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Saint
Laurent died in 2008 at the age of seventy-two. But the
legend and style live on. Yves Saint Laurent brings to mind images
of elegance and exquisitely-tailored clothing. A dream of
moonlit nights spent in cafés smoking cigarettes and drinking
ruby-red wine with friends, the elegance always given a raffish
edge with a certain bohemian luxe. Born in Algeria, Saint
Laurent moved to Paris in his teens; his star was on the ascendant
early - he won a leading fashion competition with a design for a
cocktail dress, and, interestingly, he outdid another young
designer named Karl Lagerfeld. He was hired by Christian
Dior and later named his successor and head designer at the age of
21 in 1957 after Dior's death, taking Paris by storm with his
first collection in the following year.
At
Dior, Saint Laurent's phenomenal versatility meant that he was
able to both update his brilliant predecessor as well as bring in
entirely new ideas of his own. Some of his first designs for
Dior modernized the so-called New Look, which reproduced
the Belle Epoque ideal of long skirts and tiny waists, by
making it less formal and more comfortable to wear. Saint
Laurent opened his own fashion house in 1961. Through the
years, at Dior as well as with the YSL label, he created iconic
images that live on - flared trapeze dresses, the Mondrian dress,
simple jersey shifts, architecturally-constructed cocktail
dresses, the pea jacket, the safari dress, the beatnik look,
African-inspired dresses (he was also the first to use
darker-skinned women as models), the wardrobe for Catherine
Deneuve in Belle du Jour. Also the famous
tuxedo-inspired Le Smoking pantsuit for women which hasn't
aged quite as well as some of the images that live on in new
interpretations every season - the safari dress which has become a
staple of the modern woman's wardrobe, and today's delightful luxe
boho-chic look which owes more than a little to Yves Saint
Laurent.
Saint
Laurent's most revolutionary contribution to fashion may well have
been the very idea of pret-à-porter - he introduced his
Rive Gauche stores in 1966. He realized that the decline of
couture, today worn by a few thousand women at most, was
inevitable, and saw that more accessible ready-to-wear lines were
the wave of the future!
Read:
Yves
Saint Laurent Style
Tags:
paris
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