Thank you for sharing your Pilati interviews. It has been disappointing at YSL since fall-06, and I persoanlly didn't like spring-07, as I think people should buy Loulou de la Falaise than for what Pilati did. However, i think Pilati did something great anf well-thought for Saint Laurent last week at the fall-07 show. he captured the spirit, while pushing the brand a new modern sense and exploring his own ideas. Although it might not be the best show nor the easiest to wear in the fashion week, but it touches fashion people, and has actually proved Pilati as a great designerat Saint Laurent since Alber Elbaz.
Stefano Pilati Article
- Thread starter taz
- Start date
source:NYTimes
Does the shoe fit?
T Style Magazine By CATHY HORYN
Edmund Wilson said of Proust that we always feel as if we are reading about the end of something — “the society of the dispossessed nobility and the fashionable and cultivated bourgeoisie, with their physicians and their artists, their servants and their parasites.” So it is when we think about the house of Yves Saint Laurent. Whether or not YSL is the last great Paris house — it was founded in 1961, 15 years after Dior and 48 years after Chanel — we have the feeling that it is. And, as with so many things that occupy Saint Laurent and his faithful partner, Pierre Bergé, not least posterity, this feeling was the result of a very deliberate effort.
The more we learned about Saint Laurent’s neurotic character, the more Bergé harped on the superiority of his genius; and while misery and degradation scarcely matter in the making of beautiful dresses for rich ladies, they are the recognized, if stock, qualities of a Great Artist. In the early 1990s, perhaps aware of Saint Laurent’s waning influence, Bergé stepped up the rhetoric. He famously declared that when Saint Laurent dies, so ends a particular world. Not the lament of “the last fires of a setting sun,” as Wilson said of Proust’s novel — more like a scorched-earth campaign. Bergé meant for us to think that no one could follow Saint Laurent. If the implications of such sick and desperate thinking have never been examined, it’s because Saint Laurent’s genius was real, his suffering induced sympathy, and Bergé saw to it that the master was put into a museum while still alive.
Of course this would be an extremely cynical interpretation of a fashion legend but for one fact: not one of the three designers who has succeeded him in his house has managed to fully take his place. Despite the magic of the YSL name, despite the millions of dollars invested and the millions lost — as much as $70 million as recently as two years ago — nobody, it seems, can get the brand right. Meanwhile, Chanel and Dior, once seen as dowagers next to cool Saint Laurent, have thrived and earned billions.
Alber Elbaz, the Moroccan-born, American-trained designer who has made such a success of Lanvin, was the first to try at YSL, and while his three collections were more engaging and relevant than they seemed at the time, he got the ax in 2000, after Gucci Group bought the company and installed Tom Ford. Ford certainly had a new vision for the brand, as well as the attention of Wall Street and Hollywood, but his efforts were hindered by the global economic slump that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. It also didn’t help that Bergé continually derided Ford’s work. By the spring of 2004, though, both Ford and the Gucci chief executive Domenico De Sole were out, having lost control in a power struggle with the group’s French owner, Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR).
Initially hired as Ford’s assistant, Stefano Pilati has held the job since then. Pilati is tall and ginger-haired, with a dandy’s outmoded elegance and a charming, if self-conscious, manner that masks sudden changes in mood. He came from Prada, where he had worked on the Miu Miu line with Miuccia Prada and Fabio Zambernardi. Like much of his conversation, Pilati’s designs sometimes betray an intellectual view of fashion more typically associated with Prada than with Saint Laurent. Nonetheless, he’s been responsible for a number of trends, beginning with his first YSL collection, where he reintroduced the tulip skirt and the wide belt and, despite negative reviews, set off a wave of coquettish fashion. Two seasons later, in a Spanish-inspired collection, he scored again, with slim, high-waisted pants. This past fall, few styles were more widely copied than his YSL tunics.
Aware of the gap between the brand’s perceived status and its financial losses, François-Henri Pinault, the chairman of PPR, and Robert Polet, the chief executive of Gucci Group, have made YSL a top priority, along with its sister brands Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga. For C.E.O., they plucked Valérie Hermann from Dior, where she had worked closely with its chief executive, Sidney Toledano, and had proved, through her rapport with John Galliano, that she could identify with extreme talent and still please shareholders as well as the chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Bernard Arnault. In her eight years at Dior, revenues exploded, the company hit upon an advertising image that related more directly and aggressively to young consumers, and Galliano was at his maximal creativity.
Hermann says she agreed to take the YSL job even before she met Pilati, convinced that she could turn things around. “First, I think YSL is a fantastic brand,” she said over lunch in Paris last December. “Second, it was a great challenge, because it was losing so much money for so long.” Hermann, a wife and a mother of three, rarely avoids eye contact, though her toughness is mediated by enthusiasm. She added: “Is it a desperate situation? No. That’s why I came, because I was sure we could do something.”
