<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Dear FKIA, I noticed a strong reaction in the fashion industry to the death of YSL. I&amp;#039;ve heard his name, but can you please tell me why he&amp;#039;s so great?  The passing of Yves Saint Laurent at age 71 on June 1 of this year marks the end of what will go down in history as one of the most revolutionary periods in fashion. Not only do we have YSL to thank for ready-to-wear (vis-\u00E0-vis couture), but his unorthodox ideas (such as women wearing pants) and his use of black models on the runway before anyone else liberated fashion from its repressive, snobbish predilections. Almost everything we see on the catwalk today is a fairly literal interpretation of something YSL did before. If that isn&amp;#039;t reason enough to care about YSL (and more on that later), consider his life story. Born in Algeria, he was inspired by his mother&amp;#039;s sophistication to become a designer. At 17 he moved to Paris, where he was hired by Christian Dior, who happened to be judging an illustration competition that the young Saint Laurent had entered. Four years later, when Dior died in 1957, the 21-year-old became the youngest designer to head an atelier. In an age when sartorial design has become largely about corporate profitability, the unlikelihood of YSL&amp;#039;s rise would be hard to overstate, but YSL wouldn&amp;#039;t mind this conceit. For he was the first to incorporate and sell shares of his company, long before fashion conglomeration came onto the scene. But what makes YSL really important to you and me, aside from his great eye for color and the exotic, was his desire to use fashion as a way to comment on and mine popular culture. His first collection for Dior was spring/summer couture in 1958, when he showed the Trapeze dress, a riff on modern art. By 1960 he was showing fur-trimmed motocross jackets as part of his beatnik collection and was nearly fired. After being conscripted into military service and replaced at Dior by Marc Bohan, YSL went on to launch his own company in 1961 with his then-partner and future lover, Pierre Berg\u00E9. Within a year, critics were hailing him as being as important as Balenciaga, Dior, and Chanel. What made him different was that rather than stick with a signature look, YSL dramatically changed his collection each season. By 1968, he declared that couture as an institution was irrelevant and set about putting women in pants with his CityPants collection. He was better at divining cultural influences and turning them upside down for a profit than Warhol was at elevating and exploiting the public&amp;#039;s taste for pop art. He adapted Mondrian, the Surrealists, Picasso, tuxedos (the infamous le smoking), safari, the Ballet Russes, Cossack peasants, and African tribal dress, all under the bourgeois moniker of Rive Gauche. He was the first designer to put himself in an ad nude, for his men&amp;#039;s fragrance, called YSL Pour Homme. He dressed celebrities and used them to sell his image to the press and public around the world. Catherine Deneuve, Bianca Jagger, Paloma Picasso, Betty Catroux, Loulou de la Falaise, and Marisa Berenson were his public muses. All this before he was 40. It&amp;#039;s no wonder that the man who revolutionized fashion would go on to suffer nervous breakdowns and alcohol and drug addictions for the rest of his life. He launched the heady blockbuster fragrance Opium in 1978, stirring controversy by throwing a lavish party in New York City on a four-masted boat called the Peking. In the `80s, he said he worked primarily so that those in his employ wouldn&amp;#039;t lose their jobs. By 2002, when he finally retired, the man whose favorite color was black and music was Bach was dedicating his days to mounting exhibitions of his archives. Even though YSL was a master at creating trends, he detested those who designed only for the runway and not for the woman who wears the clothes. He consistently returned to the classics (most of them of his own invention) because he believed their style was eternal. YSL loved women and committed his life to intuiting what would make them look good, feel better, and advance their cause by using taste and imagination to trump convention. A designer attending his funeral said the service was &amp;quot;so emotional, everyone was crying like it was the end of the most beautiful love story.&amp;quot; A fitting metaphor for what Yves did for women and fashion all the world over.  -submitted by Amy, NYC "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/a10298/the-life-of-ysl-335764/>