Like the French couture legends who preceded him, Yves Saint Laurent introduced brand new classics into the vocabulary of fashion.

The designer, who was diagnosed with a brain tumour last year, died in Paris on Sunday at the age of 71.

In the 1920s, Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel put women into breezy jersey dresses with short hemlines. Twenty years later, Christian Dior pulled down the hemlines again with his hourglass-shaped frocks, made with an abundance of expensive fabric and shaped with boned bodices and layers of petticoats.

The Algeria-born Saint Laurent was to get considerably more adventurous in the forms he played with.

First came a black silk velvet column dress tied with a white satin bow called Soiree de Paris - his first creation for Dior, which he joined in 1955. Then came the 1957 Trapeze collection, where dresses started fitted at the shoulders and ballooned gently into a triangular puff.

By the time he set up shop for himself in 1962, his interests had got too edgy for the venerable house of Dior and its high-society clients.

Under his own label, he toyed, with the utmost elegance, with new ideas of femininity, launching slinky Le Smoking tuxedo suits and rakishly fresh safari-inspired jackets for women.

He was one of the first fashion designers to draw from youth and street culture, laying the path for the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier and Marc Jacobs.

And while the past season saw a gamut of designers using art-inspired prints and paints on their collections, Saint Laurent's use of modern art in fashion remains largely in a league of its own.

His iconic 1965 Mondrian shift dress, writes Salon.com's Stephanie Zacharek, 'at first glance seems to work at odds with the roundness of a woman's body. Look at it some more, and you realise that the heavy black lines that divide the dress into chunks of colour, like pop-art stained glass, are so carefully placed that they sketch out and hint at, rather than obliterate, the curves beneath them.

'It's a trick dress: Its very 'hardness' is the thing that allows it to be so aggressively feminine - it's like a game to see how many right angles the feminine form can bear (and the woman wins).'

It's little wonder that he became the first living designer to have an retrospective exhibition, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983.

But it was his savvy embrace of celebrity endorsements, ready-to-wear and the licensing of accessories, cosmetics and perfumes that proved most fashion-forward.

Famous friends and fans like Catherine Deneuve, Paloma Picasso, Bianca Jagger and Lauren Bacall made sure his designs were indelibly imprinted onto the public imagination, preceding the way Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld courts up-and-coming starlets today.

YSL and his partner Pierre Berge were also one of the first to extensively license the designer's name to accessory, cosmetic and perfume manufacturers, again preceding today's accessory-driven profit margins for most fashion labels.

By setting up ready-to-wear division Rive Gauche, writes the International Herald Tribune's Suzy Menkes, 'Berge and YSL started another fashion revolution. It was the birth of luxury ready-to-wear as a democratisation of haute couture. And every plate glass designer 'flagship' across the globe today is rooted in that original 1966 concept'.

It was reported, however, that towards the end of his career, Saint Laurent had become less enamoured with ready-to-wear, expressing nostalgia for the craft and exclusivity of couture.

The Gucci Group bought over the label in 1999. In 2002, Saint Laurent announced his retirement, saying: 'I have nothing in common with this new world of fashion, which has been reduced to mere window-dressing. Elegance and beauty have been banished.'

Today, the YSL label no longer does couture. Its ready-to-wear line has been under the charge of Tom Ford, and now Stefano Pilati. The label's most significant triumph in recent memory is the now-passe Muse bag, once sported by Kate Moss and Lindsay Lohan as the most It of It bags.

But with the world's attention once again on the achievements of the label's founder, perhaps a new era of innovation in style may not be too much to hope for.

ENDURING AND ACCESSIBLE

The rarefied world of luxury peddled by iconic French fashion designers may seem distant for many regular women these days. But the work of Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel, Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent made an impact on the wardrobes of all women, regardless of whether they could afford couture.

Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel (1883-1971)

It's almost shocking how many enduring articles of fashion this savvy mademoiselle pioneered.

The woven Chanel suit, with its boxy jacket (right) and prim trim, remains a favourite of society matrons and credibility-hungry It girls, much like the quilted 2.55 handbag.

The little black dress has taken on a life of its own, becoming the uniform of elegant minimalists since Chanel premiered it in Vogue in 1926.

Every fashionista laden with ropes of fake pearls and other assorted trinkets today owes a debt to the costume jewellery trend first started by Chanel herself. And let's not forget the inimitable Chanel No. 5, launched in 1921 and still one of the best-selling perfumes of all time.

Christian Dior (1905-1957)

There were a mere 10 years between the launch of his first collection in 1947 and his death in 1957.

But the impact of his 1947 New Look collection made both his reputation and that of the Paris fashion industry for decades to come.

Celebrating a silhouette of a full skirt flaring out from a nipped waist, Dior's collection infused post-war fashion with traditional femininity and luxury, creating a gold standard of chic glamour that is still valuable fashion currency today. Why do you think model-turned-French First Lady Carla Bruni (right) chose Dior for her first overseas state visits?

Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008)

He may have been Dior's protege, but the career of this fashion prodigy was considerably more steeped in the modern world than Dior's old-world romance.

Still, the sleek lines of his tuxedo suits and safari jackets and the bold colours of his modern art-inspired dresses were not any less enthralling for women.

The Telegraph's Celia Walden writes that YSL was a designer 'who, as I was growing up, was responsible for making clothes that rendered me sick with longing'. And the (relatively) more affordable ready-to-wear collections these days? Credit goes to his Rive Gauche boutique of 1966, which helped to make stunning fashion more accessible to the woman on the street.

This article was first published in Urban, The Straits Times on Jun 5, 2008.