Since the problems at YSL date to the early ’90s, fixing them will take time. But to Hermann, the turnaround is now a certainty, if not a fact, and she points to the success of the Muse and Downtown bags and the draw of classic YSL themes like leopard print and patent leather. Last year, revenues rose a strong 19 percent, to 194 million euros (about $250 million). Hermann is no less proud of her relationship with Pilati, though one suspects it has its trials. But, as she told me: “There isn’t one day when we’re not talking. I think it is part of the deal. If he fails, I fail. And if I fail, he will probably fail as well.”
The skeptical view among editors and even some of his friends is that Pilati has still not created a YSL that feels new and relevant and that immediately connects with women the way, say, Prada or Chanel do.
Part of the problem is that each season, Pilati seems to take one step forward, only to fall two back. He can create looks that are unique to the season, but in a way it doesn’t matter; by the time he has finished piling on the accessories, or putting them on a superlong runway, or photographing them according to some obscure concept, you don’t care how different the garment is. One colleague suggested that it’s too complicated and overly intellectualized. Zambernardi of Prada told me, “So far, I like what Stefano is doing for YSL, and I never liked what Tom Ford did.” But while not wishing to sound critical of his friend, Zambernardi said that in “wanting everything to be conceptual and very thoughtful,” Pilati can get bogged down and lose sight of what’s contemporary.
This was especially true of his spring collection, staged on a long runway so thickly covered with violets and dirt that each time a model seemed on the verge of losing her footing, the audience gasped. And Yves Saint Laurent, of all fashion names, is supposed to symbolize freedom and power.
“I know!” Pilati said, looking agonized when I brought it up. “That’s what annoyed me the most — I had lost the dynamic of the Saint Laurent woman. These women were fragile looking, and it’s not the woman I want! They’re wobbling!” He said the original idea was to suggest a woman leaving a city and tracing her own path by walking on the violets. “And violets are a symbol of modesty and virginity,” Pilati added. But that wasn’t the dominant thought one had of the show. It was: Why does he have to make everything so difficult?
Filling a giant’s shoes is not easy, and at least with Saint Laurent’s, it was always assumed that the fit would never be perfect — which is altogether different from getting the brand right. Also, Saint Laurent carried such emotional weight with people who were young in the late ’60s and ’70s, when the house seemed to be the psychic center of fashion, that successors were bound to be uniquely punished if they didn’t get the line of the shoulders just so or possess his same romantic color sense. Mind you, if one were to take Bergé’s claim that “Yves is like Proust” to its logical extreme, one would see the fatal impossibility of duplicating Saint Laurent, or any great designer, since everything is relative to the time and place where it is first experienced. Surely the laws of relativity apply equally to master and successor.
Nonetheless, there is a burden attached to YSL. “To begin with, this house has so much myth behind it and under it,” Elbaz told me. “It was a house that was not a house. It was one big family. I felt like a son-in-law in that place. Mr. Saint Laurent” — who retired in stages, continuing to design the couture collections until 2002 — “let me have the daughter, which was the ready-to-wear.” He laughed. “Now that I got a divorce, everybody says, ‘Oh, he was fabulous.’ ” To Elbaz, the essence of Saint Laurent was perfection, but to make his collections seem relevant, Elbaz felt he had to play with imperfection — turning 12 classic dresses, for example, into 12 shirts. He was roundly criticized. “Is it too much Saint Laurent or is it not enough? That’s the whole issue with that house,” Elbaz added.
Although Ford initially got on well with Bergé and Saint Laurent and based his first YSL show on Saint Laurent’s muse, Betty Catroux, he soon realized he could never hope to take YSL in a new direction if he allowed Bergé to be involved, as Bergé expected. This may account for Bergé’s scorn. In any case, revivals of fashion houses have tended to work best when the founders are dead or otherwise absent. Bergé, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has been more visible since Ford left and PPR took control of Gucci Group. Pilati said that after his spring show, on the violet catwalk, Bergé told him he longed for the day when he — Pilati — did something simple, a comment that on the face of it seems benign. But Pilati is vulnerable in other ways. A year ago there was a rumor that Hedi Slimane, of Dior Homme, would replace him, a suggestion fueled by the Saint Laurent-like perfection of Slimane’s fall 2006 men’s show.
“I really couldn’t have cared less when I heard all those rumors,” Pilati said one afternoon in his studio. “I’m very aware of my limits — everybody knows them.” I asked him if he thought Slimane could do a better job at YSL. “I respect him,” Pilati replied. “I would like to say yes, he could do it. But nobody’s ever seen a women’s ready-to-wear collection from him.”
It’s probable that anyone holding the reins at YSL, at least while there are still people around who care, would feel vulnerable. As Pilati said: “I knew from Day 1 that I could be attacked from many angles. Because I’m Italian, because I’ve never been famous, because Hedi was better, because Alber was better, because Tom was better, more powerful and more beautiful. I mean, everything!” He smiled. “And I knew it from Day 1.”
