Yves St Laurent Handbags

French fashion 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, he empowered individual style while creating a scissor-sharp fashion aesthetic of sensual ease and beauty. Many of his designs are today considered timeless classics.

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.

Other highly coveted collectibles poured from his imagination, such as the black crocodile motorcycle jacket, an early intimation of Saint Laurent’s passion for subverting — or is it obverting? — street style, which was then dominated by the anti-bourgeois beatniks of Paris’s Rive Gauche.

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 plain is as flat as a canvas when the garment is worn. Mondrian’s purity met its match in Saint Laurent. (One of the pattern cutters, according to Saint Laurent expert and fashion journalist Laurence Benaïm, was another renowned perfectionist: a young Azzadine Alaia!)

In Yves Saint Laurent: The Impossible Collection (Assouline, 2020), the Mondrian dress is shown worn on the cover of Paris Vogue, as well as on British Sudanese model Alek Wek in a photographic trifold by Christoph Sillem from 1998. Saint Laurent 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.

At his best, like any artist, Saint Laurent used his nervous energy to feed his fertile imagination with all that inspired him. Creation gave him momentary peace, his confidence unassailable. “Nowhere is Saint Laurent more excessive than in his talent,” Cathy Horyn penetratingly noted in the New York Times in 2000.

And no historical haute couture collection is more excessive than Saint Laurent’s Spring/Summer 1988 line. Entirely hand embroidered by Lesage on 273 yards of ribbon, it took 670 hours, 250,000 sequins in 22 colors and 250,000 pearls to make. Among the most expensive couture garments ever, the “Sunflowers” version sold for $450,000 in 2019 at Christie’s in Paris.

“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. He was 71.

Browse an extraordinary collection of Yves Saint Laurent evening dresses, shirts and more today on 1stDibs.

An integral part of fashion, handbags and purses have been indispensable accessories ever since we began to carry around personal items. Level of craftsmanship, style and shape matters — from coin purses in ancient Greece to early 20th-century opera bags and onward, handbags have evolved considerably over the years to meet our needs and desires, whether or not you happen to be prioritizing functionality over a flashy exterior.

Once, a single “It” handbag ruled each fashion season. No more. Today, handbag lovers are savvier and have a wider range of shopping options. Nevertheless, classic bags still rule.

“It is not a fashion bag — it is a statement bag,” says Mightychic's Debra Kent of Hermès's widely beloved accessories. “When you carry an iconic Hermès bag — Birkin, Kelly, Constance — no one knows how long you have been into this culture or if you are a newbie. Your status is validated immediately.”

First released in 1997, Fendi's Baguette rose to fame along with Carrie Bradshaw, the Sex and the City character portrayed by Sarah Jessica Parker. Recently, the design has seen such a resurgence in popularity that Fendi has reissued it.

They are part of design history, so owning a handbag has meaning. As New York–based fashion historian Sarah C. Byrd says, “You have made the choice to invest in this piece because you understand the value of it in the past and in the future to come.”

From a 1980s Chanel black leather quilted mini buckle bag to the rare Hermès Birkin 30cm Himalayan with diamond hardware to a range of 19th century bags, find a rich variety of designer handbags and purses spanning numerous brands on 1stDibs — seasonal “It” designation no longer needed.