Yves Saint Laurent
The house that put women in the tuxedo — Le Smoking, Rive Gauche, and modern elegance itself.
Paris, 1961. The couturier
who dressed the modern woman.
After leading Dior in his early twenties, Yves Saint Laurent founded his own house in Paris in 1961 with Pierre Bergé. Across the 1960s he reshaped what women could wear: the Mondrian shift dress (1965), Le Smoking tuxedo (1966), the safari jacket, and the sheer blouse — borrowing from menswear and the street and elevating both to couture.
In 1966 he opened Rive Gauche, among the first designer ready-to-wear boutiques, bringing high fashion to a wider audience. Yves Saint Laurent retired in 2002; the house continues under the Kering group, with its ready-to-wear line rebranded Saint Laurent in 2012. Its founder’s vocabulary still underpins how modern tailoring reads.
The house language.
- 01Le SmokingThe 1966 tuxedo for women — the single most influential garment in the house’s history.
- 02Menswear, reworkedSafari jackets, trouser suits, the pea coat — masculine forms recut for women with couture precision.
- 03Rive GaucheOne of the first luxury ready-to-wear lines, 1966 — high fashion made wearable.
- 04Art into clothThe Mondrian dress and later Pop and Ballets Russes collections — painting and culture rendered as clothing.
"To dress a woman in a man’s tuxedo and make it the more elegant of the two — that was the whole revolution."— Anemoia Vestiaire, on Saint Laurent
Silk, tailoring and line.
Saint Laurent lives in precise tailoring and fine cloth. Our material notes on silk and on tailoring explain what to look for in exactly these pieces — the make beneath the name.
We assess each Saint Laurent piece by its cloth, its cut and its honest condition, and we describe precisely what the garment and its labels show.
We make no claim of certification or exact dating beyond what the piece itself carries — labels and construction change across the house’s eras, and we record what is present.
Measurements and condition sit on each product page. Where maker labelling is present it is recorded as found.Why vintage YSL
is collected.
Yves-era Saint Laurent — roughly the 1960s through the 1990s — is among the most collected in twentieth-century fashion, marking specific moments that reshaped how women dress. Genuine examples have grown scarcer as they have been worn and archived.
Vintage is, in truth, the way to own that era. We present what we have honestly, with condition described plainly.