Another issue occupying the front row is whether Pilati’s clothes are cool. A lot of editors don’t think so. They use terms like “fussy” and “too Italian” to indicate they don’t think his sensibility is ideal for a French house whose sex appeal was defined by a bourgeois housewife dipping into a local brothel. Of course, editors lodged similar complaints against Karl Lagerfeld when he first went to Chanel. But the question of cool has never been in doubt with Lagerfeld, nor with Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga. “I’m aware that, somehow, Saint Laurent is not cool,” Pilati said. ‘’But it has the opportunity to be.”
Olivier Zahm, the editor of the magazine Purple Fashion and a friend of Pilati’s (he also works on the men’s ad campaign for YSL), suggests that the definition of cool may be limited by the perspective of editors and ultimately not as free as the opinions of young consumers.
“There’s a lot of supercool stuff on the runways, but nobody will wear it,” Zahm said. “I think Stefano has a good understanding of what a young lady in London or New York wants to wear if she loves fashion, in the old-school sense.”
While Pilati has every reason to feel secure in his job and in his relationship with Hermann, there is a tentativeness that creeps into his work, an element of second-guessing that is reflected in the brand’s advertising images as well. It may be that he doesn’t have a strong right-hand person (Pilati said this is the case), or it may be that he is unduly influenced by the last opinion he heard, as friends and colleagues suggest.
A French editor, after seeing Prada’s collection of turbans and jewel-tone satin mini-dresses, remarked that the clothes were just the kind that Pilati should be doing at YSL. Certainly few houses have a greater claim to those references than YSL. In fact, Zambernardi believes that Pilati should take YSL “back to zero,” and added: “I think it’s difficult to do new things when the founder is still around. For French people, Saint Laurent is an institution. They almost feel that nothing is going to get better than him.” It is, finally, this thinking that is holding the house of YSL back, and making a dutiful son-in-law of the talented Mr. Pilati. Maybe Alber Elbaz was onto something when he thought that imperfection was the only way to be modern. Maybe to get YSL right, you just have to be a little bit wrong.
Does the shoe fit?
T Style Magazine By CATHY HORYN
Edmund Wilson said of Proust that we always feel as if we are reading about the end of something — “the society of the dispossessed nobility and the fashionable and cultivated bourgeoisie, with their physicians and their artists, their servants and their parasites.” So it is when we think about the house of Yves Saint Laurent. Whether or not YSL is the last great Paris house — it was founded in 1961, 15 years after Dior and 48 years after Chanel — we have the feeling that it is. And, as with so many things that occupy Saint Laurent and his faithful partner, Pierre Bergé, not least posterity, this feeling was the result of a very deliberate effort.
The more we learned about Saint Laurent’s neurotic character, the more Bergé harped on the superiority of his genius; and while misery and degradation scarcely matter in the making of beautiful dresses for rich ladies, they are the recognized, if stock, qualities of a Great Artist. In the early 1990s, perhaps aware of Saint Laurent’s waning influence, Bergé stepped up the rhetoric. He famously declared that when Saint Laurent dies, so ends a particular world. Not the lament of “the last fires of a setting sun,” as Wilson said of Proust’s novel — more like a scorched-earth campaign. Bergé meant for us to think that no one could follow Saint Laurent. If the implications of such sick and desperate thinking have never been examined, it’s because Saint Laurent’s genius was real, his suffering induced sympathy, and Bergé saw to it that the master was put into a museum while still alive.
Of course this would be an extremely cynical interpretation of a fashion legend but for one fact: not one of the three designers who has succeeded him in his house has managed to fully take his place. Despite the magic of the YSL name, despite the millions of dollars invested and the millions lost — as much as $70 million as recently as two years ago — nobody, it seems, can get the brand right. Meanwhile, Chanel and Dior, once seen as dowagers next to cool Saint Laurent, have thrived and earned billions.
Alber Elbaz, the Moroccan-born, American-trained designer who has made such a success of Lanvin, was the first to try at YSL, and while his three collections were more engaging and relevant than they seemed at the time, he got the ax in 2000, after Gucci Group bought the company and installed Tom Ford. Ford certainly had a new vision for the brand, as well as the attention of Wall Street and Hollywood, but his efforts were hindered by the global economic slump that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. It also didn’t help that Bergé continually derided Ford’s work. By the spring of 2004, though, both Ford and the Gucci chief executive Domenico De Sole were out, having lost control in a power struggle with the group’s French owner, Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR).
