“I don’t let it go,” he said. “What is it about? I should be here, thinking about how beautiful my job is, and come to the office every day and work with colors and fabrics. But no, you have something that undermines you.”
MR. PILATI had once toyed with quitting fashion and going back to school. Growing up in Milan, he dropped out as a 17-year-old to apprentice with Nino Cerruti. He became skilled in textiles and later worked with Giorgio Armani and Miuccia Prada. In 2000, Mr. Ford recruited him during his takeover of YSL.
In total, Mr. Pilati has been a designer for nearly 30 years, during which time he has had highs and lows, wrestled with drug abuse, and constantly questioned his place in fashion and whether the pressures are worth it.
“I have worked and worked and worked hard again,” he said. “I have been a monk here.” But there is one thing he said in the interview, when describing his decision to stay at YSL in 2004, when Mr. Ford abruptly left the company, that suggests he truly believes in his ability to bring the brand forward, when others have not.
“I wasn’t happy about the idea that my work could be associated with failure,” he said.
Back then, the company was in terrible shape, estimated to be losing around $100 million annually. Mr. Pilati, working with Ms. Hermann, said he sought to address one issue at a time, such as that it had no serious accessories business and its men’s wear line was a mess. The women’s collections were only one of his priorities, and while some of them were described as masterful, others fell flat.
Last October, as Mr. Pilati was preparing his spring collection, those doubts were multiplied as many designers, moved by a recent YSL retrospective, were paying homage to the style of Yves Saint Laurent, who died in 2008. Mr. Pilati’s collection, which emphasized sporty daywear and twisting ruffles on peasant skirts — a far cry from some of the more daring pieces like the strawberry embroidered dresses of 2009, the before-their-time tulip skirts of 2005 — was generally well received, and in some respects marked a pivotal shift in Mr. Pilati’s approach at the house.
There is already a waiting list for many items from the spring collection at Net-a-Porter, the online retailer, said Natalie Massenet, its founder, who has been selling the Yves Saint Laurent collection for three years.
“From the very first season,” she said, “he had an instinctual interpretation of the Saint Laurent aesthetic in an absolutely modern way, and he has the discipline to stay within the brand guidelines, but, creatively, to innovate.”
Speaking of how he has changed since his arrival, Mr. Pilati said, “I am more surprised creatively, because I almost have gone back to something that, at the beginning, I didn’t want to do, which is including a more readable way of looking at the past of Saint Laurent.”
“For many years, I didn’t even want to go there, maybe because Mr. Saint Laurent was still alive,” he said. “Maybe now I am more free and I do not feel like I am doing anything bad, or disrespectful.”
ALONG the walls of a fourth-floor office in the YSL building, the plans for the fall collection are neatly organized with sketches in the order in which each look will be presented on Monday, coordinated with fabric swatches and images from the archives that show how the arc of history reaches the contemporary plane of Mr. Pilati’s studio.
His process is somewhat counterintuitive in that Mr. Pilati first conceives an idea for a collection and then dives into the archives to find examples from Saint Laurent’s work that back up his own. Although the actual fabrics for the collection were selected months before, Mr. Pilati creates versions of each design using lightweight gray flannel wool, which makes it easier for him to detect flaws, before final samples are completed.
A long table was covered with fabrics: a thick Japanese tweed, glen plaids of varying dimensions, treated furs, wool woven with ostrich feathers, black patent leather and white mousseline. Mr. Pilati said he could see the entire run of the show in his head, from daywear to the evening dresses, just by looking at the assembled fabrics.
His pre-fall collection, shown in January, included many references to shapes seen in the Saint Laurent 1977 Opium couture collection, which Mr. Pilati said he now wanted to push forward for the fall runway show. One new idea he started with was incorporating the Prince of Wales check, so he returned to the archives to see what else Saint Laurent had done in similar patterns.
“And he has done it, because there is no one thing that he has not done,” Mr. Pilati said.
Of the dozens of images posted to a wall, one, from Saint Laurent’s fall 1969 collection, showed a model wearing a coat that appears to be embraced from behind with the skin of a lynx, whose arm reaches around her shoulder. Mr. Pilati’s updated version includes a streak of fur, treated to look like a Prince of Wales check, running down the back of a dress, almost like a tail.
“It is not a replica, but it relates to something that already exists,” he said.
In his earlier work, you might not have been able to see that connection to the past so obviously, and this is the future of Yves Saint Laurent as Mr. Pilati sees it. Saint Laurent himself paid homage to other designers in his work, including Schiaparelli, Chanel, Dior and Ossie Clark. Certainly, other designers continue to pay homage to Saint Laurent. But it is Mr. Pilati who seems most clearly motivated to create an identity for the house that is grounded in his own image.
Sometime in the weeks after this collection, Mr. Pilati will turn his attention to his future at the house. He said his current contract runs through March 2012, but he will likely open discussions about a new contract this spring. And he wants to stay.
“How can you be original today?” he asked.
In answer, he said, “You are original in your own identity.”
I've actually like Stefano's last few collections but I wish someone could bring back a sense of romance and frippery to YSL. I know we won't get that with Raf though 
