Fashion World Mourns Yves Saint Laurent

Yves Saint Laurent passed away this month. Born in Algeria, he is said to have inherited his fashion sense from his mother and his mother's friends. Saint Laurent left home at the age of 17 to work for the French designer Christian Dior. He exploded on the fashion scene in 1958 as the boy-wonder successor to Christian Dior. He soon became one of the best-known and most influential couturiers of the second half of the 20th century.
During a career that ran from 1957 to 2002 he was largely responsible for changing the way modern women dress, putting them into pants both day and night, into peacoats and safari jackets, into “le smoking” (as the French call a man’s tuxedo jacket), and into leopard prints, trench coats and, for a time in the 1970s, peasant-inspired clothing in rich fabrics. He died last week at his apartment in Paris. He was 71.