Initially hired as Ford’s assistant, Stefano Pilati has held the job since then. Pilati is tall and ginger-haired, with a dandy’s outmoded elegance and a charming, if self-conscious, manner that masks sudden changes in mood. He came from Prada, where he had worked on the Miu Miu line with Miuccia Prada and Fabio Zambernardi. Like much of his conversation, Pilati’s designs sometimes betray an intellectual view of fashion more typically associated with Prada than with Saint Laurent. Nonetheless, he’s been responsible for a number of trends, beginning with his first YSL collection, where he reintroduced the tulip skirt and the wide belt and, despite negative reviews, set off a wave of coquettish fashion. Two seasons later, in a Spanish-inspired collection, he scored again, with slim, high-waisted pants. This past fall, few styles were more widely copied than his YSL tunics.
Aware of the gap between the brand’s perceived status and its financial losses, François-Henri Pinault, the chairman of PPR, and Robert Polet, the chief executive of Gucci Group, have made YSL a top priority, along with its sister brands Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga. For C.E.O., they plucked Valérie Hermann from Dior, where she had worked closely with its chief executive, Sidney Toledano, and had proved, through her rapport with John Galliano, that she could identify with extreme talent and still please shareholders as well as the chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Bernard Arnault. In her eight years at Dior, revenues exploded, the company hit upon an advertising image that related more directly and aggressively to young consumers, and Galliano was at his maximal creativity.
Hermann says she agreed to take the YSL job even before she met Pilati, convinced that she could turn things around. “First, I think YSL is a fantastic brand,” she said over lunch in Paris last December. “Second, it was a great challenge, because it was losing so much money for so long.” Hermann, a wife and a mother of three, rarely avoids eye contact, though her toughness is mediated by enthusiasm. She added: “Is it a desperate situation? No. That’s why I came, because I was sure we could do something.”
Since the problems at YSL date to the early ’90s, fixing them will take time. But to Hermann, the turnaround is now a certainty, if not a fact, and she points to the success of the Muse and Downtown bags and the draw of classic YSL themes like leopard print and patent leather. Last year, revenues rose a strong 19 percent, to 194 million euros (about $250 million). Hermann is no less proud of her relationship with Pilati, though one suspects it has its trials. But, as she told me: “There isn’t one day when we’re not talking. I think it is part of the deal. If he fails, I fail. And if I fail, he will probably fail as well.”
The skeptical view among editors and even some of his friends is that Pilati has still not created a YSL that feels new and relevant and that immediately connects with women the way, say, Prada or Chanel do.
Part of the problem is that each season, Pilati seems to take one step forward, only to fall two back. He can create looks that are unique to the season, but in a way it doesn’t matter; by the time he has finished piling on the accessories, or putting them on a superlong runway, or photographing them according to some obscure concept, you don’t care how different the garment is. One colleague suggested that it’s too complicated and overly intellectualized. Zambernardi of Prada told me, “So far, I like what Stefano is doing for YSL, and I never liked what Tom Ford did.” But while not wishing to sound critical of his friend, Zambernardi said that in “wanting everything to be conceptual and very thoughtful,” Pilati can get bogged down and lose sight of what’s contemporary.
This was especially true of his spring collection, staged on a long runway so thickly covered with violets and dirt that each time a model seemed on the verge of losing her footing, the audience gasped. And Yves Saint Laurent, of all fashion names, is supposed to symbolize freedom and power.
“I know!” Pilati said, looking agonized when I brought it up. “That’s what annoyed me the most — I had lost the dynamic of the Saint Laurent woman. These women were fragile looking, and it’s not the woman I want! They’re wobbling!” He said the original idea was to suggest a woman leaving a city and tracing her own path by walking on the violets. “And violets are a symbol of modesty and virginity,” Pilati added. But that wasn’t the dominant thought one had of the show. It was: Why does he have to make everything so difficult?
Filling a giant’s shoes is not easy, and at least with Saint Laurent’s, it was always assumed that the fit would never be perfect — which is altogether different from getting the brand right. Also, Saint Laurent carried such emotional weight with people who were young in the late ’60s and ’70s, when the house seemed to be the psychic center of fashion, that successors were bound to be uniquely punished if they didn’t get the line of the shoulders just so or possess his same romantic color sense. Mind you, if one were to take Bergé’s claim that “Yves is like Proust” to its logical extreme, one would see the fatal impossibility of duplicating Saint Laurent, or any great designer, since everything is relative to the time and place where it is first experienced. Surely the laws of relativity apply equally to master and successor.
Nonetheless, there is a burden attached to YSL. “To begin with, this house has so much myth behind it and under it,” Elbaz told me. “It was a house that was not a house. It was one big family. I felt like a son-in-law in that place. Mr. Saint Laurent” — who retired in stages, continuing to design the couture collections until 2002 — “let me have the daughter, which was the ready-to-wear.” He laughed. “Now that I got a divorce, everybody says, ‘Oh, he was fabulous.’ ” To Elbaz, the essence of Saint Laurent was perfection, but to make his collections seem relevant, Elbaz felt he had to play with imperfection — turning 12 classic dresses, for example, into 12 shirts. He was roundly criticized. “Is it too much Saint Laurent or is it not enough? That’s the whole issue with that house,” Elbaz added.
