YSL rebrands website with new Saint Laurent Paris identity

Hedi Slimane continues to ring the changes at the venerable house of Yves Saint Laurent. Months after the announcement of his decision to rebrand the ready-to-wear line as ‘Saint Laurent Paris’ in homage to the late designer’s ‘Saint Laurent Rive Gauche’ lines, and the Frenchman’s choice to move the label’s design studios to his current home of Los Angeles, the brand’s website has been shut down in anticipation of a full rebrand after Monday evening’s show in Paris.

Visitors to the site are treated to a holding image, a downloadable ‘baby cat’ leopard print screensaver, alongside the Saint Laurent Paris logo, as a song by Liza Thorn plays in the background. Sources say that the new site will follow the same architecture as before, but will feature brand new imagery and graphic design from Slimane. Keeping the same YSL.com url, the site is due to go live Tuesday.

The rebrand has been total; this latest news follows last week’s announcement of the first Saint Laurent Paris store, set to open in Shanghai in early October. It is the first store to be completely designed by the new creative director.

The invitation to the Monday evening show was a black notebook with each page a mysterious close-up photograph of leopard print, and Slimane kept secrecy at a max. Stars including model Kate Moss, Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz, and actress Jessica Chastain filled the front rows at the Grand Palais in Paris, as the 44-year-old designer showed a series of looks inspired by traditional YSL shapes as well as Californian Château Marmont cool.

Reviews of the show have been mixed, some praising the designer for a bold new direction. Others have complained of a lack of inventiveness in the collection, among them the New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn who, in a high-profile snub, was uninvited to the show.