Ask someone to name a fashion designer and chances are the name that passes their lips will be that of Yves Saint Laurent. Still. Half a century after he arrived on the Paris catwalk and replaced Christian Dior as reigning emperor of haute couture. Like Vidal Sassoon and Stirling Moss, Saint Laurent remains the catch-all standard-bearer for his profession - however many Nicky Clarkes and Jenson Buttons and Tom Fords come and go in between. Like all revolutionaries, Saint Laurent so transformed the landscape that you stuggle to recall what it looked like before.

He defined the modern woman's wardrobe (see times2). Through his ready-to-wear Rive Gauche line, and because his innovations were so widely mimicked by others, he also ensured that this wardrobe spoke with a defiantly French accent. The trouser suit may not put Hillary Clinton into the White House, but it was Saint Laurent who helped to put Mrs Clinton into the pantsuits that have become her sartorial signature. “I am extremely proud that women the world over wear pantsuits, pea jackets and trench coats,” he said when he retired in 2002. Those safari jackets everyone wears today? Championed by Saint Laurent. Biker jackets? Turtlenecks? Those, too.

But alongside shaping the beatnik look of 1960s Paris, which remains a visual shorthand for the avant-garde, Saint Laurent created clothes so seductively feminine that already by 1969 Coco Chanel had crowned him her spiritual successor. He dressed Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, and Bianca Jagger in the slashed-to-the-waist white tuxedo she wore to marry Mick.

“Fashion dies, but style remains,” Saint Laurent said. Now he has died. But his style remains.