Two new museums celebrate pioneering talent of Yves Saint Laurent

At the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakech [Photo/Christophe Martin Architectes]

To see the museum is to witness a veritable greatest-hits collection – not just of the Yves Saint Laurent costume inventory, but of the fashion silhouette of the second half of the 20th century. It's one that kept women, no matter their age, looking young. The designer won the French Wool Board competition in 1954 with a black crêpe cocktail dress he designed in the Hubert de Givenchy workshop. Three years later, at 21, he took the reins of Christian Dior after the designer’s death in 1957, becoming the youngest couturier in the world to run a fashion house. His first collection was 1958's Trapeze, for which he won a Neiman Marcus Award for Fashion, and the year marked his first meeting with Bergé, who would become both his lover and his manager.

At Yves Saint Laurent, the hits were unrelenting. The designer popularised the ready-to-wear label; his famous tuxedo suit for women, Le Smoking; the pea coat; the safari jacket; and perhaps most famously and most imitated of all, the Mondrian dress. As much a fashion designer, he was an artist and harnessed art for his purpose, using Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Irises for another costume and often citing references to Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jean Cocteau and Andy Warhol in his work.

He was groundbreaking, too, as the first to design an haute couture black leather jacket, and even had a nude photograph of himself published for the launch of his first perfume for men, Pour Homme. Saint Laurent invoked male dress codes and appropriated them for his womenswear, thus investing women with greater social power while preserving their femininity. Says Bergé of that contribution: "If Chanel gave women their freedom, it was Saint Laurent who empowered them." And made them feel forever young.