Slimane’s crossover success was clearly explained by the potential transferability of his designs to mass retail and by the fact that many of his key design pieces looked neither new nor luxurious to the naked eye, but rather “authentically” vintage.

In her ethnographic research on vintage styling among members of the Sixties scene in Germany, Heike Jenss has described the specific performance of authenticity involved in restaging mod styles. Rather than reproducing the sartorial codes perfectly, members combine past with present, tending towards the iconic looks associated with the period. As a result, the prevailing looks in the Sixties scene are the “stereotypical” styles commonly associated with the decade in question, which are influenced by the media images of rock stars, fashion models, and actors. 

The most commonly remembered styles, like space-age and op-art looks, often reconstructed in detail, recur at Sixties events in dense concentration, presenting a hyper-version of the decade past . The menswear pastiche of the mid-2000s operated in a similarly selective manner, picking and mixing from post-1960s rock heritage to hone a contemporary classic ideal or “hyper-version” of the past.

Paradoxically, Slimane rejects the prefixed predictability of postmodernism (recycling, re-appropriation, revisiting), preferring to emphasize fashion’s “perpetual mutation,” accelerated through the last decade’s fast forward movement from analogue to digital culture, from consequential logic to parallel multiplicity.

Whilst it is true that the technologies of consumption and distribution have been transformed radically through changes in digital media platforms the 2000s, the content (of both pop and fashion cultures) is locked into a permanent mashup of the styles of recent decades. Elizabeth Wilson pointed this out early on as the checkmate position of contemporary fashion within postmodernity: “our culture of global mass media feeds us so much information that a massive cultural eclecticism is the only possible response”

Rick Owens's penchant for all rock'n'roll stuff places the leather jacket at the top of every shopping list inspired by Saint Laurent Paris. Subcultural patterns like grungy tattered knitwear and glam rock-inspired embellishments come and go, but a true style staple is the rockabilly biker jacket. While an investment in this classic Saint Laurent design needs no reason in our opinion, an oversized leather in a different shape won't take you too far from the vibe you're looking for in 2020.

SLIMANE REJECTS THE PREFIXED PREDICTABILITY OF POSTMODERNISM

Many people don't know that Rick Owens has been creating furniture and fashion since 2007.  That's partly because Owens deliberately retains the items from most of his stores; and partly because they don't look like furniture, even in situ. Instead, they resemble round, faceted rocks made of such varied materials as Carrara marble or plywood, perhaps embedded with a moose antler. Owens' own bed — one of three editions — is a colossal tomblike structure made of alabaster slabs that weighs two tons when combined with its accompanying daybed. 

"Furniture — because it was never a requirement for us — was something we only did for ourselves to satisfy our own artistic appetites and personal needs," says Owens in his trademark California drawl, on the phone from his Paris office. "I was thinking about my message of intent when I first started the furniture: it was something like, 'a fur on a rock, next to a stone, in a cave.' And I literally built a rock, the rock that I wanted..." he laughs. Often Owens seeks to dumb his own complex ideas 

down, but then he reels off his artistic influences. "There was Robert Mallet-Stevens, there was Brutalism, there was Marcel Breuer architecture and there were German bunkers." These precedents are all there, reworked into the aesthetics of the chunky, sliced-up boulders he calls chairs and tables, which challenge the notion of a designer's line of interiors as run-of-the-mill soft furniture. (There are pillows, insists Owens, which make all that rock crystal and petrified wood a little more comfortable.)

The creations of Owens can be seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, with a spectacular display featuring both pre-existing furniture and newly created pieces. There's no fashion involved, except a video of Owens draping a look from his spring/summer 2016 menswear show "Cyclops." There's also a collection of canvases by the late American contemporary artist Steven Parrino, whose punk-tinged work — cut, twisted, ripped, typically maltreated and mostly monochrome — has a direct aesthetic connection to Owens' avant-garde design and furniture. "The MOCA pieces have been more sculptural and less certainly decorated than they were before," says Owens. "It's kind of like a runway show for a museum exhibition. Do we really need a runway show to see the practical material, or do we need to see the story? Do we need to see commitment, evolution, and aspiration?

Do we really need a runway show to see the practical material, or do we need to see the story? Do we need to see commitment, evolution, and aspiration?

Last year, some fortunate fashion students at Central Saint Martins had the chance of a lifetime when Alexander McQueen enlisted their support in helping to make their collection of Spring 2020. 

