Saint Laurent

Yves Saint Laurent founded his house in Paris in 1961, alongside his partner Pierre Bergé, after leaving Christian Dior where he had taken over as head designer at twenty-one. The original proposition was to translate couture codes into a modern wardrobe for women who worked, traveled, and went out at night.

Critics quickly labeled him the designer who put women in trousers, and Le Smoking, introduced in 1966, became the garment most associated with that reputation.

Menswear arrived through Rive Gauche, the ready-to-wear line launched in 1966, and expanded steadily as Saint Laurent applied the same tailoring vocabulary to both sides of the wardrobe. The design language centered on narrow shoulders, slim trousers, sharp lapels, and dark wool suiting, often paired with silk shirts, velvet jackets, and safari pieces in gabardine.

Within the Paris scene, the house sat alongside Dior and Givenchy in couture lineage but pushed closer to the street through Rive Gauche, a strategy later echoed by Giorgio Armani and Helmut Lang. Saint Laurent received the Council of Fashion Designers of America International Award in 1981 and was the first living designer given a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983.

The company was sold to Sanofi in 1993 and then to the Gucci Group, now Kering, in 1999, with Tom Ford taking over ready-to-wear before Stefano Pilati, Hedi Slimane, and Anthony Vaccarello followed in succession.

Slimane renamed the ready-to-wear line Saint Laurent in 2012 and reshaped the men’s silhouette around skinny tailoring, leather jackets, and Chelsea boots, a look adopted widely across rock and indie circles.

Today the house dresses a clientele that spans musicians, actors, and finance-adjacent buyers, and it sits among the largest revenue generators in the Kering portfolio, holding a position in menswear defined by black tailoring, leather outerwear, and a continued reference to the codes Yves set in the 1960s and 1970s.