Personalise your YSL bag

You may be the proud owner of the latest off-the-catwalk-it-bag, but the truly stylish - and those who can afford to not enlist eBay at the end of the season to fund next season's accessory must-have – have a penchant to personalize their bags, as they do their stationary.

After all, it would be terribly unfashionable to be involved in a case of mistaken identity during front row London Fashion Week (hands off my Kelly bag!).

But Yves Saint Laurent can help you with this matter. When you buy the latest Muse bag, a beautiful leather hold-all seen on Kate Moss and Lindsay Lohan, YSL will emboss your Muse with your initials – all for free on Saturday, March 25 th .

If you don't already own one, the Muse retails for £675. Head to the boutique on Sloane Street for more information.

Estee Lauder eyes up YSL

Rumours that Estee Lauder is interested in purchasing Yves Saint Laurent, the loss-making French Fashion House once designed by Tom Ford, are now said to be untrue. PPR is apparently seeking to divest itself of the entire loss-making YSL division, but Estee Lauder reportedly is keen only on YSL's perfumes and other beauty products.

Estee Lauder, headed by billionaire Chairman Leonard A. Lauder , recently hired the very bankable Tom Ford, the former designer for PPR's Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci brands, to launch a new range of beauty products.

www.ysl.com
20 June 2005

Sales Rise For YSL Beauté

French retail group Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR) announced organic sales growth up 6.7% on a comparable basis to EUR3.91bn for "New PPR." This growth comes as a change to the fall in total growth experienced by the group in the first quarter.

The YSL Beauté division reported Q2 sales of EUR145.3m, up 7.1 per cent on a comparable basis. Sales rose across all regions during the quarter with increases of 4.2 per cent in Europe, 16.6 per cent in Japan and 37.3 per cent in the rest of Asia. The US showed a sales decline of 4.5 per cent attributed to the overall weakness of department-store sales there.

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21 July 2004

Profits Slide For YSL Beauté

YSL Beauté, the beauty arm of Italian luxury-goods firm Gucci Group, announced sales down 3.5 per cent to EUR155.6m for the fourth quarter endingJanuary 31, 2004, against like-for-like sales last year. The results were impacted by weak sales over the holiday season, the company said. On a constant-currency basis, sales for the division were flat (-0.2 per cent). Operating profit dropped to EUR11.2m from EUR14.2m in the same period the year before.

Overall the Gucci Group recorded sales up 3.8 per cent to EUR741.7m, while operating profit grew 29.2 per cent to EUR148.9m. Net profit for the group during the fourth quarter increased 1.9 per cent to EUR 97.3m.

www.ysl.com
6 April 2004

Christy in new campaign YSL

Christy Turlington, the former supermodel has been chosen by Tom Ford, Yves Saint Laurent's creative director, as the woman who best captures the fashion house's mood for the Northern Hemisphere's spring-summer. "Christy Turlington is a true modern beauty," says Ford. "She's strong, confident, sensual and mysterious."

And obviously, Ford knows what he's talking about. He is, after all, the man responsible for turning around the fortunes of Gucci and then YSL's Rive Gauche label, as well as making the pungent 1970s fragrance Opium trendy again, with the help of Sophie Dahl's naked body.

The photographer Glen Luchford under Ford's direction shot the new advertising campaign, which is appearing in the latest issues of several magazines in Australia. In the three images, Christy wears a gathered shoulder jacket with a silk, crepe de Chine seamed rose dress and diamond T-top. She carries an antique-feel flower bag and wears violet sandals adorned with kissing lips.

The new pictures are very different compared to last season's campaign for YSL, which was shot by Mario Testino and featured some of the world's leading models, including Carmen Kass, Jacquetta Wheeler and Carolina Ribeiro, dressed up as dominatrixes in little black dresses and strappy, spike heels.

Christy Turlington is one of the original '80s supermodels - along with Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell. More recently, she has reinvented herself as a business woman by launching a range of skin care products, with partners Ayla Hussain and Cavan Mahony, called Sundari, which are based on the ancient Indian medicine Ayurveda. She's also the face for Calvin Klein's perfume Eternity and owns her own yoga-clothing line.

February 21, 2003
www.ysl.com

YSL closes fashion house

The Yves Saint Laurent Haute Couture fashion house has formally closed its doors bringing an end to a fashion era, which began in 1961. Since Saint Laurent announced his retirement last January, a flood of orders kept the fashion house and its 158 employees, mainly seamstresses, busy until July of this year.
His decision to retire was not a big surprise in the fashion world, but some expected the fashion house to go on without him.
The retail tycoons Artemis vehicle will pay out 14 million euros in redundancy payments to the staff. Under terms of the closure settlement, a further 4.4 million euros in payments to former staff will be paid by fashion icon Saint Laurent himself and his business associate Pierre Berge. Most of the seamstresses will be out of work, although Chanel, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Azzedine Alaia have already hired 40 of them.
Yves Saint Laurent's ready-to-wear, perfume and accessories divisions will be unaffected by the closure since they have been sold to the Italian luxury giant Gucci.

November 2, 2002
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