Yves Saint Laurent — The King of Classy Dressing

Le Smoking — the well-known story — has been discussed extensively; however, what confirms the Yves Saint Laurent legacy is Anthony Vaccarello’s remarkable decade, Saint Laurent’s unique success in Kering, and the ICP exhibition in New York that tells the story of the designer’s heritage.

Fashion terminals have chronicled the story of Le Smoking. Tuxedos, the year 1966, women wearing trousers, being scandalous, revolting: these expressions are so common that they’ve turned into clichés.

We would like to take a different view; we claim that the trouser suit was never the main idea. It was just evidence of what Yves Saint Laurent realised way earlier than everyone else, i.e., that clothing could become not only a garment but also a powerful argument.

The designer who dressed for a debate

Think about the order of the incidents. In the year 1957, Saint Laurent was appointed as the chief of the fashion house known as the House of Dior, at the age of 21, following the death of Christian Dior — a position that many fashion designers strive for their whole lives, handed to someone who is just coming of age.

Shortly afterward, in collaboration with Pierre Bergé, he launched his brand and took a step that seemed very logical but was at that time radical. He put his name and image as the brand’s identity, which was rather unusual at that time since the designers’ role was to stay invisible.

This was how the idea of associating image with quality came to life. In 1965, Saint Laurent created the Mondrian dress, a simple wool dress with parts fashioned in order to recreate the artwork of Piet Mondrian and make art affordable for everyone.

He passed away in 2008, at the age of seventy-one, at his home in Paris. The Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent Foundation took history, well, and in 2017 set up museums in Paris and Marrakech to preserve his legacy in the right way. Up to here, everything seems fine; no big deal, really. But there is, however, a point that we want to make at this stage.

The calm decade that no one is treasuring

Anthony Vaccarello has been the creative director of Saint Laurent since 2016, and that means 2026 is going to be the ten-year anniversary of his incumbency… So yeah, the decade mark. Ten years is the sort of milestone you’d think should be celebrated, but honestly, not many people are doing it, at least not in a straightforward way.

Fashion houses change their designers every three to five years, which seems to be a normal practice in the industry nowadays, but Vaccarello is different, and his style can be characterised by strong shoulders, loud hues, and sensual women created by Saint Laurent without the need to shock people.

The commercial data supports this assertion, even during a difficult time for luxury goods in general. According to Kering’s 2025 earnings, Saint Laurent earned €2.64 billion, representing an 8% decline year-on-year and following a challenging year for the entire group, but still exhibited a robust operating margin of 20%, one of the best in the Kering portfolio.

Most remarkably, Q1 2026 statistics indicate that Saint Laurent, like Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, and Brioni, generated growth year-on-year, while Kering’s top brand, Gucci, was suffering, reporting a 14% decline in the same quarter. In other words, the house of Saint Laurent is doing the stabilising in the company that is operating based on a single, unstable engine.

New York is currently proving our point

For those in search of physical proof that Saint Laurent’s work in image creation is far from redundant, the International Center of Photography in New York currently has an exhibition that could demonstrate what they need.

One bit of information people keep bringing up when they mention the exhibition is the fact that YSL posed for Irving Penn in 1957, maybe the same year, or around it, when the designer was taken on by Dior.

At that time, he was building his own visual mythology before even getting around to his first clothing collection “Rive Gauche”. You really shouldn’t mix up that moment with something playful , because Saint Laurent was the one who understood that what matters is what one does professionally, and that knowledge sort of equipped him with an understanding of how commercial success is achieved.

Our actual argument

Remove the stories that everyone else tells over and over again, and the essence is this: The real legacy of Yves Saint Laurent Style was never any single piece of clothing. Instead, it was in the idea behind wearing the clothes – the freedom to dress how one wants to dress, as opposed to following the rules of fashion, the freedom to use one’s appearance as a form of expression.

Whenever someone calls him “the king of elegance”, one usually thinks of the tuxedo story. Still, we’d rather bring forward the idea of disciplined consistence that Vaccarello embodies or the story of a twenty-one-year-old man who was photographed by Irving Penn. Whenever someone calls him “the king of elegance”, one usually thinks of the tuxedo story. Still, we’d rather bring forward the idea of disciplined consistence that Vaccarello embodies or the story of a twenty-one-year-old man photographed by Irving Penn.

The clothes were always visible. The real inheritance was knowing which rules should be broken and which ones would have to be defended.