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June 03 Yves Saint Laurent Remembered Fashion fades,Style is eternal
I think I'm in shock. I'm in fashion today because of him. I lived in Paris right next to his first couture house. My mother adored his work and introduced me to it when I was 16. I feel in love with fashion because of Yves Saint Laurent. He was the first international superstar in the modern era. I am one of the designers who started in fashion design because of Yves. He is my inspiration. He has been my father and teacher. I paid homage to Saint Laurent's legacy.
He was a fashion designer by trade, but Yves Saint Laurent’s enduring legacy is that of gender equalizer, silhouette soothsayer, child prodigy, and inventor of the ready-to-wear category. Saint Laurent, who died in his Paris home at age 71 on Sunday, forever changed the modern woman’s wardrobe with the tuxedo jackets, trench coats, and most memorably, pants, he both glamorized and popularized in the 1960s and 70s.
When Christian Dior died in 1958, then-21-year-old Saint Laurent, his former assistant, took over at the house to instant raves (thanks in part to the flatteringly novel trapeze dress). Over the next few years designing for the house of Dior, he set the stage for ultimate change agents like Marc Jacobs and Miuccia Prada, being the first to continuously surprise each season with new lengths, moods, shapes, and tones.
Saint Laurent opened his own couture house in 1962, radically altering his aesthetic every six months to the delight and anticipation of fashion followers worldwide. By 1968, he decided that couture’s stuffy moment had passed, that the line between day and eveningwear had become blurred, and that stylish young women on the street were the best source of inspiration. He proposed a radical idea—that women wear pants every day. He offered smart suits that became an integral part of a woman’s wardrobe, leaving his indelible mark on the world of fashion.
That same year, Saint Laurent opened his first Rive Gauche store on Madison Avenue, bringing ready-to-wear to New Yorkers. While everyone else’s hemlines were rising, the skirts in his shop hit at mid-calf and were declared the new notion of sex appeal. Over the next 35 years, Saint Laurent reinvented his own classics—the safari jacket, le smoking, leopard prints—countless times, reversing public opinion that clothes needed to change drastically twice a year, and instead establishing himself as a designer both adaptable to change and highly capable of engendering it.
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