Although Ford initially got on well with Bergé and Saint Laurent and based his first YSL show on Saint Laurent’s muse, Betty Catroux, he soon realized he could never hope to take YSL in a new direction if he allowed Bergé to be involved, as Bergé expected. This may account for Bergé’s scorn. In any case, revivals of fashion houses have tended to work best when the founders are dead or otherwise absent. Bergé, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has been more visible since Ford left and PPR took control of Gucci Group. Pilati said that after his spring show, on the violet catwalk, Bergé told him he longed for the day when he — Pilati — did something simple, a comment that on the face of it seems benign. But Pilati is vulnerable in other ways. A year ago there was a rumor that Hedi Slimane, of Dior Homme, would replace him, a suggestion fueled by the Saint Laurent-like perfection of Slimane’s fall 2006 men’s show.
“I really couldn’t have cared less when I heard all those rumors,” Pilati said one afternoon in his studio. “I’m very aware of my limits — everybody knows them.” I asked him if he thought Slimane could do a better job at YSL. “I respect him,” Pilati replied. “I would like to say yes, he could do it. But nobody’s ever seen a women’s ready-to-wear collection from him.”
It’s probable that anyone holding the reins at YSL, at least while there are still people around who care, would feel vulnerable. As Pilati said: “I knew from Day 1 that I could be attacked from many angles. Because I’m Italian, because I’ve never been famous, because Hedi was better, because Alber was better, because Tom was better, more powerful and more beautiful. I mean, everything!” He smiled. “And I knew it from Day 1.”
Another issue occupying the front row is whether Pilati’s clothes are cool. A lot of editors don’t think so. They use terms like “fussy” and “too Italian” to indicate they don’t think his sensibility is ideal for a French house whose sex appeal was defined by a bourgeois housewife dipping into a local brothel. Of course, editors lodged similar complaints against Karl Lagerfeld when he first went to Chanel. But the question of cool has never been in doubt with Lagerfeld, nor with Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga. “I’m aware that, somehow, Saint Laurent is not cool,” Pilati said. ‘’But it has the opportunity to be.”
Olivier Zahm, the editor of the magazine Purple Fashion and a friend of Pilati’s (he also works on the men’s ad campaign for YSL), suggests that the definition of cool may be limited by the perspective of editors and ultimately not as free as the opinions of young consumers.
“There’s a lot of supercool stuff on the runways, but nobody will wear it,” Zahm said. “I think Stefano has a good understanding of what a young lady in London or New York wants to wear if she loves fashion, in the old-school sense.”
While Pilati has every reason to feel secure in his job and in his relationship with Hermann, there is a tentativeness that creeps into his work, an element of second-guessing that is reflected in the brand’s advertising images as well. It may be that he doesn’t have a strong right-hand person (Pilati said this is the case), or it may be that he is unduly influenced by the last opinion he heard, as friends and colleagues suggest.
A French editor, after seeing Prada’s collection of turbans and jewel-tone satin mini-dresses, remarked that the clothes were just the kind that Pilati should be doing at YSL. Certainly few houses have a greater claim to those references than YSL. In fact, Zambernardi believes that Pilati should take YSL “back to zero,” and added: “I think it’s difficult to do new things when the founder is still around. For French people, Saint Laurent is an institution. They almost feel that nothing is going to get better than him.” It is, finally, this thinking that is holding the house of YSL back, and making a dutiful son-in-law of the talented Mr. Pilati. Maybe Alber Elbaz was onto something when he thought that imperfection was the only way to be modern. Maybe to get YSL right, you just have to be a little bit wrong.
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Miss Dalloway
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I find his anwser here just brilliant and complety true.I am looking at you Tom Ford!
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[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]washingtonpost.com[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica][SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]
[/FONT][/SIZE]
[/FONT][/SIZE]
Pilati was an exceptional student of fashion history. But when it came to his own creativity, he seemed to be more of a mimic than an original thinker.
"I think he's trying to find his way," says Susan Rolontz, executive vice president of the Tobe Report, a retail consultancy. "I don't think he has a signature or a grip on what the collection should really be."
