fashion fades, style is eternal

YSL after his final show; Photo: Jean-pierre Muller/Agence France-Presse

Everyone I know in the fashion world is devastated that Yves Saint Laurent has passed. Suzy Menkes recently told the NYT, "A lot of people, especially those who were introduced to him as an aging designer, forget that in his prime he was so adept at reading the Zeitgeist."


YSL achieved instant fame when he showed his Trapeze collection, his first after the death of Christian Dior; photo courtesy AP.

My own patternmaker, Margaret, was the head patternmaker for Christian Dior and was there when he died and YSL took over at the age of 21. She worked for YSL for two collections before she moved on to Balenciaga. She and YSL were almost the same age and she said that half the people there were upset that he had been chosen as the successor. They would tell him 'But Monsieur would not do it this way.' And YSL would tell them, 'I think I'm going to leave it like this.' "Everyone in the house felt that what he was doing would not sell because it was not what Dior had been doing. He was a success on his own because of the trapeze look. I did not know how extraordinarily lucky I was to be there," she told me this morning.



For me, I can't think of Yves Saint Laurent without thinking of the Safari jacket. Catherine Deneuve. Glamour. The Smoking Suit. The creation of Ready-To-Wear. That he was the first designer to use black models on the runway. How he reinvented pants for women (before YSL, women didn't wear pants to work or to restaurants). I love that his big regret was that he didn't invent blue jeans.


In this Sept. 10, 1969 photo, Yves Saint Laurent stands outside his first London chain of Rive Gauche ready-to-wear boutique on Bond Street on opening day wearing clothing from his safari style collection. Photo courtesy AP Photo/File

I am sad that he is gone, but what he left behind touches everything in fashion, the definition of eternal style.