Saint Laurent Russian Coat

French designer Yves Saint Laurent pioneered “cross-design” in fashion, taking inspiration from street trends to modernize haute couture.

Saint Laurent was the first to launch a ready-to-wear label, YSL Rive Gauche Prêt-à-Porter. He was the first couturier to open boutiques for both men and women. Using traditional menswear fabrics and designs for women, Saint Laurent also literally cross-dressed, giving men and women alike chic pant suits, elegant tuxedo jackets and urban safari gear.

By blurring gender-specific design, Saint Laurent empowered individual style while creating a scissor-sharp fashion aesthetic of sensual ease and beauty. Many of his designs are today considered timeless classics. Saint Laurent also consistently used Black models, like Mounia, Iman and Naomi Campbell, and he drew endless inspiration from different ethnicities and cultures, in no small part because of his Algerian roots.

Born to French parents in Oran, Algeria, in 1936, Saint Laurent went to Paris at age 17 to study fashion at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. Just two years later, in 1955, his remarkable sketches were shown to Christian Dior, then the world’s reigning couturier, who hired him immediately.

Surprisingly soon thereafter, Dior publicly chose Saint Laurent as his successor, which sadly proved prescient when the fashion legend died unexpectedly, in 1957. A mere slip of a youth, the 21-year-old Saint Laurent was nevertheless up to the challenge. He shook the traditional couture clientele to its core with youthful silhouettes and styles like the A-line trapeze dress that hung with seeming effortlessness from the shoulders, the antithesis of the pinched waists and molded skirts that had been all the rage after the deprivations of World War II.

After a mandated spell in the torturous French military, Saint Laurent suffered a nervous breakdown and was dismissed by Dior in 1962. Out of the ashes rose the Age of Yves. With Pierre Bergé, his then-lover who became his lifelong business partner and friend, the designer founded Yves Saint Laurent YSL to encompass prêt-à-porter, or ready-to-wear. In 1966, they opened the first YSL Rive Gauche women’s boutique in Paris, followed soon thereafter by YSL Rive Gauche for men. Saint Laurent had given birth to a global brand.

His revolutionary Mondrian mini dress from 1965 is a core element of his fashion biography. It is a prime example of how Saint Laurent, an avid art lover and collector, looked to painters, from Goya to Picasso, Ingres to Matisse, for inspiration.

With its pure lines and hues, Mondrian’s ground-breaking 1935 color-block painting Composition C transmutes beautifully into a dress that is highly valued by collectors of contemporary fashion and widely copied commercially to this day. The design is the epitome of Saint Laurent’s aesthetic, requiring a meticulous hand-piecing of each color block so that, despite the body’s curves, the visual plane is as flat as a canvas when the garment is worn. Mondrian’s purity met its match in Saint Laurent.

“I am no longer concerned with sensation and innovation, but with the perfection of my style,” Saint Laurent said four years before retiring, in 2002. After a long period of ill health, he died at his home in Paris on June 1, 2008.

Browse an extraordinary collection of vintage Yves Saint Laurent evening dresses, shirts, handbags and other clothing and accessories today on 1stDibs.

There is a stylish garment for anywhere in the universe, and on 1stDibs, finding the right vintage and designer coats and outerwear doesn’t have to feel like a journey to the ends of the earth.

Outerwear includes many types of garments aside from the standard coat. From capes, gilets, jackets and cloaks to raincoats and kimonos, fashion designers have long been preparing us for the elements, and outerwear in general has changed and evolved significantly over time.

A lot of the coat styles in our closets, such as the durable Navy-inspired peacoat, were popularized by soldiers who battled aggressive climes in their regulation field jackets and parkas — indeed, keeping troopers comfortable guided the design of the military surplus garments that have often become buzzy fashion trends. Even today, owing to the likes of Burberry, a luxury fashion house that is among the originators of the trench coat worn by British officers during World War I, the trench remains a timeless style, now available in a range of colors that can be worn throughout the year.

While women in late 1700s England donned an adaptation of a men’s jacket called a spencer — the likeness of which could be spotted in Ralph Lauren’s ready-to-wear collections hundreds of years later — designers hadn’t widely been crafting outerwear specifically for women. Generally, the outerwear of choice for the fashionable, well-heeled lady prior to the 1800s usually consisted of capes, shawls and stoles. By the mid-1800s, women were wearing overcoats with multiple layered collars popularized by men (often called a Garrick coat in England), and as women entered the workforce during the 1920s, hemlines climbed, jewelry was prominent and fashion conventions were broken across the board.

Thankfully, the 20th century’s tradition of challenging the norm continues steadfast in today’s outerwear fashions. Contemporary designers certainly find inspiration in 1960s and 1970s coats by Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent and Bonnie Cashin, but unisex options abound in modern creations that take both function and style into account. Find what inspires you in the full range of vintage and designer coats and outerwear available for sale on 1stDibs.