YVES SAINT-LAURENT
Aug. 1 1936-June 1, 2008
By Tim Gunn
People know his name, I don't know how much people really know about the impact that he had. He was the first one in the history of couture that launched a ready-to-wear line. That alone puts him on the fashion map and gives him a place in fashion history and perpetuity. Through ready-to-wear, he could bring a couture point of view to the masses so to speak. And that's an exaggeration because even the masses couldn't afford a ready-to-wear line. But you were having access to couture at a designer ready-to-wear price. And that was unprecedented. And hugely revolutionary.
In America, we look at design through a lens of commerce, and that was not Yves Saint-Laurent's sort of raison d'etre. That wasn't his goal. It was really about wanting to impact more women than what the couture line could actually do. It was ego driven more than anything else. But God bless him for having the ego that said, I want to walk up and down the rue, and see people wearing my clothes.
I can't imagine removing him from the whole fabric of the 20th century. I know this is going to sound overly ground, and you might think ridiculous, but this is why I'm so passionate about what I do. It would have been a different world without him. And less of one. His impact on the industry was profound.
Yves Saint-Laurent, 71, died of brain cancer in Paris.
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