On August 1st, Yves Saint Laurent would have turned 90. He never made it past 71, yet nine decades after his birth in Oran, the industry is still measuring itself against a wardrobe he built more than half a century ago. That is not nostalgia. That is the definition of a legacy that works — clothes designed to outlast their season, their decade, and their designer.
I keep returning to Saint Laurent in this publication because he is, in many ways, the original argument for everything Ethical Editorial stands for: that style and substance are not opposites, that a garment can be both beautiful and built to last, and that the most radical thing a designer can do is make clothes that give the wearer power rather than take it away.
Why he is still the reference point
Saint Laurent became head designer at Christian Dior at 21, after Dior’s sudden death in 1957. By 1962 he had his own house. What followed was not a string of pretty dresses but a rewriting of what women were allowed to wear in public, at work, at dinner, and on their own terms: trousers, safari jackets, pea coats, the jumpsuit — and, above all, the suit.
He is credited with popularising ready-to-wear as a serious creative category rather than a lesser cousin of couture, launching his Rive Gauche line in 1966 specifically to make his design language accessible beyond the small circle of clients who could afford a made-to-measure gown. That decision — to design well for many rather than only exquisitely for a few — is one of the quieter but more consequential parts of his legacy, and one that speaks directly to how I think about ethical fashion today: democratising quality is itself an ethical act.
The suit as an act of liberation
No single garment tells this story better than Le Smoking, the women’s tuxedo suit he introduced in his Fall/Winter 1966 collection. Until that moment, the tuxedo had been exclusively a man’s garment for over a century. Saint Laurent took its structure — the sharp lapel, the strict shoulder, the clean trouser line — and rebuilt it around the female body, softening the curve of the collar without softening its authority.
The reaction proved how threatening a well-tailored jacket could be. Restaurants in New York and Paris turned away women who arrived in trousers; one of Saint Laurent’s clients, socialite Nan Kempner, was famously refused entry to a restaurant in her Le Smoking pantsuit — so she removed the trousers on the spot and walked in wearing the jacket as a dress. Within a decade the same suit had been worn by Catherine Deneuve, Bianca Jagger, Lauren Bacall and Liza Minnelli, and the tuxedo had permanently entered the female wardrobe.
What makes Le Smoking an ethical milestone as much as an aesthetic one is what it did to the balance of power in a room. Saint Laurent understood, decades before the language of empowerment became a marketing line, that clothing is not neutral — that a blazer with real shoulder and real structure changes how a woman is treated, how much space she is allowed to take up, how seriously she is heard. He gave women armour that did not sacrifice femininity to gain authority. That is the opposite of the disposable, decorative fashion that treats women’s bodies as surfaces rather than as the site of decision-making.
Beyond Le Smoking: the blazer as everyday tool
Saint Laurent’s tailoring instinct did not stop at the tuxedo. His safari jacket, introduced for both men and women, took the structure of a utility garment and turned it into something a woman could wear to run a business in. His trouser suits for daywear extended the same logic Le Smoking had proven at night: a woman’s blazer could be sharp, comfortable, and unapologetically hers, not a scaled-down borrow from a man’s closet.
This is the throughline I think is worth teaching young designers today: tailoring, done honestly, is one of the most durable forms of clothing there is. A well-built blazer is repaired, not replaced. It moves between decades, between owners, between occasions. It is the natural enemy of the trend cycle. Saint Laurent’s suits from the 1960s and 70s still circulate on the resale and vintage market today, worn as confidently as they were the year they were made — proof, in fabric and thread, that quality construction is itself a form of sustainability, long before that word entered the fashion vocabulary.
“Fashions fade, style is eternal”
Saint Laurent’s own words about Le Smoking have outlived him as a kind of design philosophy: fashions fade, style is eternal. It is, in effect, an early and elegant rejection of the logic that now drives fast fashion — the idea that clothes exist to be consumed quickly and discarded. Saint Laurent built garments meant to be worn for a lifetime, reinterpreted season after season rather than replaced by something newer and cheaper. That is a values statement as much as a design one, and it is precisely the standard I hold Cantarelli and the designers we cover at Ethical Editorial to: build it once, build it to be worn, build it to be kept.
The legacy that remains
Ninety years on, the house he built continues to reissue and reinterpret Le Smoking every few seasons, a garment still treated as current rather than archival. But the more important inheritance is not the silhouette itself — it is the conviction behind it. Saint Laurent proved that a designer’s role is not only to dress people but to widen what they are permitted to be: powerful, comfortable, self-possessed, dressed in something built to last. For an industry still working to reconcile beauty with responsibility, that remains the standard worth measuring ourselves against.
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