Adieu to the Era of Yves.(Yves Saint Laurent)(Brief Article)

Thirty-five years ago Spanish film director Luis Bunuel hired French actress Catherine Deneuve to play the lead in his new picture, "Belle de Jour." The character was complicated: a frigid bourgeois wife who, unbeknown to her husband, works by day as a high-class call girl for fetishists. How, Bunuel and Deneuve wondered, would such a woman dress? They needed clothes that were both traditional and sexually charged, almost to the point of perversion.

Deneuve remembered a fashion show she had attended two years earlier put on by a young French designer named Yves Saint Laurent. He had begun making headlines with radical designs like trapeze dresses and shifts based on Mondrian paintings, and Deneuve thought his clothes had a classic line with just the right touch of naughtiness. So she suggested Saint Laurent and, as she recalled recently, "luckily, Bunuel was open to the idea."

Luckily indeed. "Belle de Jour"--with its soft belted shifts, masculine trench coats and solid-heel black pumps with oversize gold buckles-- essentially launched Saint Laurent's long and influential career. Now that career is coming to a close. Last week Saint Laurent, 65, announced that he will retire next Wednesday, with a final fashion show/retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His company will carry on in name through his ready-to-wear, perfume and cosmetics lines under the sure hand of Tom Ford, the American-born designer of Gucci, which bought YSL two years ago for $1 billion. But the money-losing haute couture division, which Saint Laurent held on to and continued to run, personally cutting and pinning the $25,000 suits and $100,000 gowns, will be shuttered.

No wonder women everywhere are feeling so nostalgic. From his very first show at Christian Dior 44 years ago, through his four decades at his own house, Saint Laurent personally changed the way women dress. The last of the great couturiers--he learned his craft during the heyday of 1950s Paris fashion--Saint Laurent took everyday items such as men's suits and military uniforms, and used couture techniques, the finest fabrics and an artist's deft touch to transform them into stylish, wearable clothes. He anticipated as well as echoed society's changes in a way that no other designer ever has--and likely ever will. He captured the beginnings of the women's liberation movement and the sexual revolution in those designs--frank and strong, without being radical. "I have believed for a long time now that fashion is not merely there to embellish women," he said at the press conference where he announced his retirement last week. "I believe it is also a means to give them confidence, to enable them to assert themselves."

Sadly, Saint Laurent himself never was as confident or assertive as his devoted clients. Born to a conservative French family and raised ...