 Legendary fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent died at his Paris home last Sunday aged 71 after a long battle with brain cancer. Today during his funeral the fashion world will give a last bow to a designer who gave women a wardrobe that spoke of confidence, authority and elegance.
“He’s my big fashion hero and always has been and it’s really sad that he’s gone,” Marc Jacobs told WWD. “I just think to me and to so many others he has been such a great inspiration in terms of everything, first and foremost in terms design. Saint Laurent was the first to look at youth and street culture and take elements and make them chic.”
“Gabrielle Chanel gave women freedom. Yves Saint Laurent gave them power,” said Saint Laurent’s long-time confidante and business partner, Pierre Berge on France Info radio. “Like all creators, Yves Saint Laurent had two faces - a public face and private face.”
“I think I’m in shock. I’m in fashion today because of him. I lived in Paris right next to his first couture house. My mother adored his work and introduced me to it when I was 16. I feel in love with fashion because of Yves Saint Laurent. He was the first international superstar in the modern era,” Vera Wang told WWD.
 “For me, Saint Laurent is and has always been the absolute master. In his work, I find the energy to do my work. He gave us glamour, he loves women — and he opened a lot of doors for fashion. What we are all doing is because of Saint Laurent. We all love him, and he knows that,” Jean Paul Gaultier said.
Among many top names, YSL’s designer peers Valentino, John Galliano, Giorgio Armani, Stefano Pilati, Hubert de Givenchy, Alber Elbaz, Jean Paul Gaultier, Christian Lacroix, Hedi Slimane, Kenzo Takada, Sonia Rykiel and Jean-Louis Scherrer and his former muses Catherine Deneuve, Laetitia Casta and Claudia Schiffer are due to attend the funeral of the world’s most legendary designers. YSL headquarters and YSL boutiques worldwide will all be closed today in memoriam.
 Yves Saint Laurent was born and grew up in Algeria. His father wanted him to become a lawyer but his flair for design was very strong. At 17 he went to fashion school in Paris, where he won a design competition with a sketch of a cocktail dress.
After the victory he was introduced to Christian Dior, who hired him as a new assistant. After Dior suddenly died three years later, Saint Laurent was chosen to take over as chief designer of the fashion house.
However three years later Saint Laurent was called up for military service in his native Algeria, where an independence war was under way. His service only lasted three weeks, but by the time he returned, he’d already been replaced at Dior by Marc Bohan.
Saint Laurent decided to open his own design house with his business partner and life long confident Pierre Berge in 1962. Yves Saint Laurent was only 25.
 It was under the Yves Saint Laurent label that he produced some of his most iconic designs like Le Smoking - the first tuxedo for women, safari jackets, and see-through blouses. He liberated women with his pantsuits and simple, yet chic, silhouettes. In time Saint Laurent expanded his business with perfume licenses, including Opium and Champagne, and the Rive Gauche ready-to-wear line, for which stores were also opened and men’s wear was added in 1969.
Saint Laurent wanted to democratise fashion and bring beautiful clothes to every woman. Yves Saint Laurent was always a head of his times. He was the first fashion designer to use a black model on his runway and he helped young Naomi Campbell to become Vogue’s cover girl in both France and England.
 Saint Laurent wasn’t afraid to shock. In 1971, his radical ‘40s haute couture collection startled critics as did the advertising campaign for the first YSL men’s fragrance, Pour Homme, in which he posed nude, wearing only his thick black rimmed glasses and his launch in the mid 1970s of a perfume called “Opium” brought accusations that he was condoning drug use. In 1976, his Ballet Russes collection was termed “revolutionary.”
Yves Saint Laurent popularized the bohemian-chic style that later went on to characterize the hippie aesthetic. He welcomed then exotic and unorthodox influences into his work, such as the traditional prints of Africa and the folkloric costumes of Russia. He celebrated a relationship between fashion and the art world, most dynamically with his Mondrian dress of 1965.
Saint Laurent battled with depression, ill health and drugs on and off throughout his career to the point that Berge was known to say his partner and friend “was born with a nervous breakdown.” He discussed his homosexuality and drug problems for the first time in an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro in 1991.
 He became the first living fashion designer to be honoured by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983 and he was awarded the rank of Commander of the Legion d’Honneur by former French president Jacques Chirac in 2001.
In 1998 Laurent retired from ready-to-wear and in January 2002 Saint Laurent announced that he would close his couture house. “I am extremely proud that women of the world today wear pants suits, pea jackets and trench coats,” he said at his retirement news conference. “In many ways I feel that I have created the wardrobe of the contemporary woman.”
When Gucci Group bought the label in 1999, Tom Ford recut the tuxedo and resurrected both the African sensibility and the Asian fascination. He also gave a nod to the house’s history of sexual provocation with a collection of see-through frocks. And now designer Stefano Pilati helms the house. He has turned his attention to the brand’s famed tailoring and its historical emphasis on dramatic silhouettes. He has also recruited one of Yves favourite models, Naomi Campbell, to star in the autumn/winter 2008 campaign for the label.
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