What a week the fashion community has been having--first, the US release of Sex And The City last Friday, (which we’ll get to later), and then the death of Yves St. Laurent on Sunday.

For those of you who might be a little fuzzy on which of the old European white guys YSL was, (because, shockingly, not everyone has their heads as far up the bony behind of the Fashion Industrial Complex as, say,  certain insufferably self-important NY Times correspondents and their commentators ), he was a big deal in the seventies and eighties.  He was also the guy who came out with, among other things, the iconic women’s tuxedo suit, --a.k.a ”Le Smoking” --in 1968. 


[Students of fashion lore will be familiar with the famous story of socialite Nan Kempner being refused entrance to Le Cote Basque for wearing it :  “The maitre d’ told her she couldn’t dine in a pair of trousers and Kempner promptly dropped the pants and proceeded to dine in the jacket, which had instantly become a very short dress...” . ]

Considering that, before then, “dressy pants” for women was a contradiction in terms, this was pretty revolutionary stuff by any standards, especially for a guy who started his career at Dior, whose clothes were the very essence of fifties-era “ladylike” outfits.


YSL’s other creations, like the safari look,

the Mondrian dress,

and more pant suits,

(Oh, sorry, we meant trouser suits, which is what everyone seems to be calling them now, perhaps to avoid the hideous seventies-era polyester connotations of the word “pantsuit") are of course legendary, and have been well-chronicled by the fashion press, so we’re not going to repeat the lesson here.  [Anyone who wants to feel like they’re back in grade school watching a filmstrip on some obscure chapter in history might enjoy Cathy Horyn’s pedantic retrospective on his career, although we much prefer Lisa Armstrong’s video--maybe it’s the British accent?  And Suzy Menkes , as always, has some nice things to say as well.]

But of all of the YSL legacies, there is one of his designs that has, curiously, been hardly mentioned at all, even though it probably touched more of us than any other of his contributions to the last few decades of the twentieth century.

In fact, we defy you to find anyone who lived through the late seventies/ early eighties who wouldn’t recognize it if they had a whiff:

That fragrance, and the rich-disco evening wear that echoed it’s exotic scent, (like the jackets in this 1978 Vogue spread: )

is the YSL we remember best.

In fact, one of our first “good” perfumes --by any designer-- was Rive Gauche for women,

which we thought was terribly exotic even though we had only a vague idea, back then, of what--or who--YSL was.

 So while others may eulogize Yves St Laurent for his genius with couture, let’s not forget those iconic fragrances, (not that Opium is easy to forget!) which, let’s face it, is as close as most of us ever got to owning a piece of Yves.

Repose en paix, Monsieur St. Laurent, and thanks for the memories!