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica][SIZE=-1]Lost in Translation?[/SIZE][/FONT]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Pilati has tried his best to be the kind of sorcerer the fashion industry requires, turning up at high-profile events with a model dressed in YSL finery on his arm. Linda Evangelista wore one of his elaborately ruffled gowns to the gala that opened the "AngloMania" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year. Julianne Moore presented an award to Pilati from Fashion Group International in fall 2006 wearing a pair of his heels that were so high she looked as though she was both en pointe and in pain. More recently, Moore wore one of Pilati's tuxedo mini-dresses to this year's Costume Institute gala at the Met. She was in constant danger of exposing a nipple.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]"His clothes tend not to have red carpet appeal," says Hal Rubenstein, the fashion director of InStyle magazine. Pilati's clothes, Rubenstein says, typically are worn by actresses who might be considered cerebral: Moore, Cate Blanchett, Kristin Scott Thomas. "They are not going to get that big march down the red carpet. It's a much, much quieter look. The house has to figure out how to reach customers in a different way because they're not going to reach them from photos in Us Weekly."[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]There are two well-known ways to raise brands from the dead, as exemplified by Alber Elbaz's gentle elegance at Lanvin -- where he ultimately landed after his short, unsuccessful tenure at YSL -- and Karl Lagerfeld's jacket obsession at Chanel.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]"Some people say Chanel would have had historical importance whatever happened to the house," Koda says. "But that's not true, based on the way fashion treats historical designers. If Chanel had continued without Karl, it would not have as vivid an iconography. The reason we think of her in such strong terms is not because of Chanel. Others were doing what she was doing. What made her memorable is another designer who deconstructed her and then reconstructed her in a different way."[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]"With Alber at Lanvin, he channeled the poetry of Lanvin," Koda says. "What he has done is really not about Lanvin per se, but something more conceptual."[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Pilati began his tenure at YSL following the Lagerfeld/Chanel example. He took the company archive literally, drawing on history but failing to blow off the dust. Now, he has focused on the YSL poetry, on the rhythm and syntax of the house's language rather than the actual words.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Pilati reflected the spirit of the house in his choice of models for the fall show. Saint Laurent was known for celebrating black models and in a season when they were especially absent on the runways, Pilati, at least, had one.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]"In the '70s, to have black models in Paris and Europe was sort of a message of having an open mind," Pilati says. "We were definitely less used to races crossing lines. It was definitely something coming from America."[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Saint Laurent "was very sensitive to that. It was helping to add exoticism to the collection and to embrace the multicultural aspect of the work."[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Why aren't there more black models working today? "To me, it is a matter of proportions and the bodies I choose. My fit model was a black model," he says. "When I wanted to translate what I put on her, it was a disaster. It would need 13 times more work in the atelier to modify it to put on a more Caucasian anatomy.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]"Sometimes, it's not your choice. You can't find [black models] that are beautiful and with the right proportions. I prefer them with lean proportions with no big hips."[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Big hips? A dearth of beautiful black models? This from the designer who characterizes himself as the best salesman for his clothes.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica][FONT=Arial,Helvetica][SIZE=-1]His Own Voice[/SIZE][/FONT]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Fall 2007 has been Pilati's strongest collection yet for the brand. It is coolly tailored, unforced and not fussy.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]"It was way more natural," says Peter Marx, president of Saks Jandel, which owns the YSL franchise in Chevy Chase. "It looked more comfortable. It was extremely elegant."[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]At the same time, the industry's assessment of his earlier work at YSL began to shift. That first collection, as it turns out, had an enormous influence on other designers.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]"It introduced a new shape for skirts," Rolontz says.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Pilati's emphasis on rounded hips and bubble silhouettes launched a flotilla of imitators. His focus on the waist helped to transform wide belts into one of the key items on trend reports at fashion magazines and retailers -- from high-end boutiques to mass market merchants.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]"When I first looked at that collection, I thought 'What is he doing?' " Rubenstein recalls. "And six months later, I thought, 'I was wrong.' All the things he was doing were showing up everywhere: the tulip skirt and the boxy jacket. They were showing up everywhere. I've never so misjudged the influence of a designer."[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]That doesn't mean Rubenstein, in hindsight, liked Pilati's first collection more. But he acknowledges its significance.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]"It always takes a while to understand," says Pilati. "That was the silhouette I believed in because I thought it was beautiful on women. The fact that I was copied, it makes me happy. That's the purpose of trying to do something beautiful. I'm not competing. . . . I compete with myself. I compete with my tortures and my dilemmas." (A penchant for melodrama is a trait he shares with Saint Laurent.)[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Specialty items from the collections have sold, Marx says, such as blouses with ruffles and crochet details.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]"The walking-on-the-daisies collection did have a few pieces that sold pretty well," Rolontz says. ( Violets. They walked on violets.)[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Most important, the accessories, particularly the handbags, have been selling and account for more than half of the business. For most high-end brands, that's where the money is made -- not ready-to-wear. Sales were up in 2006 by 19.1 percent over the previous year thanks to leather goods. The uptick has been driven by handbags such as the Muse, which sells for about $1,300, and the $1,800 Rive Gauche bag.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]But the clothes, which account for just under 40 percent of sales, are the soul of the brand. The fall collection, with its palette of charcoal gray, emphasis on tailoring, strong silhouettes and focus on daywear, reflects the work of a designer more comfortable expressing his own point of view.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]"This season is the one I feel is most close to me," Pilati says. "This season I learned, after three years of going here and there, I guess this is the first time I gather everything I learned and put it out again in my own voice."[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]"It gives me hope, not confidence, you're always scared about what's next. But it gives me hope," Pilati says.[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Peter Marx of Saks Jandel describes Pilati as "the real deal. It's not just marketing. With the clothes, he really is the true deal. We're hopeful that he'll stay."[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Marx has borne witness to each upheaval at YSL, beginning with the founder's retirement. "Just as Alber was getting his voice, just as Tom was getting his voice," each left the company, says Marx. Then he pauses. "Let's hope this guy doesn't get fired."[/FONT][/SIZE]
Stefano Pilati's latest designs for Yves Saint Laurent have received rave reviews. The creative director of Saint Laurent has had to battle his own idolatry of the namesake designer, and Pilati's previous collections were mostly panned. Left, a dress from the fall collection.
