Word: sainte
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Along with Cocteau, the avant-garde French writer and film director whose aphorism he quotes frequently these days, Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent may be fou like a fox. After years of beguiling women into austerely tailored pantsuits, now, in this cool age of less is more and casual is all, the world's most influential couturier has stopped the parade with a collection of high-camp peasant fashions that are impractical, fantastical and egotistical. They are also subtle, sumptuous, sensual and jubilantly feminine. The overwhelming first American response, both from those who deal in clothes and those...
...paisana-princess image-the YSLook -is a deliberate assertion, a statement. It says, in the words of a Washington fashion setter who was in Paris last week, "Aren't I simply devastatingly dazzling!" It is not, at from $2,000 to $10,000 per outfit, for humble folks. Saint Laurent has used with theatrical abandon the old luxurious, tactile fabrics: satin, gold and silver lame, silk faille, velvet, taffeta, chiffon, chenille, mousseline and moire. The materials, fashioned into 106 outfits for Saint Laurent's July 28 showing, bring back blouses with billowing sleeves, bouffant skirts and, yes, soft...
...shape of Y.S.L. to come was foreshadowed last spring, when he displayed a ready-to-wear collection that embodied in less expensive form the essence of the couture show. Thus reversing the traditional cycle of a high-fashion collection followed by a mass-manufactured version of the same clothes, Saint Laurent's top-line show echoed-and amplified-his earlier collection. This strategy, rather than the designs themselves, was the real revolution. The very same week that fashion writers were trumpeting the glories of Saint Laurent's haute couture, the ready-to-wear clothes were showing...
...fashion generates for Y.S.L.-or Pierre Cardin or Dior-helps boost sales of the entire line of products, from soap to wallpaper, that is marketed under a fashion-house name. As a conglomerateur, with 4,450 employees worldwide, 58 products on the market and annual sales of $200 million, Saint Laurent can afford to subsidize the rich who buy his $5,000 gowns...
Still, after reflecting on Saint Laurent's New New Look, some U.S. designers were saying at week's end that actually, it was hopelessly out of date for Americans. "The collection has no relationship to what's happening to women today," observed Ralph Lauren. Halston declared that "the costume party is over for America." Others, like Clovis Ruffin, loved it. "It reminds me of the grand old days of Paris." he said. Giorgio Sant' Angelo called it "beautiful," adding, "but to me it looks like a very old revolution...