Style It Like Stefano.(Stefano Pilati)

Byline: Sarah Mower editor: Sally Singer

Gender-crossing clothes are nothing new in the house of Yves Saint Laurent. But, asks Sarah Mower , what purpose do they serve if not a political one?

It's quite hard to drag a full admission out of Stefano Pilati about the hows and whys behind the latest women's collection to find its way into YSL stores. It's not exactly a secret, but it's never been presented on any runway. In fact, the last person to wear it in a publicity context was a man who modeled the clothes in the video for Saint Laurent's spring menswear collection. Privately, Pilati has been wearing them himself. Now, though, those exact same suits, jackets, blousons, and sweaters (with a few tweaks) have--to use his word--"spontaneously" migrated across shop floors to hang in the women's department. To find them, you need to use the code word unisex --a term, of course, plucked straight out of the lexicon of hip that surrounded Yves Saint Laurent's pioneering reassignment of menswear to women in the dawn of the feminist movement.

The news will have a certain substratum of Pilati's female friends, acquaintances, and general pants-favoring fans dancing around punching the air. "It's funny because I thought the concept, as banal as it sounds, couldn't mean anything today," he says. "Because we went through 'unisex' with a purpose, in terms of a moment of liberation of the sexes. Today we don't really need to suggest that through clothes, no? But what came out is a silhouette, an attitude for a woman that is very contemporary."

For years--and this is the part of the backstory the celebrated Italian dandy is diffident about discussing--women friends have scrutinized and commented on the clothes Stefano Pilati wears. Some, inspired by his style, have gotten into the habit of marching into YSL menswear departments and hijacking the odd jacket or shirt for themselves. Others will put their heads to one side, sidle up to stroke his cashmere sleeve, and wheedle in his ear, '"Wish you'd design like that for us!'"

He insists, though, that the real epiphany behind this development didn't come out of the sense that women are missing masculine/feminine dressing--or at least definitely not in any of the gender-bending, political ways that it's come up in fashion before. It came from almost the opposite direction: the gender positioning of men. Instead of menswear suitings, Pilati found himself reaching for crepe de Chine, constructing blazers out of washed silk, blousons from dip-dyed organza, and ending up with an evening jacket embroidered with dull-gold antiqued sequins. After heels and belts from the women's cruise collection were called in, a draft lookbook was shot and, suddenly, a new subcollection was spontaneously erupting from the studio. "Some are an exact copy of the men's, just a smaller size and graded. And some maintain the look but consider the anatomy of a female body with more precision, because technically, there are some things you can't avoid."

If the collection doesn't carry the controversial heft of Yves Saint Laurent's original ...