Photo Credit: By Christophe Petit Tesson -- Wpn For The Washington Post Photo
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[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]washingtonpost.com[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica][SIZE=-1][FONT=Arial,Helvetica]
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I think Stefano is doing amazingly well for YSL. I have loved every single one of his collections so far. Some of the things people have been saying about him have been really scathing and upsetting. It's just not true!! His YSL woman is not helpless or unconfident. She's quite the opposite, actually. I didn't see the walking in heels on the bed of flowers as something "mean" at all...it was a beautiful image! And that collection is absoltuely stunning... I want everything!!
I really wonder why Pilati gets such bad press, because I've always thought that his clothes were beyond excellent. Especially, the Fall '06 show. It was a major trendsetter, and the accessories were particularly gorgeous. Maybe the fact that he's catering to an older (or at least more sophisticated) audience has something to do with it?
Jacque Marcel
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Hmmm? I really don't like his excuse for the lack of black models on his runway. I guess nobody is perfect...
Not impressed yet by him. The pressure must be insane!!!! He is pissing me off with that whole black model thing though. Don't care who he uses, just don't say all that stupid stuff ( thanks for the one sister in the show though bro).
birdofparadise
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voila
Stefano Pilati Inks Deal to Stay at YSL
Published: Thursday, September 20, 2007
By Miles Socha
PARIS — Stefano Pilati is staying put at Yves Saint Laurent, WWD has learned.
The Italian-born designer, who in 2004 succeeded Tom Ford at the helm of one of fashion's most storied brands, has signed a new multiyear contract with YSL parent Gucci Group. YSL confirmed in a brief statement that Pilati would continue as its creative director, responsible for all product categories and also the image of the brand. YSL and Pilati both declined further comment.
Still, Pilati's contract renewal should squelch persistent speculation in recent months that he might be headed to a competing brand — or be replaced at YSL by former Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane.
According to sources, Valentino had courted Pilati as a possible successor to the Roman couturier, but the YSL designer rebuffed advances. As for Slimane, sources said there has been no contact between YSL executives and the men's wear star, who cemented his reputation at YSL before Gucci Group put Ford in the designer's seat in 2000. Since exiting Dior Homme earlier this year, Slimane has focused on art projects and editorial photography.
Pilati, 42, was handpicked by Ford in 2000 as women's design director at YSL. Before that, Pilati worked in senior design and fabric development positions for a number of Italian fashion houses, including Miu Miu, Prada and Giorgio Armani.
Pilati received mixed reviews for his bulbous-and-belted solo debut for YSL in 2004, but his designs have proven influential and he has since won many fans in the press and retail communities. Critics and buyers hailed his fall-winter 2007 collection as his best ever for the house.
Retailers have also recently lauded YSL for a consistent string of hit shoes and bags, including the popular Muse, Downtown and Tribute styles. In 2005, YSL recruited an accessories designer from Louis Vuitton, Raphaelle Hanley, to beef up the lucrative category.
Still, Pilati and Valerie Hermann, YSL's president and chief executive officer, face the daunting task of steering the fashion house into profitable territory. The company was driven deeply into the red after a radical attempt by previous management to engineer a Gucci-esque rejuvenation.
In the first half of 2007, YSL narrowed its losses to 26 million euros, or $34.6 million, from 35 million euros, or $43 million, a year ago. Gucci Group, owned by PPR, has yet to set a target date for the brand to reach breakeven, but has repeatedly stated that it is likely to occur when revenues reach about 300 million to 350 million euros, or approximately $420 million to $490 million.
Sales in the first half totaled 101 million euros, or $140.2 million, up from 85 million euros, or $118 million, in the year-ago period.
Pilati and Hermann have funneled energy into establishing YSL as a purveyor of a complete wardrobe for modern life. Earlier this year, they unveiled a sharply priced collection of YSL essentials, dubbed Edition 24, designed to reach a broader and younger customer base.
