RIP YSL: Yves Saint Laurent Dead at 71

As followers of the official UnBeige Twitter account learned yesterday evening, fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent died at his home in Paris after a long battle with brain cancer. The Algerian-born designer and prodigy of Christian Dior (whose house he took over at the age of 21 after Dior’s sudden death in 1957) is credited with creating prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) fashion and cementing Paris’s status as the world’s fashion capital. And so, as freshly placed black flags flapped solemnly along the Champs Elysées, we donned our favorite le smoking and scoured the global remembrances for a few things you might not have known about YSL, as he was known and immortalized in the logo designed in 1963 by French graphic artist Cassandre.