Madam and Yves

"Fashion," said Baudelaire, "is a sublime distortion of nature, or rather a constantly repeated attempt to reform nature." It also can be a means of understanding civilizations. The fortress of Victorian dress suggested much about the surrounding world's customs. So did the loose, low-cut flapper lines of the '20s, the Doris Day suburban look of the '50s and, in the '60s, the brash, youthful miniskirts, which gave way to pantsuits and jeans.

What, then, are social historians to make of the "revolution" that overwrought fashion editors were declaring last week (see MODERN LIVING) after Yves Saint Laurent revealed his fall collection? What mysteries of the Zeitgeist were riding on the mannequins' shoulders? Saint Laurent's muse told him women will now look like czarist imitations of gypsies, booted peasants in $5,000 velvets and taffetas, long-limbed and slightly fantastic creatures. The feminine mystique becomes the feminine muzhik.

The prices, at least, suggest an intuition that good times lie ahead--although, of course, Paris originals are always expensive. The frocks are romantically opulent, pointing away from unisex or any parody of male dress. Maybe women feel sufficiently liberated by now to allow themselves frankly "feminine" dress. But are women ready for such high costume--and would they feel comfortable in such operatic garb? At any rate, Saint Laurent seems to have decreed a turn away from politics (women a few years ago were wearing army shirts and cartridge belts) toward a different, Ballets Russes fantasy. The question is whether women will follow him.

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