Fashion designers are not generally a handsome bunch. Most of them leave the beauty to their creations — which is why Stefano Pilati, the 43-year-old Italian creative director of Yves Saint Laurent, comes as a pleasant surprise. Quite the Adonis, with his short, bleached-blond hair, noble nose and well-toned body (he has a gym in the basement of his flat), he is not afraid to be front of camera, nor indeed to be photographed with his current muse, Naomi Campbell. Naked.

We meet in his apartment, which is in a swanky part of Paris, the day after his spring/summer 2009 show. It was held in the Grand Palais to mixed reviews — some loved it, others left disappointed that he had not repeated the success of his current autumn/winter collection — and was followed by a private dinner party at Caviar Kaspia, where I confess I ate my body weight in beluga. The night finished late, but today Pilati is looking fresh and ready for anything — just what you would expect from a man who works out, runs, cycles and swims, and still finds time to create 20 collections a year. He is wearing brogues, but not quite brogues as we know them; tweed trousers, but not exactly as seen in the shires; and an English sweater — traditional dress, but there is something a little avant-garde about the cut. Very YSL. Hidden — but I know it’s there because he showed it to me last night — is an elaborate tattoo down his right arm.

The room, elegantly sparse and fashionably underlit, is as relaxed as Pilati, who soon slides off the sofa we are sitting on, to the floor, where he half-lies at my feet. His dog, Bepi, an albino boxer, constantly tries to interrupt him with excessive shows of affection.

“I want to give women a feeling of self-confidence in their femininity, as well as a feeling of control,” Pilati says. “This collection was interesting because Yves died while I was working on it, so I did quite a lot of referencing about what the spirit of the house meant.”

The ready-to-wear side of YSL has gone through changes since its eponymous founder retired. Having briefly been led by Alber Elbaz (now the phenomenally successful designer of Lanvin), then Tom Ford, it was made Pilati’s fiefdom in 2000. He developed his style based on his belief that high fashion has a real relevance not only to the times, but also to women regardless of their age. It has pretty well divided the fashion world: women over 45 were not initially convinced that its strength would flatter them; younger women were delirious, realising that it would do what they increasingly expect from high fashion — that is, empower them by reflecting their uncompromising modernity. And they were the ones who were right.

“Fashion is a business,” Pilati says briskly. “Whatever a designer does must have meaning. It must end up on women’s backs, or what is the point? Certainly, I acknowledge at this moment that we have a financial crisis, but that doesn’t mean that fashion should be boring. At a time like this, designers have to look forward, not back. We cannot produce good clothes by copying or re-creating great moments from the past. And I cannot afford to forget that whatever I create affects the jobs and livelihoods of a workforce of more than 12,000 people. They are my responsibility, and I can only fulfil it by taking in what is happening and producing my solution to what women need.”

It could be Saint Laurent himself talking 50 years ago, when he stepped away from couture as being irrelevant and embraced the realities of the street, pop and youth culture to produce Rive Gauche, the most famous and influential of all ready-to-wear labels.

Pilati finds it surprising how little fashion has actually moved on in the past 45 years. “Look at Courrèges,” he points out. “His space-age fashion is still just that — a dream of an unrealised future. We haven’t caught up with what he was proposing, even now. Where are the new fabrics and techniques? Compared with, say, the automobile industry, fashion has hardly moved.”

He is keen for it to catch up, though. In 1998, he worked on a project with Nike, fusing fashion with sportswear, and he found researching it fascinating. “Synthetic fibres are so cool,” he enthuses. “I believe in the nobility of sport and the self-respect that being fit and alert brings to the individual. And it has a lesson for fashion. If the industry is to survive, we can’t work in a self-feeding, inward-looking circle of the privileged. We must look wider than that. I love floaty gowns on a catwalk, but we need more than that if fashion is to be relevant.”

Pilati is a totally modern designer whose strength lies in his knowledge of what fashion has done and may do again. His clothes are for edgy, “out there” women who don’t want fashion for disguise but rather to expose them: their confidence, open-mindedness and belief in their femininity. Just as Saint Laurent’s customers did more than half a century ago.

THE SUNDAY TIMES STYLE LECTURE
STEFANO PILATI IN CONVERSATION WITH COLIN McDOWELL
OCTOBER 29 2008

Doors open at 6.00pm and lecture starts at 6.30pm
London College of Fashion, 20 John Princes Street, London W1G 0BJ
Tickets: £20 (plus £2.50 booking fee) available by phone on 0844 209 0371. Click here to book online

Stefano Pilati has been creative director of the great fashion house Yves St Laurent since 2004. He is known for his edgy, architectural, and powerful designs.

YSL clothes bear the strong stamp of Pilati’s personality which, in itself, shows how he learned his trade, and with whom. Menswear for Cerruti was followed by a stint with Armani and then a period at Prada designing for both the eponymous line and the Miu Miu label.

Pilati’s Yves Saint Laurent is not only elegant, soignee and sophisticated but also, in a look back to Yves in the early days of Rive Gauche, streetwise and, at times, almost shockingly bold.

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