Also in that vein, YSL has been handing out an advertising vehicle in newspaper form during New York and London fashion weeks, and at Paris subway stations, to get its fashion message to the street. A total of two million copies of this "Manifesto" will be distributed this month, including in Milan during the Italian collections next week.
Stefano Pilati Inks Deal to Stay at YSL
Published: Thursday, September 20, 2007
By Miles Socha
PARIS — Stefano Pilati is staying put at Yves Saint Laurent, WWD has learned.
The Italian-born designer, who in 2004 succeeded Tom Ford at the helm of one of fashion's most storied brands, has signed a new multiyear contract with YSL parent Gucci Group. YSL confirmed in a brief statement that Pilati would continue as its creative director, responsible for all product categories and also the image of the brand. YSL and Pilati both declined further comment.
Still, Pilati's contract renewal should squelch persistent speculation in recent months that he might be headed to a competing brand — or be replaced at YSL by former Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane.
According to sources, Valentino had courted Pilati as a possible successor to the Roman couturier, but the YSL designer rebuffed advances. As for Slimane, sources said there has been no contact between YSL executives and the men's wear star, who cemented his reputation at YSL before Gucci Group put Ford in the designer's seat in 2000. Since exiting Dior Homme earlier this year, Slimane has focused on art projects and editorial photography.
Pilati, 42, was handpicked by Ford in 2000 as women's design director at YSL. Before that, Pilati worked in senior design and fabric development positions for a number of Italian fashion houses, including Miu Miu, Prada and Giorgio Armani.
Pilati received mixed reviews for his bulbous-and-belted solo debut for YSL in 2004, but his designs have proven influential and he has since won many fans in the press and retail communities. Critics and buyers hailed his fall-winter 2007 collection as his best ever for the house.
Retailers have also recently lauded YSL for a consistent string of hit shoes and bags, including the popular Muse, Downtown and Tribute styles. In 2005, YSL recruited an accessories designer from Louis Vuitton, Raphaelle Hanley, to beef up the lucrative category.
Still, Pilati and Valerie Hermann, YSL's president and chief executive officer, face the daunting task of steering the fashion house into profitable territory. The company was driven deeply into the red after a radical attempt by previous management to engineer a Gucci-esque rejuvenation.
In the first half of 2007, YSL narrowed its losses to 26 million euros, or $34.6 million, from 35 million euros, or $43 million, a year ago. Gucci Group, owned by PPR, has yet to set a target date for the brand to reach breakeven, but has repeatedly stated that it is likely to occur when revenues reach about 300 million to 350 million euros, or approximately $420 million to $490 million.
Sales in the first half totaled 101 million euros, or $140.2 million, up from 85 million euros, or $118 million, in the year-ago period.
Pilati and Hermann have funneled energy into establishing YSL as a purveyor of a complete wardrobe for modern life. Earlier this year, they unveiled a sharply priced collection of YSL essentials, dubbed Edition 24, designed to reach a broader and younger customer base.
Also in that vein, YSL has been handing out an advertising vehicle in newspaper form during New York and London fashion weeks, and at Paris subway stations, to get its fashion message to the street. A total of two million copies of this "Manifesto" will be distributed this month, including in Milan during the Italian collections next week.
birdofparadise
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It's interesting how Tom Ford lives on in these little ways, especially considering that one of the more positive aspects of his reign at YSL was that he began structuring some of the accessories business there, buying back all those licenses, getting Pilati on board (wasn't it also rumoured that Ford was to hand design director responsibilities fully over to him at some point?) I wasn't even remotely impressed by the F/W 07 collection and was a huge fan of his first two collections for the house, they had more spunk and excitement, what's elegance without energy?
thanks bird of paradise 
& a big karma 4u
yes I do agree with about Tom, what he did there at YSL is good for YSL now..even if some of his designs weren't theorticaly YSL & made Mr. St. Laurent crazy, but shaking the image of house ,attracting new young customers & cutting the licenses ....all of this have made a strong base for YSL that helped Pilati in his mision.
& I love Stefano's 1st debut too.. for me it is the best so far , full of energy & Yves vitalty.
& a big karma 4uyes I do agree with about Tom, what he did there at YSL is good for YSL now..even if some of his designs weren't theorticaly YSL & made Mr. St. Laurent crazy, but shaking the image of house ,attracting new young customers & cutting the licenses ....all of this have made a strong base for YSL that helped Pilati in his mision.
& I love Stefano's 1st debut too.. for me it is the best so far , full of energy & Yves vitalty.
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birdofparadise
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I'm really intrigued by the idea that he turned down Valentino, I wonder if it would've been closer to his sensibilities somehow, maybe even closer to his training as i'm sure he could navigate the system after working for prada et al.
DuTTyRoCK112
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Tom obviously was ousted from Gucci so for him to create a new label under his name, to me, is employment, not ego.
