"Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it. " 

THE first sign, apparently, was when three-year-old Yves told his mother that his shoes did not go with his dress. They were at home in Oran at that time, a dull commercial town in French-ruled Algeria. But after 1936 it had a genius in the making. Yves's father sold insurance and ran a chain of cinemas, and Mrs Mathieu-Saint-Laurent cut was an elegant figure in colonial society.

Yves Saint Laurent inherited his fashion sense from his mother. He studied first at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, but felt bored by the syllabus so left after a few months.

Yves left home at the age of 17 to work for the French designer Christian Dior. Following Dior's death in 1957, Yves, at the age of 21, was put in charge of the effort of saving the Dior house from financial ruin. His work for the 1958 Dior collection brought him international acclaim for his work and came to be known as the trapeze dress, which became integral to fashion during the 1960s.

In 1962, he had a nervous breakdown and in the wake of this was released from Dior. Pierre Bergé, his lover and he then started their own fashion house backed by funding from Atlanta millionaire J. Mack Robinson. The couple split romantically in 1976 but remained business partners.

Yves also started the idea of wearing silhouettes in the 1920s, '30s and '40s.

During the 1960s and 1970s, his fashion house popularized fashion trends such as the beatnik look, safari jackets for men and women, tight pants and tall, thigh-high boots, including the creation of arguably the most famous classic tuxedo suit for women in 1966, the Le Smoking suit.

He was the first, in 1966, to popularize ready-to-wear in an attempt to democratize fashion, with Rive Gauche and the boutique of the same name. He also became the first designer to use black models in his runway shows.

He designed clothes that reflected women's changing role in society: more confident personally, sexually and in the work-place.

He retired from haute couture in 2002. He died on June 1, 2008 of brain cancer at his residence in Paris. Saint Laurent's body was cremated and his ashes were scattered in Marrakech, Morocco in a botanical garden that he often visited to find influence and refuge.

Saint Laurent was a great innovator, helping to revitalise haute couture while making ready-to-wear design popular.