Yves-Henri-Donat-Mathieu Saint Laurent
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For more information on Yves-Henri-Donat-Mathieu Saint Laurent, visit Britannica.com.
French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent is closely associated with the ‘Swinging Sixties’, an outlook embodied in his ‘see through’ blouses of 1968 and his incorporation of ‘street style’ into fashion goods. He studied at the school of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture and, after winning first prize in an International Wool Secretariat Competition for a cocktail dress in 1954, went to work for Dior on the recommendation of the editor of French Vogue. He became head designer at Dior in 1957, producing six collections before he was replaced in 1960, when he undertook military service. He started his own couture house two years later, going on to launch Y, his first perfume for women (1964), the Rive Gauche boutiques for women (1966), and menswear (1974). He also brought his design expertise to bear on other fields, styling the actress Catherine Deneuve for the Luis Bunuel film Belle du jour, a fashion-film star relationship that gained recognition for Saint Laurent with an ‘Oscar’ award from Harper's Bazaar. He established a reputation for his ready-to-wear designs over succeeding decades but stopped putting on major fashion shows for his ready-to-wear collections in 1996, the same year in which he marked a first amongst couturiers by transmitting his couture show live on the internet. His prominent place in French national culture was underlined by being chosen to stage a large-scale fashion entertainment in the Stade du France on the occasion of the World Cup in 1998. Furthermore, not only did he and his fashion output receive considerable coverage in the fashion press, but his work was also seen internationally in many exhibitions. These included the Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design exhibition (1983) of his major designs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, a retrospective exhibition of his work from 1958 to 1985 in Beijing (1985), with further retrospectives at the Musée des Arts de la Mode in Paris (1986, also shown in Moscow), Tokyo (1990), and elsewhere. Throughout his career Saint Laurent has received many awards, including the International Award from the Council of the Fashion Designers of America (1982), receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the same body in 1999. In 1985 he was awarded the Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the president of France, François Mitterand.
Bibliography
See D. Teboul, Yves Saint Laurent: 5, Avenue Marceau, 75116 Paris (2002); A. Drake, The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris (2006); two documentary films dir. by D. Teboul, one of the same title as his book, the other Yves Saint Laurent: His Life and Times (both: 2003).
Algerian-born French fashion designer who pioneered ready-to-wear fashions and adapted menswear for women.
A great adaptor, Yves Saint Laurent responds in his designs to history, art, and literature. Vast ranges of themes are incorporated into his work, from the Ballet Russes to the writings of Marcel Proust, who inspired his taffeta gowns of 1971; the paintings of Picasso to the minimalist work of Mondrian and the de Stijl movement, shown in the primary colors of his geometrically blocked wool jersey dresses of 1965.
Saint Laurent has a great love of the theatre. He has designed costumes for many stage productions during his long career and the theatre is an important source of ideas for his couture collections. Flamboyant ensembles, such as the Shakespeare wedding dress of brocade and damask of 1980 and his extravagant series of garments inspired by a romantic vision of Russian dress, reflect his passion for theatrical costume.
Less successful have been his attempts to engage with countercultural movements such as the 1960 collection based on the bohemian Left Bank look. The criticism leveled by the press on being confronted with the avant garde on the couture catwalk led to Saint Laurent's replacement as head designer for Dior, even though his 1958 trapeze line had been an enormous success and he had been fêted as the savior of Parisian couture. At this time the House of Dior was responsible for nearly half of France's fashion exports, so there was a heavy burden of financial responsibility on Saint Laurent's shoulders.
The 1960 collection appropriated the Left Bank style with knitted turtlenecks and black leather jackets, crocodile jackets with mink collars, and—a design which was to crop up again and again in his repertoire—the fur jacket with knitted sleeves. In 1968 Saint Laurent produced a tailored trouser collection reflecting his sympathy with the cause of the student marchers who had brought the streets of Paris to a standstill. The clothes were black and accessorized with headbands and fringes.
Where Saint Laurent sets the standards for world fashion is in his feminizing of the basic shapes of the male wardrobe. Like Chanel before him, he responded to the subtleties of masculine tailoring seeking to provide a similar sort of style for women. He produced a whole series of elegant day clothes, such as the shirt dress, which became a staple of the sophisticated woman's wardrobe of the 1970s. Saint Laurent is justly acclaimed for his sharply tailored suits with skirts or trousers, le smoking (a simple black suit with satin lapels based on the male tuxedo, which became an alternative to the frothily feminine evening gown), safari jackets, brass buttoned pea jackets, flying suits—in fact many of the chic classics of postwar women's style.
Saint Laurent's designs contain no rigid shaping or over-elaborate cutting but depend on a perfection of line and a masterful understanding of printed textiles and the use of luxurious materials. He worked with silk printers to produce glowing fabric designs incorporating a brilliant palette of clashing colors such as hot pink, violet, and sapphire blue. A sharp contrast is produced with his simple, practical daywear and romantic, exotic eveningwear, which is more obviously seductive with its extensive beadwork, embroidery, satin, and sheer fabrics such as silk chiffon.
Less interested in fashion than in style, Saint Laurent is and will always be a classicist, designing elegant, tasteful, and sophisticated apparel, perfectly handcrafted in the manner of the old couturiers. He did, however, use industrial methods to produce his Rive Gauche ready-to-wear line, created in 1966, and sold in his own franchised chain of boutiques. The popular line was later taken over by Alber Elbaz, who had worked for Guy Laroche, in 1998, and then by Tom Ford in 2000.
