UPTOWNflavor

We see touches of his style every time we take a stroll down the busy 125th Street corridor: denim wear, designer fashions, and brand names. The iconic legend of the fashion world, Yves Saint Laurent has died in Paris at the age of 71. Saint Laurent had been suffering from poor health and was wheel-chair bound before becoming bedridden.

Yves Saint Laurent took the fashion world by storm when at the tender age of 21 he entered the House of Dior as the protégé of the late designer, Christian Dior. He went on to create and redefine cultural standards for the next four decades. Saint Laurent announced his retirement in 2002 at age 65 and the closure of the Paris-based haute couture house he had founded 40 years earlier. It was mourned in the fashion world as the end of an era. His ready-to-wear label, Rive Gauche, which was sold to Gucci in 1999, still has boutiques around the world.

According to Women’s Wear Daily (WWD),

Saint Laurent’s contributions to fashion were unquestioned – even if, in later years, many of his collections were considered repetitive of his signatures. In this century, only Dior, Coco Chanel, Cristobal Balenciaga and Karl Lagerfeld, his peer and rival, were said to be on the same plateau.

At the minimum, fashion owes him the credit for the invention of ready to wear through the launch in 1966 of his Rive Gauche collection. But there also were his iconic tuxedo suit “le smoking,” beatnik fashions, the use of safari jackets as a style statement for women and men, the Ballets Russes collection, his unparalleled sense of color combinations, the artistry of his cut, designer denim and the launch of a significant fragrance and beauty business with a designer name.

While Saint Laurent revolutionized women’s fashion (Hillary Clinton’s pant suits fetish is directly attributed to him), his influence on hip hop fashion world can be seen vividly in the designs of people ranging from Sean Jean and Baby Phat to Micheal Knight. Tommy Hilfiger credits him with “changing the word of fashion forever. YSL the man is gone, but his imprint on the world lives on.

Photo: AP File: Yves Saint-Laurent, London1969