The house caused another furor in 1977 with a fragrance called Opium. The press went into a tailspin, with some publications banning the ad. In 1971, he used his own face and body to promote his product, posing nude in an advertisement for the new Saint Laurent men’s cologne, Pour Homme.
With its own identity and boutique, it was the first mass-produced ready-to-wear line by a French couturier to rival the success of couture. Saint Laurent opened the Rive Gauche prêt-à-porter boutique in 1966 to sell his designs directly to the public-thereby sidestepping the knockoff merchants. And the timing of Le Smoking was perfect: It spoke to the desires of the nervy young woman who was just then gaining access to birth control, political power, and an executive career. Before it, pantsuits on women were still a bit transgressive, but in Saint Laurent’s fertile imagination, the trouser suit telegraphed a sensuous femininity. One of Saint Laurent’s most scandalous looks was his 1966 Le Smoking tuxedo suit. Séverine’s wardrobe of immaculately tailored military-inspired coats and shifts-along with her controlled facade-masks her louche inner life of fetishistic fantasy.
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The Saint Laurent creed of subversion beneath bourgeois perfection was on full display in his costumes for Catherine Deneuve’s role as Séverine Serizy, an affluent housewife who leads a double life as a call girl, in Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de Jour. A master of appropriation, Saint Laurent would venture into realms as diverse as the gay counterculture, the souks of Marrakech, and the steppes of Russia, plucking from them garments that were humble (peasant blouses, military trenchcoats) or ceremonial (African conical breastplates) and elevating them to the status of high fashion. “It is young and strives for attractiveness rather than elegance.” It also strived for worldliness. “There is a new trend in fashion,” he declared. Within a few years of opening his own atelier, Saint Laurent was infusing his creations with the maverick spirit of the 1960s. Saint Laurent and his longtime lover (and business alter ego), Pierre Bergé, founded the company in 1961, a year after the young designer was abruptly dismissed from Paris’s reigning couture house, Christian Dior, of which he had been the head. Yves Saint Laurent himself said it best: “Chanel freed women, and I empowered them.” Founded in 1961, the legendary house that bears his name has given us a repertoire of fabled pieces (the Mondrian shift, Le Smoking, the safari jacket, the see-through dress) that offered a modern vocabulary of dressing that was confident, worldly, and sexually liberated.