Yves Saint Laurent founded his house in 1962 with his partner in life and business, Pierre Bergé, and in 1963 commissioned the designer Cassandre to create the interlocking YSL monogram. Drawing on Left Bank counterculture, he brought safari jackets, thigh-high boots and leather trousers into couture, and his 1965 Mondrian dresses used near-invisible seams in heavy wool jersey to build the painting’s grid into the garment. In 1966 he introduced Le Smoking, a tuxedo cut for women that saw wearers turned away from restaurants, and launched Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, becoming the first major couturier to popularize ready-to-wear.

Licensing, cosmetics and fragrances such as Opium funded rapid expansion, and his broad-shouldered 1978 look set up 1980s power dressing, but overextension left the house struggling by the early 1990s. Sanofi bought it in 1993 and Kering in 1999; Kering handed ready-to-wear to Alber Elbaz and then Tom Ford, closed haute couture in 2002, and Saint Laurent died of brain cancer in 2008. Hedi Slimane moved the design studio to Los Angeles in 2012 and dropped Yves from the ready-to-wear name, and during the pandemic Anthony Vaccarello sold discounted bags in bulk to wholesalers with authentication tags removed.

• Muses including Betty Catroux, Loulou de la Falaise and Catherine Deneuve embodied the brand’s image.
• Paris boutique Colette sold Ain’t Laurent Without Yves parody shirts, and the house canceled its wholesale order.
• Under Stefano Pilati, stores in San Francisco, Chicago’s Oak Street and on Madison Avenue closed.
• Investigators found Kering routed about 550 million euros in profits through a Swiss subsidiary from 2009 to 2017, evading roughly 180 million euros in French taxes.
• Saint Laurent Productions funds films by directors including Pedro Almodóvar and David Cronenberg.