Yves Saint-Laurent Profiles

Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent, professionally known as Yves Saint-Laurent, was a French fashion designer who, in 1961, founded his eponymous fashion label. He is regarded as being among the foremost fashion designers in the twentieth century. This profiles page is the anchor of his record in this guide: it sets out the founding and the design philosophy — the two facts every other page in this series assumes. Of all the pages in this series, this is the one the others depend on.

The biography searches in the references gather the wider career coverage, and the official YSL website is linked there as well. The collections, dresses, runway and news pages in this series file the fashion work the founding produced.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

The 1961 Founding

An eponymous label founded in 1961 by a designer regarded among the foremost of the twentieth century: the founding is the fixed point of this record, and everything filed in this series is dated against it. The collections page holds the season-by-season view of what the label became, the dresses page files the strand at its center, and the runway and fashion week pages follow the Paris presentations where each season was argued in public.

The profiles record itself is deliberately spare, because the house's public identity is carried by the work and by the philosophy stated below: elegance that never asks the wearer to choose between looking right and feeling right. Readers who want the life in greater depth will find the biography searches in the references kept current by the search engines themselves.

Comfortable Yet Elegant

He approached fashion in a different perspective by wanting women to look comfortable yet elegant at the same time — a simple sentence that rearranged the priorities of Paris dressing. Elegance had usually been bought with restriction; his perspective treated comfort as a design requirement rather than a compromise, and the clothes filed across this series — the tailoring, the dresses, the seasonal collections — are that perspective worked out garment by garment.

He was also able to adapt his style to accommodate the changes in fashion during that period, which is why the record rewards being read whole: the fall and spring pages file the same philosophy at both weights of the year, across decades of changing fashion, and the news page gathers the continuing coverage of the designer and the house his label became.