The Look 10, worn by British model Stella Tennant, consisted of a white sleeveless midi dress featuring abstract line drawings of "dancing ladies" created by the above students. (All student's names were credited in the show notes.)

The students' dancing girl sketches were made on long white sheets during a life-drawing class led by fashion illustrator Julie Verhoeven at the London brand's flagship store. 

Subsequently, artistic director Sarah Burton hired the entire McQueen team to hand-embroider and lace a single ivory linen dress over the drawings. 

The Stitch School, a charity that fosters community through needlework, has provided specialist tables and looms for the teams in London and Paris so that each person can contribute to creating this look. 

Tennant's dress went on to inspire the Look 12 embroidery of dancing girls: a linen dress in blue with an open neckline and short bulbous sleeves. 

Burton championed this season with the school kids and her whole team working on this outfit, it all added to the sense group spirit and cohesiveness. As she wrote back then in her show notes, "I love the idea that people have the time to do things together, the time to meet and talk together, the time to reconnect to the world."

This opportunity given to London Central Saint Martins students is truly important as most now-famous designers once started their career as interns. Rick Owens, after graduating from high school, moved to Los Angeles for two years to study art at Otis College of Art and Design, before taking training in pattern making and draping at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College.

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN BROUGHT LONDON STUDENTS' DRAWINGS TO LIFE

Rick Owens designs furniture to be used on the long run so that objects can be inherited from generation to generation. The designer believes that tables and chairs should be with the character as they are part of our everyday life; they fill the space of the house with rhythm and allusions. The same approach was taken by Paul Poiret, Jeanne Lanvin, Rei Kawakubo and other designers who, for various reasons, turned to interior items. Rick Owens began designing furniture under the patronage of Parisian gallery owner Philippe Jousse of Jousse Enterprise. Today, Rick Owens furniture is presented and produced by the Carpenters Workshop Gallery.

Rick Owens anticipates an era of new barbarism. In collaboration with the gallery, he created the Prehistoric collection, which included objects from petrified wood and stone with the remains of plants from five hundred thousand years ago, from marble and alabaster. The surface of some things is complemented by chips and spectacular scratches in the spirit of modern urban vandalism.

Ten years ago, when Hun and I (as Rick Owens calls his wife Michel Lamy) moved to Paris, I would occasionally make custom furniture, including the one that I once invented for our bunker on Hollywood Boulevard. I was inspired by simple lumber items from Robert Mallet-Stevens and Claude Parent. As soon as we settled in the city, Hun began looking around for artisans. I made something from black plywood, Hun found somebody who translated those forms into a petrified wood. Our Los Angeles bed, upholstered in an army blanket, turned into an alabaster shape in Paris, and a chair from pressed lumber was carved from soft white marble. In general, this furniture has become an individual exercise in creating our own small world.

Rick Owens comes up with original objects, rethinking archetypes: for instance, the backless chair in his Curila Chair opus or the Trident Chair, a Roman camping bed, or La Boudeuse couch sofa in the style of Louis XVI. He chooses exquisite, rare materials and is ready to endlessly develop a black and white palette so that he can stay within his signature monochrome style also in furniture design. He needs either a five hundred thousand-year-old petrified tree or translucent marble and alabaster. Rick Owens manages to design furniture no less expressive than his fashion shows.

Rick Owens designs furniture on the long run: so that objects can be inherited from generation to generation.

RICK OWENS FURNITURE: AN ERA OF NEW BARBARISM

The term “camouflage” initially entered into the fashion lexicon as a concept, not as a patterned fabric. The patterned garments mentioned before containing disrupted camouflage were at the time called many things, but not “camouflage.” However, once the idea of deceptive concealment was introduced via World War I, the inherent meaning of the term “camouflage” caught on quickly, and was often applied to the transformative powers of fashion. The bifurcated meaning of camouflage as both a pattern applied to garments and a concept that affects the perception of one’s appearance endures to this day in fashion.

A 1918 article in the New York Times describes the lightweight satin exterior on the new style of Eton jacket as “only camouflage. Underneath these coats are padded and quilted.” A book published that same year called Color in Everyday Life claimed that there were “optic illusions created through line movement, through simultaneous contrast and through the differences in retinal excitement caused by different colors and arrangement which can be utilized effectively in connection with the adaptation of the color scheme to the figure of the wearer.” The plates in the book, titled “Camouflage in Dress Design,” demonstrate how a woman could elongate and slenderize her silhouette by using “vertical parallelism” or alternately emphasize her curves through “horizontal parallelism”.

