Just as women were starting to enter the workplace, he gave them the clothes to compete on a level playing field. His trapeze dresses became instant classics, firmly establishing Paris as the center of the fashion universe for the second half of the 20th century. Contrary to the image that Yves created about himself, I always found him to be very quick when it came to business and to have a kind of intuitive compass that always led him in the right direction.”įrom Saint Laurent’s first collection, presented for the house of Dior in 1958, the Algerian-born designer reinvented the clothing we live in. He “pioneered the structure of the contemporary fashion house when they introduced ready-to-wear and licensed products. “Yves not only had great intuition about fashion but was also a great businessman,” said Tom Ford, who designed the YSL ready-to-wear line from 2000 to 2004. It was he who laid the groundwork for this spring’s clothing-as-canvas trend, which has even trickled down to the Gap, when he married fine art and fashion with his famous 1965 Mondrian shift dress. Saint Laurent’s dramatic collections set the stage for the runway extravaganzas we see today, and his themes (safari, bohemian, ballet) set fashion codes that continue to be copied on the racks and the street. He created the wardrobe of the modern woman (the pea coat, the pants suit, the peasant blouse), opened our eyes to ethnic beauty and global style, and set us on a course toward the democratization of fashion, even as he elevated the rarefied haute couture to “the rank of art,” as French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday. There is virtually nothing about the way we dress or the way we shop now that was not a result of his 44-year career. In this respect, Yves Saint Laurent, who died at his home in Paris on Sunday after a long illness, was a revolutionary. In this era of insert-name-here celebrity clothing lines, it’s easy to forget that fashion was once a medium for change.
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