His client list reads like a world-wide Who’s Who. Whether American socialites, French film stars or European royalty, they all have one thing in common – they remain faithful to the master of originality and innovation. Hardly surprising when you think about it, for few fashion designers have had the talent or skill to constantly reinvent fashion in the manner of Yves Saint Laurent.

France’s World Cup victory was Yves Saint Laurent’s too. For last year he presided over the largest fashion show ever staged. Three hundred mannequins, including his famous Mondrian dresses, Safari jackets and Le Smoking trouser suites were paraded in the Stade de France in Paris in front of an audience of 80,000, illustrating a fashion journey through time.

The remarkable life and times of Yves Saint Laurent began on August 1^st 1936, in Oran, Algeria – then a French colony. His mother doted upon him, the oldest of her three children, and encouraged his flair for art. From an early age the young Yves was fascinated by8 fashion and theatre. He copies the dresses he saw in Vogue – and promptly set about designing his own, submitting an entry to a competition in Paris for which he won third prize. In 1954, after completing his baccalaureate, he moved to the French capital where he enrolled in the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture. He won first prize in three different categories at the International Wool Secretariat competition, while Karl Lagerfeld won a fourth for a coat design. Michel de Brunhoff, the Director of Vogue had no difficulty in recognising that Saint Laurent was extremely talented and arranged to introduce him to the couturier Christian Dior – who promptly hired him as a design assistant. And then, unexpected and unannounced, Saint Laurent suddenly became a legend in his own lifetime, to coin a cliché, when at the age of 21 he took over at Dior, after the designer suddenly died. Within ten weeks of the great Dior’s death, Saint Laurent put on his first show. Introducing the short, swing Trapeze Line – he was immediately hurled into the headlines, becoming an instant success. As Dior had done a decade earlier, Yves Saint Laurent had turned the fashion industry on its head with a new silhouette. The hour-glass figure and pristine white gloves of middle-aged couture were replace by avant-garde ideas such as the Beat collection in 1960. This was the first haute couture collection which had its origins in clothes being worn on the streets. By designing clothes for his own generation, not his mother’s, Saint Laurent succeeded in outraging the more conservative of Dior’s clientele. Ironically, the Beat Look, his homage to the beatniks of the Left Bank with black leather jackets and turtle-neck sweaters, would later become a fashion classic.

Soon after he took over at Dior, Saint Laurent met his future partner, Pierre Berge, with whom he floated the idea of opening his own fashion house. After suffering a nervous breakdown as a result of poor reviews of his work – combined with the effect of one year’s military conscription – he learned that Marc Bohan had replaced him at Dior. The best thing that could have happened to him, as he would later point out, for his dismissal from Dior was a turning point in his career – one from which he would never look back.

Saint Laurent has been associated with dozens of first in fashion – but the best remembered is undoubtedly the creation of Le Smoking back in the swinging sixties. This revolutionary black trouser suit was based on a man’s dinner jacket – but tailored to flatter a woman’s figure. From that point, trousers won by women were considered chic – and a new generation of designers, including Kalvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan and Giorgio Armani put their own slant onto the trouser suit as sophisticated daywear.

Haute couture has quite been the same since. Ask Monsieur Dupont – the French man in the street – what Saint Laurent has given to fashion and he will undoubtedly inform you that its ‘le fun’. The production of comfortable and yet stylish clothes for an active, modern life. He also recognised the importance of the youth revolution and influence of mass media in his design philosophy. And during the sixties and seventies he found the time to design for the theatre and cinema, including the films Belle de Jour, The Pink Panther – and the ballet Scherezade.

While some late 20^th century designers deliberately court controversy, it is easy to forget the effect of Saint Laurent’s transparent blouses when the first appeared on the catwalk 30 years ago. His eye-catching designs owed much to his love of the arts and were seen in collections inspired by Mondrian painting and Pop-Art as well as the Ballet Russes. In particular, the Mondrian dresses inspired a million rag-trade copies and, believing that fashion was no longer the prerogative of the rich, Saint Laurent decided to produce is own read-to-wear line.

The first couturier to appreciate that there was money to be made from a diffusion of pret-à-porter, Yves Saint Laurent opened a Rive Gauche boutique in Paris in 1966. His objective? To dress the girl in the street. She did not disappoint. For the boutique was an immediate success with trouser suits, chain-belts and mini-skirts being snapped up like petits pains , as they say in the land of fashion. Rive Gauche boutiques were soon opening up all over the world, enabling fashion-conscious women to wear Saint Laurent designs at a fraction of the cost of couture. He also had the business acumen to bring the image of Parisian chic to an international audience through the licensing of products such as accessories and cosmetics. Before you could say Yves Saint Laurent, he was a household name. Not bad from the boy from Oran.

Recent auctions of 20^th century couture – such as the ones held by Sotherby’s in New York, see Yves Saint Laurent as a highlight. Tiffany Dubin, fashion specialist at Sotheby’s, explains: "Its because from the beginning his clothes were timeless. At present, they are very much in vogues, with young New Yorkers wearing his early designs from the 1060’s and 70s. His Russian and African collections were especially important and his designs while at the House of Dior have been eagerly acquired by collectors." Sotheby’s achieved high prices for a Saint Laurent cocktail ensemble created in 1958 which sold for US$ 17,250, as well as a day ensemble from the Autumn/Winter 1959 collection which sold for US$43,125 – both purchased for the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, which is scheduled to open soon on the outskirts of Paris.

The costume collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London is the fortunate recipient of six Le Smoking outfits, thanks to the generosity of Jill Ritblat, the wife of one of London’s biggest property developers. Mrs. Ritblat, a faithful client of Saint Laurent for 25 years, cites favourite designs including his Mondrian-inspired-dresses from 1965 and, more recently, his Sunflower embroidered jacket as clothes which imitate art as well as being examples of exquisite workmanship. The Sunflower jacket, inspired by Van Gogh, has 450,000 sequins sewn on by hand. In fact while 150 hours of work are required to produce an haute couture dress, it takes four times as long to make an embroidered garment.

Saint Laurent’s fragrance launches are as influential – and controversial – as the clothes he designs. The introduction of his first fragrance, Y, was in 1964, but by 1971 he had come to appreciate the power of what might be called provocative photography – outraging many when he decided to pose nude for the launch of YSL Pour Homme. In 1977, Opium was introduced with the slogan ‘Opium – for those addicted to Yves Saint Laurent’. To publicise the perfume, Saint Laurent hosted a party on a Chinese junk on Manhattan’s East River amidst rumours than an opium den was hidden in the hold of the boat. It was the first of the fragrance industry’s mega-launches and the combined scandal of the slogan, party and implied use of drugs only served to boost sales – proving the time-honoured slogan that all publicity is good publicity. More controversy followed with the launch of Champagne in 1993, when French champagne growers successfully campaigned for the withdrawal of the use of the name.

For over 40 years, Saint Laurent has changed the way women dress – and continues to command the respect of his peers, if only for having survived for so long in the jungle of high fashion. In 1968, the late, great Coco Chanel claimed him as her spiritual heir. In 1983, he was the only living designer to be the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, while the 1990s saw numerous designers – Helmut Lang, Christian Lacroix and Marc Jacobs – looking back to Saint Laurent’s hard-edged glamour for inspiration. Today, his street-cred in London and New York has reached new heights. From a sheer, feminine top or a masculine trouser suit, Yves Saint Laurent has led the way in the emancipation of women’s clothing. And thus fully deserves his recognition as the greatest fashion designer of the 20^th century – if not the millennium.