Fashion king Saint Laurent Dies

[Sylph]

Designer mastered appeal to masses

Icon of haute couture's impact extended from famed French runways to the modern office

By Wendy Donahue | Tribune reporter


Yves Saint Laurent, widely considered the single most influential fashion designer of the second half of the 20th Century, died Sunday at age 71 at his Paris home after a long illness.

The designer's death was announced by Pierre Berge, his longtime friend and business partner.

Translating and often anticipating changes in politics and culture throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s, Saint Laurent was the first major designer to put women in pants for evening, with his iconic "Le Smoking" tuxedo of 1966.

Saint Laurent also was one of the first major designers who dared take inspiration from what women were wearing on the streets. In 1966 he created Rive Gauche, the first ready-to-wear, or pret-a-porter, line and boutique by a major designer, and the first such line to be embraced even by women who could afford couture. Indirectly, it amounted to a stroke of modern marketing genius, broadening the customer base for fashion.

"If Chanel dominated the first half of the 20th Century, there's no question that Saint Laurent dominated the second half," said Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York."His influence has been absolutely enormous."

Youth culture infiltrated high fashion for the first time via Saint Laurent's beatnik looks, in his last collection for the House of Dior. His sheer dresses, with strategically placed sequins, fueled an explosion of nude looks in 1966. The periodic revival of peasant chic and ethnic/folk elements owes much to his fantasy-babushka collections of 1976.

Saint Laurent wasn't just a keen observer of an experimental, paradoxical era. He was a participant in it, one who mingled a fanatical admiration of Proust with an appetite for discos and drink.

"He had such an allure," said Gillion Carrara, director of the Fashion Resource Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, contrasting that sleek allure with the puddinglike portliness of Saint Laurent's predecessor, Christian Dior. "He sold clothes with his allure. So many young fashion designers today are very good looking. Before we realized that marketing advantage, that was exactly what Saint Laurent was doing."

Born in Algeria in 1936, Saint Laurent went to Paris at age 17 and attended fashion school before his sketches caught the eye of Dior, whose own postwar "New Look" had sent shock waves through the fashion world.

It was as Dior's most trusted assistant that Saint Laurent first visited Chicago.

Josie Tomes, who lives on the Gold Coast and worked in the Marshall Field & Co. fashion office from 1951 to 1960, recalls Saint Laurent's fashion show and benefit for the Art Institute, presented by Field's, on April 8, 1957.

"The whole thing became so electric that people were standing up and shouting at the presentation," Tomes said. "It was over the top."

Within months of that visit, Dior died unexpectedly and Saint Laurent, barely 21 years old, was catapulted to the helm at the house.

His debut collection, known as the trapeze collection for its gently flaring dresses, became a global sensation.

His successive innovations, however, ruffled traditional thinkers within the House of Dior, who saw no place in high design for beatnik or other street references. When Saint Laurent was drafted to serve in the French army during the Algerian war, the House of Dior eventually quit fighting for his deferment.

Boot camp couldn't have been less suited to Saint Laurent's temperament. He suffered a nervous breakdown, and, upon release from a military hospital, broke officially with Dior.

The years that followed would be punctuated by bouts of depression, along with alcohol and drug abuse, even as his star rose.

In 1961, Saint Laurent started his own couture house, financed by Berge.

From that perch, Saint Laurent, of whom Jacqueline Kennedy became a client in 1963, unleashed a string of oft-imitated looks—thigh-high alligator boots as the Beatles became a household name and the Mondrian color-block dresses of 1965.

Before Giorgio Armani's power suits, Saint Laurent glamorized menswear-inspired trousers and jackets for women even as he created the most fragile of evening gowns and dresses, guided by muses such as Loulou de La Falaise, Betty Catroux and legendary French actress Catherine Deneuve.

Black models appeared regularly on his runways. He posed wearing nothing but his glasses in ads for a men's fragrance. The exotic woman's fragrance Opium was launched in 1977.

"Many fashion editors deified him, believing to the very end of his career that he could do no wrong, that everything he designed was earth-shaking," e-mailed Genevieve Buck, former fashion editor for the Chicago Tribune. "I think he was a great architect of clothing, had a dazzling sense of color and accessorizing. But, perhaps because I covered his pret-a-porter runway shows in Paris from the late '70s through the early '90s, I saw him through his years of opulence and creativity then witnessed his declining years, when his addictions became so obvious in the repetitiveness of his designs and in his runway appearances."

When Gucci bought the YSL brand in 1999, Saint Laurent stayed on while Tom Ford took over ready-to-wear.

In 2002, with his health deteriorating, Saint Laurent closed the couture house.

The Yves Saint Laurent men's and women's ready-to-wear and accessories collections live on under creative director Stefano Pilati, as does the Oak Street Rive Gauche store, which opened in 2004.

Some YSL designs that predate his retirement remain in the closets of fashionable Chicagoans such as Liz Stiffel. She has donated many of her designer pieces to the Chicago History Museum's Costume Council, for which she serves as vice president. But only one of her Yves Saint Laurents, she says apologetically.

"He paid so much attention to detail and the workmanship. And the fabrics are magnificent," Stiffel said. "You really could wear them forever."


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