Yves Saint Laurent:YVES SAINT Laurent, who has died aged 71 from brain cancer, had a reputation as an artist, transcending fashion, which had been arranged by his entourage and was endorsed by the French establishment.
His true importance, though, was that he was both the last of the Paris couturiers and the first designer to invest his talent in what later became the 21st-century global market for mass luxury.
He was born in Algeria, the son of a businessman. The boy advised his family's chic womenfolk on how to dress and cut miniature garments from his mother's remnants. When he was 17 his father arranged for his sketches to be shown to the editor-in-chief of French Vogue and enrolled him at the official couture academy in Paris. He won first prize in a major competition, and presented the Vogue contact with artwork that predicted Christian Dior's next collection. Dior took the ambitious young man on as his apprentice in 1955, promoting him in 1957 to assistant.
Suddenly, Dior was dead of a heart attack at 52. The textile magnate Marcel Boussac, who financed the house of Dior, named three female staff and Saint Laurent to take over.
Saint Laurent scribbled a thousand designs in a fortnight, later edited by the wise women, who chose the trapeze look as silhouette for his first collection of January 1958; this ignored the natural waist and constructed the dresses lightly, predicting the techniques of the next decade. The collection was a success. The workshop hands applauded. The press wept.
Saint Laurent might not have survived alone, but within weeks of his debut he met his spiritual spouse, his lifelong protector and promoter Pierre Berge, of whom he said: "His strength meant I could rest on him when I was out of breath." (Saint Laurent's repeated diva performances of weakness micro-controlled the others in his life.) Saint Laurent's Beat collection of 1960 so alarmed the customers that Dior refused to contest Saint Laurent's army conscription later that year.
He was meant to fight in Algeria, but he collapsed during induction and was discharged.
No job awaited - but Saint Laurent was set up in his own house with just enough cash for a single collection in 1962. The customers bought the clothes, soon with the sloping YSL logo by graphic designer Cassandre.
Through the 1960s, Saint Laurent did modern - safari and sailor jackets, the female tuxedo with cummerbund he called "le smoking" and short shifts inspired by Mondrian and Andy Warhol.
Based in Marrakech, Morocco, Saint Laurent found an unconflicted north Africa among the rich hippies. He adopted fresh muses, or they adopted him: Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise, two wild women who looked like himself, feminised. They were the first to wear the "Saint Laurent shoulder" with its high underarm cut for a lean limb - his own body form imitated in cloth. He lurked in Marrakech during the Paris events of May 1968, returning - with Berge with the spin - for a collection described as the "first post-couture".
The real fashion revolution, though, was less in the line than in the licensing. In 1967 the house opened a pret-a-porter boutique - Rive Gauche. Later, YSL supplied designs and the name, but the boutiques were franchised, while Berge licensed the name to accessory manufacturers. Saint Laurent followed his master Dior into perfumes, with Y in 1964 and Rive Gauche in 1968.
By 1970 Saint Laurent understood that if couture had a future, it was as a loss leader for licensing deals. The realisation coincided with Saint Laurent's own introductory season of flamboyant behaviour. How much drink, drugs and smashing of antiques he actually indulged in is uncertain, but he projected a personal, gay liberation when photographed nude by Jeanloup Sieff in 1971. His 1940s-themed collection of 1971 shocked - less because of its bareness, since he had done transparent for years, than because of its harsh tartiness, described as "gay taste . . . a camp flirtation with vulgarity".
Berge and Saint Laurent bought control of the couture business. Saint Laurent's next creative experiments helped him cope with Berge's exit from their shared private life and home (though not business); Berge was exhausted by 18 years of proximity to Saint Laurent's casebook of neuroses as well as his attraction to substance abuse and to a dangerous lover.
The estranged couple nevertheless designed a 1976 show that changed the way couture was presented. They had a raised catwalk built: haute couture as stage show. The costumes from that Opera collection looked sublime in photographs, but were luxury brand enhancers rather than clothes. The primary purpose of his 1977 and 1978 collections was to publicise the logo and his 1977 perfume Opium.
After 1978, a museum tone dominated his designs. By 1983 they were on retrospective display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The show went on the road, and others followed, drafting in his perfected classics of the 1980s and such near-unwearable wonders as the 1988 jackets hand-beaded with Van Gogh paintings: more like vestments than fashion. Berge had the gallery ambitions and did the negotiations, persuading the world that he at last was curating an artist.
Saint Laurent's physical health had been affected by depression, bouts of 150 cigarettes a day and drugs. It became a Parisian tradition to rumour he had been hospitalised during the collections season. Often it was true.
His brand stayed in the game, with its ownership passing through various luxury goods groups. In 1999, Tom Ford was brought in to design YSL ready-to-wear. Many claim Ford's appointment precipitated Saint Laurent's 2002 retirement: "I feel I created the wardrobe of the contemporary woman," he told the tearful faithful as he passed into internal exile in his Paris apartment.
Saint Laurent's closest companion in his home, which Berge only visited, was his bulldog Moujik. He always had a bulldog called Moujik; when the current one died, a replacement pup was bought, and also named Moujik.
Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent: born August 1st 1936; died June 1st 2008