100 Most Influential People in Fashion

Fashion Influential #9: Yves Saint Laurent

By Alicia on

Fashion great Yves Saint Laurent. Image via thehuffingtonpost.

YVES SAINT LAURENT
Born:
August 1, 1936, Oran, Algeria
Died:
June 1, 2008, Paris France
Popularized:
Le Smoking Suit (a tuxedo suit for women), the beatnik look, thigh-high boots, safari jackets, peacoats, leopard print, etc.
Fan of:
Betty Catroux, Talitha Pol, Katoucha Niane, Iman, Laetitia Casta, Catherine Deneuve
Fans:
Catherine Deneuve, Paloma Picasso, Lauren Bacall, his mother
Beginnings.
Yves Saint Laurent, like his design contemporary Karl Lagerfeld, won first prize in an International Wool Secretariat competition in 1954 for his sketch of a cocktail dress. His win led to an interview with Christian Dior, who hired him immediately. When Dior died in 1957, Yves, who had been Dior's "right arm," was named Dior's head designer at the age of 21. His first collection for Dior, based on a "trapeze" silhouette, debuted to much acclaim on January 30, 1958.

Career Highs.
Yves Saint Laurent continued to change the shape of modern fashion, creating many of the looks now coming back into vogue. It was Yves who popularized peacoats, safari jackets, trench coats, and smoking jackets for women. It was he who swathed his models in racy leopard print. Perhaps most importantly, Yves revolutionized modern womenswear by introducing pants as eveningwear. As he put it, "My small job as a couturier is to make clothes that reflect our times. I'm convinced women want to wear pants."
The clothes incorporated all my dreams, all my heroines in the novels, the operas, the paintings. It was my heart - everything I love that I gave to this collection."
- Yves Saint Laurent

Yves Saint Laurent.
Career Lows.
In September of 1960, a few months after Saint Laurent's last collection for Dior, he was conscripted into the French military during the Algerian War. He suffered a nervous collapse three weeks into his mandatory 27 months of service, leading the House of Dior to name Marc Bohan, Saint Laurent's former assistant, the new head designer. At the military psychiatric hospital he received electro-shock therapy, which he said changed him forever. Still, the 1962 debut of his own couture house was a resounding success.

Legacy.
Who knows how long it might have been until women wore formal pants, had it not been for Yves Saint Laurent. He also created many of the looks we see being reinvented today: his 1976 "rich peasant" collection inspired the bohemian peasant top you bought last summer. But his mark in the fashion world isn't confined to his revolutionary designs: Yves Saint Laurent was the first - and for some time, the only - high fashion designer to use models of color in his runway shows and advertisements.

Yves Saint Laurent Spring/Summer 2009, Paris.

Get the Look.
Yves Saint Laurent was so instrumental to modern fashion, his designs continue to be reinvented by other designers. Thus, it's highly likely you own all the pieces you need for an outfit Yves would have found classy. He loved to say that a woman could be fashionable with nothing more than a pair of pants, a sweater, and a raincoat. As long as the pieces are classic - the kind you'll want to keep and wear forever - then you're set.

- Alicia