Yves Saint Laurent (August 1, 1936 – June 1, 2008)

Yves St Laurent, aged 21, at a press conference in 1957, shortly after the announcement of his new role as Chief designer of the Dior fashion house

   Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent, known as Yves Saint Laurent was a French fashion designer, one of the greatest names in fashion history.He was born in 1936 in Oran, Algeria, to middle-class parents. His father, Charles, owned a chain of cinemas. His mother, Lucienne, was a diminutive beauty and socialite who doted on her precious son. "I can still see my mother," Saint Laurent once wrote, "about to leave for a ball, come to kiss me good night, wearing a long dress of white tulle with pear-shaped white sequins."

   At only 17, Yves Saint Laurent won a prize in a competition for the International Wool Secreteriat; his winning entry was a little black cocktail dress. Not long afterwards, the then editor of French Vogue introduced him to Christian Dior, then at the height of his fame. The couturier offered the teenager a job. Dior, it has always been said, had complete confidence in his young protégé and was always happy to give credit to his input.

   It was, by all accounts, a young Yves Saint Laurent, not Dior himself, who designed the dress worn in Avedon's Dovima with the Elephants, the seminal fashion photograph of 1955. Less than two years after that picture was taken, Dior died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving Saint Laurent, aged only 21, presiding over France's most high-profile fashion house, still at that point basking in the glory of the nostalgically romantic New Look.

   The young couturier rose effortlessly to this onerous task not, as a lesser talent might have done, by continuing to uphold the values of his predecessor, but by transforming them. His first collection of "trapeze-line" dresses which, with their light and youthful silhouette, were a million miles away from the predominantly Belle Epoque line that the house stood for until that time, led an unusually hysterical French press to announce the following morning: "Saint Laurent has saved France".

   Before Yves Saint Laurent, French designer fashion was only about haute couture – hand-made, exorbitantly priced one-offs that would only ever be worn by the privileged few – or cheap copies cobbled together by faceless pattern cutters and machinists. Responding to the surge in youth culture, Saint Laurent changed all this for ever, and throughout the Seventies and Eighties he was the designer favoured by the beautiful people in Europe and beyond. Bianca Jagger, Talitha Getty and Marianne Faithfull all wore Saint Laurent, paying biannual visits to his fearsomely glamorous boutiques, staffed by equally formidable vendeuses.

   Saint Laurent said that his most cherished design was "the smoking, because it gave freedom to women. It also gave women the confidence to feel beautiful". He said that the most exciting thing in contemporary fashion was the fact that there are "no more rules, the freedom of dressing, the beauty of mixing vintage clothes with a pair of jeans that I love".

   When asked whether the haute couture was the most prized side of his work he had this to say. "Yes, it is. I am very happy to design haute couture. It's a love story between couture and me".

The famous five – his greatest looks:

   The Mondrian dress (1965)

   The first of many flirtations with fine art, these brightly coloured, minimally cut, ultra-short dresses, inspired by the late work of Piet Mondrian, again met with rapturous reviews. Later, Saint Laurent went on to reference everyone from Van Gogh to Picasso. He was always a keen collector and sponsor of contemporary painting. In the same year, the couturier designed Catherine Deneuve's wardrobe for the Luis Buñuel classic, Belle de Jour.

   Transparent (1968)

   Scandal ensued when Yves Saint Laurent sent out a model bare breasted in a transparent, ostrich-feather-trimmed blouse – this was, surprisingly, the first time in fashion history such immodesty had occurred.

   Le Smoking (1966)

   Although Saint Laurent was not the first designer to put women into trousers, he did reinvent the man's tuxedo, putting it on the couture catwalk as an androgynous alternative to overtly feminine and frothy eveningwear for the first time. In 1969, he followed this with a trouser suit for daywear. "Le Smoking" remained an integral part of all Saint Laurent's ready-to-wear and haute couture collections until his retirement. It was most famously photographed by Helmut Newton in a dimly lit Paris alleyway in 1975.

   Love Me Forever Or Never (1970)

   Tradition decrees that "the bride" is the last outfit on to the catwalk at all haute-couture collections – an anachronistic flourish that continues, for the most part, to this day. In 1970, Saint Laurent sent his bride out in a velvet coat appliquéd with Love Me Forever Or Never – quite a move away fromthe usual white-meringue dresses.

   Safari (1968)

   Inspired by the great explorers, the designer took the safari suit – in khaki and with patch pockets – and transformed it into a chic urban uniform. Again, it was to appear in various forms on his runway throughout his career.  <...>