
His styles epitomised a certain kind of seductive, wealthy, intelligent French woman – Catherine Deneuve, in other words, who frequently sat in the front row at his shows, and it’s a look that is still as desirable today as it was 40 years ago. His shamelessly sexy clothes dovetailed perfectly with feminism’s inception, as did his advent of trousers for a woman’s daily wardrobe, and his frequent references in his collection to art and other aspects of modern culture.
He was one of the first to use black models and he also is credited with beginning to democratise the fashion world by shifting the industry’s attention from the rarefied and frankly extortionate world of haute couture to the relatively more accessible one of prêt a porter, with his Rive Gauche line.
Source: Yves Saint Laurent, legendary designer and Pied Piper of fashion, dies aged 71
During a career that ran from 1957 to 2002, he was largely responsible for changing the way modern women dress, putting them into pants both day and night, into peacoats and safari jackets, into “le smoking” (as the French call a man’s tuxedo jacket), and into leopard prints, trench coats and, for a time in the 1970’s, peasant-inspired clothing in rich fabrics.
Mr. Saint Laurent often sought inspiration on the streets, bringing the Parisian beatnik style to couture runways and adapting the sailors’ peacoats he found in Army-Navy stores in New York into jackets that found their way into fashionable women’s wardrobes around the world. His glamorous evening clothes were often adorned with appliqués and beadwork inspired by artists like Picasso, Miró and Matisse. .
Among the women of style who wore his clothes were Catherine Deneuve, Paloma Picasso, Nan Kempner, Lauren Bacall, Marella Agnelli and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild.
Mr. Saint Laurent achieved instant fame in 1958 at the age of 21 when he showed his Trapeze collection, his first for Christian Dior following the master’s death. But unlike many overnight sensations, Mr. Saint Laurent managed to remain at the top of his profession as fashion changed, from an emphasis on formal, custom-made haute couture to casual sportswear.
For many years after he opened his own couture house in 1962, his collections were eagerly anticipated by fashion enthusiasts, who considered his the final word on that season’s style. His influence was at its height during the 1960’s and 70’s when it was still normal for couturiers to change silhouettes and hemlines drastically every six months.
Among his greatest successes were his Mondrian collection in 1965, based on the Dutch artist’s linear paintings, and the “rich peasant” collection of 1976, which stirred so much interest that the Paris show was restaged in New York for his American admirers. “The clothes incorporated all my dreams,” he said after the show, “all my heroines in the novels, the operas, the paintings. It was my heart — everything I love that I gave to this collection.”
Originally a maverick and a generator of controversy — in 1968, his suggestion that women wear pants as an everyday uniform was considered revolutionary — Mr. Saint Laurent developed into a more conservative designer, a believer in evolution rather than revolution. He often said that all a woman needed to be fashionable was a pair of pants, a sweater and a raincoat.
“My small job as a couturier,” he once said, “is to make clothes that reflect our times. I’m convinced women want to wear pants.”
By 1983, when he was 47, his work was recognized by fashion scholars as so fundamentally important to women’s dress that a retrospective of his designs was held at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first time the museum had honored a living designer. Diana Vreeland, the legendary magazine editor and the doyenne of the Costume Institute, who masterminded the exhibition, called him “a living genius” and “the Pied Piper of fashion.”
Source: Yves Saint Laurent, Fashion Icon, Dies at 71
***UPDATE***
In this video clip, Yves Saint Laurent was interviewed and he discussed his pioneering decision to work with black models.
Video via: All About the Glam! Mr. Yves Saint Laurent You Will Always Be Remembered
Yves Saint Laurent, Fashion Legend and Cultural Icon Dies at 71
