The Women Who Inspired the Scandal Collection

This isn’t Dior’s New Look — however the Parisian women preferred to forget.

While the majority of designers in 1971 romanticized the past, Dior’s nipped waists, Balenciaga’s sculptural purity, the soft nostalgia of the 1950s — YSL chose to do the opposite. He reached back to the darkest most un-comfortable corner of French memory: occupied Paris in the 1940s.

Not the patriotic version. 
Not the Resistance myth. 
Not the elegant silhouette of Dior’s post-war revival.

YSL looked at the women who survived the war by any means necessary — the Parisian ladies tried to not discuss.

Yves Saint Laurent developed the inspiration for his Scandal Collection, with

• platform shoes worn by nightclub dancers and black‑market couriers.
• square, padded shouldersborrowed from men’s jackets and re-purposed by women who had to be tough.
• tight skirts that clung to the body with a kind of defiant sexuality.
• fox‑fur stoles that signaled glamour purchased in the shadows.
• exaggerated make-up — red lips, rouged cheeks, penciled brows — the armor of women who lived by their wits.
• the gritty glamour of survival not the polished elegance of couture.

These were not Dior’s women. These were women who lived through hunger, fear, scarcity and moral ambiguity — and still found ways to be glamorous.

YSL didn’t set out to design nostalgia. He was instead designing memory — the kind Paris didn’t want to face. Wasn’t ready to face. Wounds were still raw. Re-visiting those wounds the Parisian ladies, the fashion world did not want to do. Parisian ladies and the fashion world wanted to move forward not backwards. 

It was a portrait of survival as opposed to romance. A mirror held up to a past the fashion world preferred to forget. The French would react in a situation like this one by saying, “Mon Dieu!” Upon witnessing YSL’s 1971 collection as it hit the scene for Paris Fashion Week. 

And that’s the reason Yves Saint Laurent’s 1971 collection caused a scandal.

I’m Stacey Hobbs, thanks for reading Face by Stace! Until next time. 
do you feel fabulous today?