Baltimore Beauty Examiner

R.I.P YSL

This past Sunday, the beauty world lost a great visionary.

Yves Saint-Laurent was one of the world's most brilliant and significant contributors to beauty and fashion all throughout his nearly fifty-year career.  He began to make his mark as a designer in 1957, when he became the wunderkind right-hand man of the master of French fashion, Monsieur Christian Dior. The legendary YSL was truly a pioneer, expanding upon Dior's "New Look" by creating a sexy, groundbreaking version of a man's tuxedo jacket, known still to this day as "Le Smoking".

Helmut Newton's 1975 photo of the iconic "Le Smoking."

This idea of feminization, the tweaking of traditional menswear into sleekly seductive, powerfully structured silhouettes for women, turned the fashion world on its diamond-encrusted ear.

He became liberator of fashionable women everywhere when, in 1968, YSL declared that women should be able to wear (gasp) pants as a daily uniform, thus changing forever the direction of the way women wear clothes. He also believed in modern classics making the foundation of one's wardrobe, and rather than designing in trends that would be obsolete in one or two seasons, M. St.-Laurent extolled the virtues of building around key pieces. He believed that his responsibility as a coutourier was to reflect the times through his designs.

 YSL was inspired by art all around him; he looked to many directions and subcultures for inspiration. "Le Smoking" was actually inspired by the classic shape of the Navy peacoat. and he was particularly influenced by painters such as Miro, Picasso and Matisse. This uncanny ability to connect practicality with abstract elegance reflected in all his collections,  as did an
incredible sense of color and proportion. I am a fan particularly of his "Rich Hippie" phase during the '70's and his Mondrian-inspired shifts in the sixties.

It seems to me that YSL, more than any other designer in history, was and remains one of the the most relevant and revolutionary designers in the world.  Throughout vast changes in political climate and societal evolution, YSL's pieces remain classic yet perennially modern garments that liberate and empower the wearer at any age, in any era. Merci, Monsieur.

 

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