Death of a “Pied Piper of Fashion”

I recently had the chance to interview Indian designer Manish Arora. The very last questions I asked him was which designer – no matter what era – he would have chosen if he had to do an interview for a famous fashion magazine. “Yves Saint Laurent,” he promptly replied, “he created some of the most amazing designs and will forever be an icon.” I thought it was a very apt choice: the late YSL changed the way women dressed, turned them into amazons with his ground-breaking designs, always being in step with one’s time and, simultaneously, offering women a glimpse of the future.
Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent was born in Oran, Algeria, in 1936. At 17 he moved to Paris taking with him his portfolio of sketches that won him praise from the likes of Michel de Brunoff, editor of Vogue, who published them. After studying design for a short period of time at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, he won first prize in an International Wool Secretariat design competition for his sketch of a cocktail dress. It was de Brunoff who advised Christian Dior to hire the young designer who, for three  worked as Dior’s assistant.
Named House of Dior head designer after the French couturier’s sudden death in 1957, Saint Laurent revolutionised fashion by introducing in 1958 the Ligne Trapeze or “Trapeze Line”, a youthful silhouette that, swinging freely from the shoulders, flared out gently to a wide hemline. Five more collections for Dior followed but, in 1960 Saint Laurent was called up to fight in Algeria’s war of independence. When he went back to Paris, suffering from a nervous breakdown, the House of Dior had given his job to his former assistant, Marc Bohan. 
In 1961 Saint Laurent founded his own house with his partner, Pierre Bergé. The first Yves Saint Laurent collection was shown in January 1962. It was the beginning of a great success story: Saint Laurent started producing clothes and accessories, launched in 1966 his first ready-to-wear line, opened his first Rive Gauche shop in rue de Tournon and contributed to the world of arts by designing costumes for ballet, theatrical productions and movies (Catherine Deneuve wears YSL in Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film Belle de Jour, pairing the look with shoes by Roger Vivier).
In the ‘80s, Saint Laurent became the first designer to have a retrospective dedicated to his work at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, but, during the ‘90s the label began to languish. In 1999 YSL was bought by the Gucci Group, and the ready to wear line was taken over Tom Ford. Before retiring to his house in Marrakech, Saint Laurent hosted a last show in January 2002 that featured over 350 classic pieces as well as 40 new gowns. The label is currently designed by Stefano Pilati.
YSL will be forever remembered as one of the designers who truly brought fresh ideas into fashion: his A/W 1965-66 collection was directly inspired by Piet Mondrian’s paintings in which horizontal and vertical black lines divide the white canvas into rectangles, some of which are painted red, yellow or blue, while for his following collections he quoted from Tom Wesselmann, Picasso, Matisse and Van Gogh’s works. He experimented with non-traditional materials such as wood beads and raffia, turned the workaday parka, the trench coat, the pea coat and the safari jacket into haute couture and created collections based on Mongols and Russian peasants, North African maidens and Proustian heroines.
His greatest achievement is having empowered women by devising a minimalist tuxedo suit, “Le Smoking”, for women. In the frivolous and superficial fashion industry in which a season relentlessly follows another and a collection only lasts a few months, Saint Laurent’s creations achieved longevity  and an iconic status. After all, as he said in an interview in 1983: “A woman’s wardrobe shouldn’t change every six months. You should be able to use the pieces you already own and add to them. Because they are like timeless classics.”
It was American magazine editor Diana Vreeland who dubbed him the “Pied Piper of fashion”, explaining how “whatever he does, women of all ages, from all over the world, follow.”
I have a soft spot for his 1976-77 Ballets Russes-inspired collection as I’ve always been a big fan of the famous corps de ballet. Nicknamed "Cossack" of "Russian", the collection featured babushkas, wide sleeve shirts, ample skirts often superimposed one on the other and reminiscent of Armenian women’s costumes, and scarves used as belts. The collection was characterised by colourful fabrics - muslin, silk, flannel, taffetas, velvet, crepes - floral prints and, here and there, occasional splashes of gold.
The tuxedo suit in its single-breasted jacket with satin lapels and satin trousers incarnation remains one of my all-time favourite creation by YSL: it's stylish, classical but radical at the same time.
As Saint Laurent wrote in the catalogue for his 2005 exhibition “Smoking Forever”: “For a woman, le smoking is an indispensable garment with which she finds herself continually in fashion, because it is about style, not fashion. Fashions come and go, but style is forever.”    

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