YSL: the man who loved women

Dame Vivienne Westwood enchanted Channel 4 News host Jon Snow on Monday evening with an effusive tribute to Yves Saint Laurent, describing him as "one of the few who have achieved perfection with everything they touched" - before admitting that she had never worn a YSL outfit and that it was her young husband, Andreas Kronthaler, who had introduced her to his genius late in life. When Saint Laurent (pictured in London) was in his element in the 1970s, she was too busy being the queen of punk on the King's Road.

However, after discovering his work in the 1990s, she was smitten. Saint Laurent, she said, had liberated women and made everyone who wore his clothes feel more beautiful. She was "proud to pay homage to him on behalf of every woman".

Other tributes have poured in following the designer's death in Paris on Sunday. Naomi Campbell, speaking on the telephone from New York, broke down in tears while speaking of his influence: she was one of several black models who felt they owed their careers to Saint Laurent, one of the first leading designers to use black models on the catwalk.

It was Saint Laurent's revolutionary use of men's tailoring in pant-suits and in adapting the tuxedo for women - 'Le Smoking', as he called it - that many women consider his greatest triumph.

France's Culture Minister, Christine Albanel, said: "This brilliant idea that a woman could be the most feminine possible while dressing like a man... it seems to me decisive," she said. "Little by little, women get rid of their corset and then they live differently."

Saint Laurent's long-time partner Pierre Berge said on France-Info radio that while Chanel gave women freedom, Yves Saint Laurent gave them power. "In this sense, he was a libertarian, an anarchist and he threw bombs at the legs of society," he said. "That's how he transformed society and that's how he transformed women."