In 1934, the Council of Fashion Research of L. Bamberger and Co. published a study in which “three hundred architects, industrial designers and experts in the science of camouflage in many parts of the country have suggested how a stout woman may dress to obtain the most flattering effect.” Some of the suggestions included never wearing “shiny-surfaced materials” and shunning “large printed patterns,” “flippsy-floppsy trimmings, puffed sleeved and garments that fit too snugly.” One architect suggested using “contrasting colors to camouflage” an unsightly area, while another simply admitted that “it is not easy to say what folds, what materials, what colors, textures, will make a diabetic matron look like the Woolworth building.”

Today, designers often apply camouflage prints to their models. Within his last season, Alexander Wang presented several variations of camo sweatpants, camouflage back panel t-shirts, and camo canvas totes.

A 1918 article in the New York Times describes the lightweight satin exterior on the new style of Eton jacket as “only camouflage. Underneath these coats are padded and quilted.”

CAMOUFLAGE AS A CONCEPT IN FASHION LEXICON

Elsa Schiaparelli created camouflage-patterned garments at least three times within a decade. In 1937-38 she designed an evening gown with a black and green camouflage print. Two years later, just after war was declared in France, she presented her midseason collection with a military theme. This small collection featured colors such as Torch Blue, Trench Brown, and Legion Red and included “a taffeta dress streaked with dark red, green and blue [that] was named ‘camouflage.’” “A camouflage effect [was also] given in an air raid hooded overall suit of pale blue transparent oil-silk worn over purple woolen.” The taffeta gown in particular caused quite a stir, as it was “dubbed the ‘washerwoman’ dress and is made to answer the prayer for something to wear direct from workaday events to playtime goings-on. It buttons down the front on miniature hand-grenades.” Schiaparelli predates by sixty years a Moschino “Cheap and Chic” dress from Fall 2000 with a camouflage print and lipstick holster. Her cheeky use of camouflage with hand grenade buttons is easily understand when one considers her connection to Surrealism and its adherents, like Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau, with whom she had collaborated on some of her designs. She implicitly realized the irony and disconnectedness of using camouflage, by this time a proven war tactic, as an integral component for a modern, fashionable silk dress.

Schiaparelli predates by sixty years a Moschino “Cheap and Chic” dress from Fall 2000 with a camouflage print and lipstick holster.

SCHIAPARELLI PREDATES BY SIXTY YEARS MOSCHINO CHEAP AND CHIC DRESS

Artists brokered the fluid transmission of camouflage between fashion and the military during the early twentieth century. While the most popular camouflage pattern appropriated by fashion since World War II has been based on the coincidental type of camouflage theory (utilizing both blending and disruptive principles), prior to World War II it was solely the disruptive form of camouflage, informally called Dazzle, which was most exploited in clothing. While artists and fashion designers during the first part of the twentieth century did not call their work “camouflage,” the visual principles employed were the same as those for camouflage theory – the purposeful application of a high differential graphic pattern composed of mid-to-large scale blocks of color that were meant to shatter the singular body into pieces. These designs, which collectively are camouflage-like in theory, overwhelmingly had the same purpose – i.e. to enact upon the wearer the perception of dynamism, kinetic movement, even disintegration.

The work of the Italian Futurists clearly demonstrates the principles behind disruptive camouflage. The prominent Futurist Giacomo Balla claimed that their “transformable clothes” were made using “mechanical trimmings, surprises, tricks, [and the] disappearance of [the] individual. Balla wrote in his declaration, “The Antineutral Dress” that Futurist clothing should, amongst other things, be “dynamic, with the dynamic colors and patterns of fabric triangles, cones, spirals, ellipses, circles able to inspire the love of danger, of speed and assault, the hatred of peace and immobility.” The Futurists used a strategic application of disruptive color patterns to clothing in a bellicose, aggressive, destructive and modular way. Giacomo Balla’s fashion designs during much of his artistic career, from 1914-1930, were shockingly colorful with sharply angular motifs jutting out with combative force, shattering the singular body. Another Futurist, Tullio Crali, created projects for men’s and women’s garments that distorted the body into asymmetrical pieces and components. These garments, while definitively Futurist, could just as well be classified as examples of camouflage theory due to the viewer’s disrupted visual perception when gazing at the wearer.

The work of the Italian Futurists clearly demonstrates the principles behind disruptive camouflage. 