There was been a radical change in the small company founded by Yves Saint Laurent and business partner Pierre Bergé in 1961. It became a massive financial conglomerate, listed on the Paris Bourse, the result of profitable licensing deals. In the 1990s the firm changed ownership several times, ending up as part of the Gucci Group in 1999. Called "fashion's shiniest trophy," by the International Herald Tribune (16 November 1999), the YSL acquisition was another example of the fashion industry's tightening consolidation.
In the 21st century, YSL remained an acclaimed couture house, though its namesake and Rive Gauche designer Tom Ford rarely saw eye to eye. In January 2002, however, such creative differences were moot: Saint Laurent announced he was leaving the firm that bore his name and retiring. Roundly considered the last of the true haute couturiers, the industry lost one of its most elegant and inspired purveyors.
Publications
By Saint Laurent:
On Saint Laurent:
— Caroline Cox; updated by Nelly Rhodes
Quotes:
"I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity -- all I hope for in my clothes."
"We must never confuse elegance with snobbery."
"It pains me physically to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic, by fashion."
"A good model can advance fashion by ten years."
"Fashions fade, but style is eternal."
"I knew the youthfulness of the sixties: Talitha and Paul Getty lying on a starlit terrace in Marrakesh, beautiful and damned, and a whole generation assembled as if for eternity where the curtain of the past seemed to lift before an extraordinary future."
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Yves Saint-Laurent
| This article is about a person who has recently died. Some information, such as the circumstances of the person's death and surrounding events, may change rapidly as more facts become known. |
| Yves Saint-Laurent | |
| Yves saint laurent-2.jpg | |
| Personal Information | |
|---|---|
| Name | Yves Saint-Laurent |
| Nationality | French |
| Birth date | August 1 1936 |
| Birth place | Oran, Algeria |
| Date of death | June 1 2008 (aged 71) |
| Place of death | Paris, France |
| Working Life | |
| Label Name | Yves Saint-Laurent |
Yves Henri Donat Dave Mathieu-Saint-Laurent (August 1, 1936 – June 1, 2008)[1][2] was a French pied noir fashion designer, and was considered among the greatest of the 20th century. In 1985, in his book, Couture: The Great Fashion Designers, Caroline Rennolds Milbank wrote, "The most consistently celebrated and influential designer of the past twenty-five years, Yves Saint Laurent can be credited with both spurring the couture's rise from its Sixties ashes and with finally rendering ready-to-wear reputable".
The son of an insurance company president, Yves Saint-Laurent was born on 1 August 1936 in Oran, in what was then French Algeria. Saint Laurent left home at the age of 17 to work for the French designer Christian Dior. Following Dior's death in 1957, Yves, at the age of 22, was put in charge of the effort of saving the Dior house from financial ruin.
Shortly after this success, he was conscripted to serve in the French army during the Algerian War of Independence. After 20 days, the stress of being hazed by fellow soldiers led the fragile Saint Laurent to be institutionalized in a French mental hospital, where he underwent psychiatric treatment, including electroshock therapy, for a nervous breakdown.[3]
In 1962, in the wake of his nervous breakdown, Saint Laurent was released from Dior and started his own label, YSL, financed by his companion, Pierre Bergé. The couple split romantically in 1976 but remained business partners.[4] During the 1960s and 1970s, the firm popularized fashion trends such as the beatnik look, safari jackets for men and women, tight pants and tall, thigh-high boots, including the creation of arguably the most famous classic tuxedo suit for women in 1966, Le Smoking suit. He also started mainstreaming the idea of wearing silhouettes from the 1920s, '30s and '40s. He was the first, in 1966, to popularize ready-to-wear in an attempt to democratize fashion, with Rive Gauche and the boutique of the same name.[5] He was also the first designer to use black models in his runway shows.[6] Among his muses were Loulou de la Falaise, the daughter of a French marquis and an Anglo-Irish fashion model; Betty Catroux, the half-Brazilian daughter of an American diplomat and wife of a French decorator; Talitha Pol-Getty, who died of drug overdose in 1971; Catherine Deneuve, the iconic French actress; and the Guinean-born Senegalese supermodel Katoucha Niane, the daughter of writer Djibril Tamsir Niane. Ambassador to the couturier during the late 1970s and early 80s was London socialite millionairess Diane Boulting-Casserley Vandelli, making the brand ever more popular amongst the European jet-set and upper classes.
In 1983, he became the first living fashion designer to be honored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 2001, he was awarded the rank of Commander of the Légion d'Honneur by French president Jacques Chirac.
Saint Laurent retired in 2002 and became increasingly reclusive. From then until his death he spent much of his time at his house in Marrakech, Morocco.
He also created a foundation with Pierre Bergé in Paris to trace the history of the house of YSL, complete with 15,000 objects and 5,000 pieces of clothing.
He died on June 1, 2008, in his home in Paris of a long-term illness.
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Saint-Laurent, Yves |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Mathieu-Saint-Laurent, Yves Henri Donat Dave |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | fashion designer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 1 1936 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Oran, French Algeria |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 1, 2008 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Paris, France |
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