Ysl Heart Print Blouse Vintage

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.

For everyday casual wear, elevating your look at the office or making a dramatic entrance at a formal event, authentic designer and vintage skirts are reliably versatile garments.

Skirts have been around for thousands of years. A woman’s straw skirt found in an Armenian cave is believed to have been handwoven in 3,900 B.C., and long, full skirts were worn by men and women in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Mesopotamia. Over time, the hemlines might have changed significantly but the skirt’s integral role in fashion has remained in place.

By the early 1900s, skirt hemlines had crept up slightly to ankle-length height from the densely layered floor-length style that dominated the Victorian era — a radical shift. As women in the United States began to live more active lives during the 1920s, designers such as Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel sought to free them from the long skirts and other constrictions that persevered in fashion by ​​introducing her first little black dress. That same decade, she debuted her perfume, Chanel No. 5, as well as the Chanel suit with a fitted skirt, inspired by the boxy lines of men’s clothing and employing a sporty tweed.

Advancements in swimwear during the 1920s and 1930s also reflected a climbing hemline. Visionary designers such as Elsa Schiaparelli eventually pushed the boundaries of modesty with her backless suit, but women still wore long garments in public. Also during the so-called Roaring ’20s, short flapper dresses that fell at the knees and boasted a free-flowing sack-like silhouette, as well as chic beaded evening gowns and floral day dresses, paired fabulously with the dazzling jewelry of the era. This proved to be just a fleeting deviation from prevailing social convention, however. Skirts grew longer again in the 1930s, even if bows and other embellishments were added. As women entered the workforce in large numbers, clean lines accentuated curves and flared slightly where the material resolved at the ankles.

After World War II, France earned recognition as the center of fashion design for women. It was the golden age of haute couture, and women, quick to dispense of the drab utilitarian wartime garb that hung in their closets, pined for luxurious, elegant skirts designed by Christian Dior, Chanel, Givenchy and others, which were splashed across the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in richly colored photographs shot by the likes of Richard Avedon and David Bailey. The 1960s introduced narrow pencil skirts and provocative minis emblazoned with geometrically dazzling patterns or bright floral prints by designers such as Emilio Pucci, Pierre Cardin and Lilly Pulitzer. By the 1970s, women felt emboldened to wear different varieties of this all-purpose garment, exploring wraps, crushed velvet maxis and other styles crafted by Halston, ​​André Courrèges, Yves Saint Laurent and others.

On 1stDibs, find a wide range of designer and vintage skirts for any gender by Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Alexander McQueen and more. Whether it’s a skirt that can be altered to suit a specific style or an addition that’s ready to join your cherished collection, find exactly what you’re looking for today.