THE FLUID TRANSMISSION OF CAMOUFLAGE BETWEEN FASHION AND THE MILITARY

Upon first consideration, military-issued camouflage would seem to suggest the disappearance of the individual – its very nature as a uniform emphasizes conformity, while the optical effects of the pattern force the disintegration of the human form by merging it into the background. Yet, when used by fashion, camouflage announces one’s presence, serving to distinguish the wearer from others. From the 1970s to present day, the pattern has repeatedly fallen in and out of fashion, creating a cycle that has served to fix it solidly in the fashion pantheon as a classic. Even though the pattern now has widespread populist appeal, it still retains edgy overtones due to its use in the military and in anti-fashion. The inherent malleability of camouflage to transfigure the body is echoed in its flexibility within the realm of fashion to both distinguish yet codify the wearer. It is at the same time used as a tool of subversion and an indication of accepted fashionable conformity.

Camouflage is immediately recognizable, yet it has contradictory meanings. Like the fragmented world that the pattern embodies, in socio-cultural terms the camouflage pattern embodies conflicting connotations – violent yet peaceful, urban yet natural, conformist yet subversive. Inherently democratic, camouflage belongs to male and female, rich and the poor, pacifists and warriors. Ultimately, it is the wearer, not the pattern itself that determines its meaning.

Designers often apply camouflage prints to their models. Within his last season, Alexander Wang presented several variations of camo sweatpants, camouflage back panel t-shirts, and camo canvas totes.

From the 1970s to present day, the pattern has repeatedly fallen in and out of fashion, creating a cycle that has served to fix it solidly in the fashion pantheon as a classic. 

SOLIDLY OF CAMOUFLAGE IN THE FASHION PANTHEON

Fashion designer Claude Sabbah's statement implies that camouflage, both as a concept and a pattern, is omnipotent and omnipresent. How could a simple textile pattern ever be compared with God? If Sabbah's opinion is correct, how did camouflage achieve such power?

The camouflage textile pattern itself is just one aspect of camouflage theory, albeit the most visible. The pattern, with its original intention of concealing the human form during war, directly relates to the concept of camouflage theory as practiced in otherways, such as concealing undesirable parts of the body or distorting visual reality. The term Camouflage embodies deeper philosophical meanings speaking to an intentional denial of truth. Indeed, fashionable camouflage springs out of this theoretical realm of intentional deception - trickery meant for survival through the shifting of reality. Fashion permits, and even encourages, the assumption of new identities through the act of wearing clothes, mirroring the rebirth through deception that camouflage enables.

How did the textile pattern known as camouflage come to be imprinted on the public consciousness with such a variety of co-existing meanings? The focus is mainly on the American, and by a certain extension, European experience of fashionable camouflage for two reasons: first, the trend for wearing fashionable camouflage began in the United States, and second, the pattern most associated with fashionable camouflage is actually an American military camouflage creation.

There are several important thematic connections to camouflage that need to be investigated. Foremost, camouflage cannot be discussed without acknowledging its direct link to art. Indeed, the pattern called camouflage is at its essence an artistic rendering of the natural world. Initially, artists created defensive camouflage schematics during both World Wars, and afterwards they were the first to use the pattern in subversive ways. Art served as camouflage’s primary node of transference between the military and civilian realms. Other disparate forces connected to the development of camouflage as a fashion classic include music, marketing, anti-fashion, political activism and feminism.

The term Camouflage embodies deeper philosophical meanings speaking to an intentional denial of truth.

The modern theory of military camouflage owes much to the American painter Abbott Thayer, whose ideas of protective coloration in the natural world debuted in a 1896 article called “The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration.”

He expanded his theories in his 1909 book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, co-written with his son Gerald, espousing that the purpose of an animal’s coloration was to attain transparency and obliteration of form through countershading and disruptive patterning as compared against its background from a certain vantage point. After World War I broke out, Thayer’s book was used as a reference by all sides, and Thayer himself consulted with both British and American armies. His 1909 book also contained photographs of a camouflaged scout concealed in a tree meant to demonstrate the protective qualities of applying disruptive patterning to the body and clothing. These photographs are some the first ever to record clothing containing a camouflage pattern.

Thayer reiterated his earlier findings in a 1918 article, stating that “all the patterns and brilliant colors of the animal kingdom, instead of making their wearers conspicuous, are, on the contrary, pure concealing coloration, being the actual color notes of the scene in which the wearer lives, so that he really is nature’s utmost picture of his background.” To this end, Thayer espoused that “man has only to cut out a stencil of the soldier, ship, cannon or whatever figure he wishes to conceal, and look through this stencil from the viewpoint under consideration, to learn just what costume from that viewpoint would most tend to conceal this figure.” While there is pictorial and material evidence of camouflage applied by paint and fabric to garments during WWI, these were relegated to elite military personnel, such as snipers. Uniforms with a standardized, government-issued camouflage pattern would not emerge until World War II.

