Farewell Yves Saint Laurent

Photo: Agence France-Presse

Marriage is great because of the give and take. I get to bore Shannon with my non-stop rambling about slow food and the importance of walkable communities, and she gets to enlighten me with a greater appreciation for fashion. I never thought I’d write a blog post about fashion.

The fact is that fashion, or rather style, has always been important to me, but a fear of looking stupid and a love of subtlety keep me from dressing too elaborately. Shannon’s helping get me sort out my feelings on the whole thing. She introduced me to the Sartorialist a few weeks ago, and his photographs are helping me sublimate all my vague notions of how I would really like to present myself. Now I actually pay attention to the fashion world, and ended up reading a few articles about Yves Saint Laurent this past week.

Yves Saint Laurent has helped me figure things out a bit further. I like these quotes from him:

The silhouette counts more than anything. It should never be overloaded.

I always believed that style was more important than fashion. They are rare, those who imposed their style while fashion makers are so numerous.

I suppose I like the quotes simply because they give credence to something I already believed (funny how that works)—that is that simplicity is to be admired and style cannot be manufactured, which makes it so rare and wonderful.

While I’m becoming more aware of how I’d like to dress, I’m still a long way from actually doing it because I have no time and I hate shopping. In the meantime, I’ll keep depending on my strong aversion to trends and my constant hope to surprise people with a weird mind rather than wearing my weirdness (literally) on my sleeve.

That said, I’ll keep wearing my weird sunglasses. I’m sure Yves would have approved.