At times it can be difficult even for well-established fashion designers to nail down their vision.
Expressing your fashion language through form and colour and identifying the principles of an originally unique aesthetics is even harder nowadays when everything (or almost everything…) has been tried out.
Natural fabrics have been reworked, engineered to look like synthetic textiles, colour palettes have broadened thanks to digital resources while new tailoring techniques have made sure that seams have become practically invisible or non-existent.
Knowing very well that one inspiration is never enough to create a truly original collection, Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy tried to combine together two different figures, scuba divers and skiers, and mixing his sporty inspiration with the Bauhaus movement.
Tisci, though, didn’t move from Gunta Stölzl’s experimental and colourful tapestries, but reduced everything to a very basic and clean palette that comprised white, black, red and nude.
In one top these colours were for example employed to create geometrical graphic details and angles that recalled the designs used on posters and postcards to advertise the Bauhaus’ 1923 summer exhibition, and there was a sort of arty reference to the fur and leather panels employed to create architecturally perfect jackets.
Yet sporty prevailed over arty inspirations and elegance with form-fitting ski jumpers turned into scuba diving suits and worn with skirts and trousers left unzipped around the waist that created a very similar effect to that seen on Balenciaga’s runway.
For the evening the skier-scuba diver jumpers were transformed into see-through black or nude lace body stockings decorated with ruffled details and into organza T-shirts covered in feathers.
Tisci’s gothic inspirations were turned into a horror-infused violent sensuality (also symbolised by the choice of lipstick colour, a vivid ruby red) in white dresses with splashes of red lace that, from a distance,es looked like blood stains, in the red choker necklaces that unmistakeably ended up looking like slits at the throat and scarlet gloves and handbags for modern Red Queens.
In fact, in this modern mix of art, sport, romanticism and luxury, you just wished Tisci had gone for his more violent streak, opting for more asymmetrical geometries like the ones displayed by his one shoulder velvet evening dress and armour-like linearly modern leather corsets.
There may have not been one single “pretino” dress in sight at Yves Saint Laurent’s, but Stefano Pilati denying any religious influences didn’t genuinely convince fashion critics.
The collection was indeed infused with a sense of mature and almost conservative sobriety, with nun-like black capes, dresses and hoods, long monastic mid-calf thick wool dresses and chains with figurines of stylised models reminiscent of pictures cut out from 70s vintage magazines, dangling like crosses from a bishop’s chain.
While Pilati claimed he was trying to channel YSL’s more classic, severe and mature styles, white shirts-cum-capes worn with black trousers and accessorised with a wide-brimmed black hat, cardinal red gloves and even a cardinal red cape seemed to reinforce the idea that, at some point while designing the collection and browsing the archives, Pilati had an "Ecstasy of Saint Theresa" moment.
Yet, while the colours, styles and silhouettes perfectly translated into clothes the semantics of religion, black and blue suede court shoes with protruding mohawks around the heel and the toe, materials – in particular clear PVC, fur and organza – 
and sheer chiffon inserts and transparencies that hinted at a sensuality otherwise repressed throughout the catwalk, showed that this was certainly no convent, but an attempt at balancing Yves Saint Laurent’s clean lines with luxuriously modern inspirations.
More variations in the colour palette arrived at the very end of the catwalk via an emerald green cape dress and a yellow dress with topiary-like ruffles, yet, by then it was too late to shrug off the sense of a rather conservative and at times claustrophobic chic.
Hopefully, Pilati will go back to be more challenging and provoking next season, but, for the time being, YSL's fans interested in seeing some genuinely daring looks that truly revolutionised fashion design, will have to head to the late designer's retrospective at Paris' Petit Palais.
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