These watches had been, at finest, a mere dilution of the as soon as dynamic and disruptive Yves Saint Laurent look. It was an inevitable consequence for a model that stamped itself imperiously throughout something and the whole lot product-wise within the ’80s and ’90s. YSL offered the ready-to-wear enterprise to Gucci for some $1 billion in 1999 and shut down the couture home when Saint Laurent retired in 2002.
Gucci’s Tom Ford, taking cost at Yves Saint Laurent, terminated and cleaned up the licenses on which France’s famend trend home was constructed, “Stamping your identify on trend merchandise was a license to earn cash. Now, a sensible designer seems to be for a license to kill,” introduced Suzy Menkes in The New York Instances in July 2000, “The speculation is to create a leaner, fitter luxurious world wherein purchasers are higher served and designers reap the advantages of larger revenue margins for their very own shops.”