While there is pictorial and material evidence of camouflage applied by paint and fabric to garments during WWI, these were relegated to elite military personnel, such as snipers. Uniforms with a standardized, government-issued camouflage pattern would not emerge until World War II.

ABBOTT THAYER: THE MODERN THEORY OF MILITARY CAMOUFLAGE

There are essentially three types of military camouflage, all of which were utilized in World War I for the purpose of evading detection. The first type is a blending, or assimilating, camouflage that seeks to use color and pattern to melt into the background by mimicking other objects in the environment. A second type of camouflage is called disruptive camouflage, which obliterates a single recognizable shape into several smaller unrecognizable units by using a high-differential color scheme. A third type of camouflage is coincident camouflage, a method of using both blending and disruptive techniques to merge an object into the background whilst breaking it into several smaller irregular shapes. This last type of camouflage is the type we most associate with the pattern applied to uniforms – a pattern containing amorphous shapes in colors matching the natural environment.

Many have suggested the place of Gestalt theory in the study of camouflage. The Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider wrote, “one realizes immediately that Picasso’s new technique [of Cubism] consisted partly in destroying the natural units of familiar objects by opposing one unit-forming factor to another.” In Gestalt theory, the blending kind of camouflage is called “unit forming,” while the disruptive form is called “unit breaking.” Coincidental camouflage succeeds by breaking a form into units, and then causing these units to merge into other objects within the background through blending coloration. While this theory was not codified until the 1930s, it serves to explain why camouflage was an effective war tactic.

This principle of obliteration was also applied to ships, usually in a striped zebralike scheme called “Dazzle”. Of utmost importance during WWI was the need to make ships visually disappear on open water. In 1917, British Lieutenant Commander Norman Wilkinson laid out his idea for making boats disappear in a letter to the British Admiralty. “It should be pointed out, the idea is not to render the ship in any degree invisible, as this is virtually impossible, but to largely distort the external shape by means of violent color contrasts.” The goal was to force the enemy into an inaccurate reading of the ship’s distance, direction of travel and speed through visually breaking the ship into smaller pieces.

There are essentially three types of military camouflage, all of which were utilized in World War I for the purpose of evading detection. 

The term camouflage derives from the French word camoufleur, meaning “to disguise.” It entered the English language during World War I, when the French first adopted it as an innovative military technique. In 1914, the portrait painter Guirand de Scévola proposed hiding shiny artillery behind paint and fabric. De Scévola was quoted as saying:

In order to totally deform objects, I employed the means Cubists used to represent them – later this permitted me, without giving reason, to hire in my [camouflage] section some painters, who, because of their very special vision, had an aptitude for denaturing any kind of form whatsoever.

This concept of concealing coloration and deformation spread rapidly to Britain and Germany, finally reaching the United States in 1917, the year the USA entered the war.

Camouflage served to drastically alter the look and method of modern warfare. While armies decades earlier had used monochromatic coloring on their uniforms as a form of blending camouflage, the early twentieth century marked the first time that the possibilities of abstraction through coloration and patterning were realized. The First World War inaugurated new and brutal forms of weaponry and tactics such as digging trenches and scouting from the air, thus military emphasis shifted from showing one’s strength and valor to using deception as a main tool for survival. As an author in 1917 stated, “the flash of brilliant colors, brass buttons and gold braid is no more. The passing of the spectacular soldier is due in part to the greatly increased destructiveness of our modern machines of war. To be seen is to be lost.”

THE CONCEPT OF CONCEALING COLORATION AND DEFORMATION

One important function for the typographer is to read and convey the text. The tone, the tempo, its conceptual structure and its physical size all decide its typographic form. As the theatrical director for the script, or the musician for the score, the typographer is to the text. The main goal of the practical part is to explore the realms of typographic performance and push the boundaries of expectations regarding usage of type.“The new time sense of typographic man is cinematic, sequential, pictorial.” – Marshall McLuhan, The medium is the Message, 1967.

For instance, Alexander Wang logo, reminds of impact text, basic and bold.

The first experiment, display typography, is about achieving the right balance between typographic elements and other elements in an artwork, where there is less concern about readability, and more scope for imaginative use of form. Form is combined with negative space, graphical elements, and pictures, establishing relationships, and dialog between words and photos. Type components are typically often more prevalent in color and scale than in text typography.

