fashion

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.

The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art held its annual gala last night, attracting a red-carpet lineup of fashion and movie stars.

As guests entered the Museum's Great Hall, they were confronted by three superhero figures looming nearly 20 feet high -- Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman -- made of high-density foam and painted to resemble monumental sculptures. Reminiscent of the marble figures in the nearby Greek and Roman galleries, these statues were mere foam, disposable after a night of partying.