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Yves Saint Laurent’s Intellectual Moment

Brainy is one good way to describe the fashion created by Stefano Pilati, whose latest collection for Yves Saint Laurent, which he showed in Paris on Monday, Oct. 5, was an experimental exercise that resulted in fashion of great wit, and probably real influence.

Pilati possibly took more risks with the Spring 2010 collection than any he has done before for YSL, pumping out sleeves in great white thermo-bonded mess jackets, using rosettes as the bodices of dresses or sassing up overalls with ruffled shoulder straps.

Pairing a scalloped back blue wool bolero with a black leather apron dress was a tricky proposition, but Pilati brought it off with aplomb.

Intellectual fashion, in that his clothes reinvent typical construction, is what this designer does. And like the founder of the house, Pilati is a great colorist, from the somber grays and nudes to the optimistic periwinkle blues and coral pinks.

The Italian-born designer retains a zany sense of mischief, using strawberries as ceramic earrings, placing the fruit in bright red on a post-modern flamenco dress and then darkening them in some great looks that will likely be highly admired and important.

“I want to wear that strawberry dress,” Kate Moss, star of the current YSL ad campaign, told Pilati backstage, where pop star Prince was also perched.

“It’s many, many ideas, a multiplicity of influences, an aesthetic paradigm of new minimalism,” said Pilati.

There were also some great accessories, like pointy-toed platforms with flying buttress heels, cool gray gloves with ribboned uppers and primitive steel bracelets. Though not all his experimentation was a success; cutting horizontal holes into lederhosen was a tad contrived.

Nonetheless, this show, staged in the contemporary art museum, Palais de Tokyo, on a rectangular catwalk, reconfirmed Pilati as an key trendsetter, whose show is not to be missed.

The presentation was the latest example of Pilati's skill as a stylist. While most major designers employ a stylist to edit or translate a collection into a runway hit, Pilati does it himself. This time, he used hair clips and crystals on the models’ heads to create an exotic crown out of which sprouted stands of hair. They all looked great.

Truly he is fashion’s modern renaissance man.

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