All three illustrations are digitally created in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, with the help of a drawing tablet. The idea behind typography is to merge the two different styles – a clean Helvetica Neueand the messy handwriting, and match them with the illustration. The same illustrating and typographic style indicate the drawings belong to the same collection. The drawings are later applied onto ready-to-wear garments (a plain white t-shirt).

Pattern is a natural or accidental arrangement or sequence. The elements of pattern repeat in a predictable manner. Patterns have an underlying mathematical structure. The pattern is a design used in fashion to produce any number of identical garments. In this experiment, five different typefaces are used for the creation of typographic patterns, based exclusively on letter “L”. Letter L is one of the simplest alphabetical forms, which allows easy manipulation with design elements space, shape and form. All patterns are juxtaposed according to various geometric transformations like translation, rotation, reflection and symmetry.

The first experiment, display typography, is about achieving the right balance between typographic elements and other elements in an artwork, where there is less concern about readability, and more scope for imaginative use of form

COMBINATION OF DISPLAY TYPOGRAPHY AND TYPOGRAPHIC PATTERNS

In Dreaming by the Book, Elaine Scarry explores how writers construct and manipulate imagery, demonstrating how bending, folding and stretching mental images are the focus of. Styles of faces perform similar manipulations, rather than strictly mental ones, conjuring visual associations. The late twentieth century witnessed the democratization of typeface design and typeface usage due to the ease of access to desktop computer technology and a related exponential growth in the number of typefaces available to users of type. The explosion of typeface designs has caused the significance of typefaces to move from being viewed as the products of a specialist area of printing craft with its own mystique and history to one of a tradable commodity of debatable value within visual culture, susceptible to piracy, and able to be considered in theoretical terms of consumption, trends analysis and fashion.

Any text transmitted from Owens HQ – via the website, social media feeds or his personal email correspondence – is all transacted in capital letters. “I like how things almost come out like a proclamation, I might have it completely wrong because I know to some people it’s just shouting, but to me it’s kind of a cheerful proclamation. Everything I say is kind of like, a little artificial and happy. Almost like a child speaking too loudly in church.”

Any text transmitted from Owens HQ – via the website, social media feeds or his personal email correspondence – is all transacted in capital letters.

RICK OWENS: I LIKE HOW THINGS ALMOST COME OUT LIKE A PROCLAMATION

The YSL monogram instantly reminds of the great Yves Saint Laurent. The designer, the brand, and the French chicness of his clothes have been associated with the famous slanting logo that has represented the house since 1961. But in June 2012, when new creative director Hedi Slimane took over the helm of the luxury brand, he discontinued the classical tradition of the brand – changing the house name into Saint Laurent Paris. It was a controversial move that received both praise and criticism, but now, Wallpaper Magazine has deemed it the best rebranding in the past years.

Many saw the removal of ‘Yves’ from Yves Saint Laurent as a sign of disrespect towards the deceased designer, but others thought that renaming the house Saint Laurent Paris can be seen as a bow to him and the roots of his line. Saint Laurent, the designer, began as an haute couturier, but basically invented ready-to-wear with his revolutionary 1966 runway show in Paris under the name Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. The change in name refers to this time, as does the change of font to Helvetica, which harkens back to that formative era for the brand. Slimane told Wallpaper*, ‘It made sense today to transpose these principles and recover the original name and typeface. It seems intrinsic to the universe of Yves Saint Laurent.’ This form of retro-branding allowed Slimane to pay respect to the designer while also signaling his arrival and differentiating himself from his predecessors, Stefano Pilati and Tom Ford, the two other creative directors who have lead the house since Saint Laurent stepped down. While the renowned, visually rich and embellished YSL interlocking monogram will remain in touch, it will coexist with the new, minimalistic Saint Laurent Paris packaging. As the whole Saint Laurent appearance adapted to recent rebranding, the new minimalistic approach can be seen in the new offices, advertising, fashion show invitations, etc.

A handful of brands, including Balenciaga with Demna Gvasalia, Burberry under Riccardo Tisci and Celine with the appointment of Hedi Slimane, have recently gone through a logo update. The last company to make a change to its logo was Alexander Wang in 2018. The label's logo has been the same since its launch in 2005 and then, 12 years later, the company got a makeover.

The YSL monogram instantly reminds of the great Yves Saint Laurent. However, in June 2012, when Hedi Slimane took over the helm of the luxury brand, he discontinued the classical tradition of the brand – changing the house name into Saint Laurent Paris.

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