Editor’s note: I’m in Morocco till mid-December shooting a television travel show. If you post a comment on the site, be patient. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. —John

I escaped to the De Young Museum last week to check out the new Yves St Laurent exhibition, one in a trifecta of special exhibits. Maya Lin’s Systemic Landscapes inspired me to reconsider spatial constructions, and the Asian-American Modern Art installation forced a revisiting of the definition of American Modernism, but the YSL show struck me most.

At a time when Gucci looks uncannily like upgraded Banana Republic, and everyone dresses like high-schoolers, it’s hard to imagine that a single designer could change social mores. YSL did. He took ladies from wasp-waisted dresses (think June Cleaver) and put them into pants suits and tuxedos, effectively hijacking the authority of men’s power clothing and bestowing it upon women. He introduced new color palettes, playful shapes, see-through fabrics. Not since Dior, and Balenciaga before him, had a designer so changed women’s silhouettes.

So what makes these 120 works worthy of a fine-arts-museum show? In a word, timelessness. Wigless mannequins emphasize the freshness and innovation of the designs: add contemporary hairstyles and each outfit would look as inspired today as when it first appeared on the catwalk. The only exceptions are several designs inspired by other artists, such as Mondrian. These look dated, tired. YSL’s genius seemed to diminish only when he abandoned his own muse in favor of another’s.

Tom Ford may be remembered for little more than the muffin top—that lip of fat caused by too-tight low-rise jeans. We may have to wait another generation before a designer changes the way women dress as radically as YSL. Until then, we can always look back in time for inspiration. The exhibit runs till April 5, 2009, and shows nowhere else in the U.S.

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