Yves Saint Laurent

Saint Laurent's most-discussed single piece, Le Smoking - the women's tuxedo suit - actually debuted in 1966, which I think trips people up when they try to place him squarely in the 1970s. But the decade is really where that idea stops being a provocation and becomes a working wardrobe philosophy, worn out into the world by women who weren't models or muses, at exactly the moment more of them were dressing for offices and needing clothes that read as authoritative rather than decorative.

He ran two operations through the decade that mattered for very different reasons: the haute couture house itself, and Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, the ready-to-wear line he'd opened back in 1966 - genuinely early for a couturier to put his own name on off-the-rack clothing sold through standalone boutiques rather than treating ready-to-wear as beneath the label. That structure let him run two conversations at once through the 70s: couture collections building out ideas like the saharienne, his belted, patch-pocketed safari jacket that moved from runway to real closets with unusual speed, and Rive Gauche translating the same silhouettes - trouser suits, blazers, wide-lapeled jackets borrowed wholesale from men's tailoring - into clothes an ordinary working woman could actually buy. His 1976-77 Russian and Ballets Russes-inspired collections, all rich color and opulent layering, are usually cited as a turning point in fashion history for reasons that have nothing to do with menswear at all - they're often credited as the moment couture shows themselves became a kind of theatrical spectacle rather than a straightforward presentation of clothes.

What ties the decade together for him, I think, is that both threads - the borrowed-from-menswear tailoring and the theatrical, historicist opulence - come from the same instinct to take womenswear somewhere it hadn't confidently gone before and just... let it stay there. The menswear thread in particular is the one with the longest tail: it's a straight line from Le Smoking through his 70s trouser suits to the loose, borrowed-from-the-boys layering of the Annie Hall silhouette by decade's end, and to the broader question of how women were meant to dress with authority that runs through second-wave feminism and dressing for work. He didn't originate every piece of that conversation, but he gave it its most confident and most copied version.