France

Fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent died Sunday at the age of 71, a half century after he rocked the fashion world as the wunderkind successor to Christian Dior.

In a career that peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, Saint Laurent produced many striking collections and pieces, including his tentlike "trapeze" dresses for Dior, his 1966 Mondrian minidress, and his opulent Russian-inspired 1976 collection. But his most important contributions were the least individually memorable -- the innovations that became so much a part of fashion that we hardly notice them. To much controversy, he took turtlenecks and leather jackets out of beatnik subculture and made them high fashion. He turned pea coats and safari jackets from utilitarian apparel into recurring expressions of style. Above all, he made pants suits normal feminine attire, neither transgressive nor intrinsically casual. When in 1970 my elementary school finally decided to let female students and teachers wear pants, we could thank Yves Saint Laurent.