By RACHID AOULI and GAELLE FAURE, Associated Press Writer
Stars and couturiers filed into the Saint-Roch church in central Paris on Thursday for a final homage to the renowned fashion designer four days after he died of brain cancer at the age of 71.
First lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, a former model who strutted the catwalks to show off Saint Laurent's collections, accompanied her husband, President Nicolas Sarkozy. Like the sea of mourners, both wore black, the funereal color that also was the designer's preferred shade.
Actress Catherine Deneuve, her face drawn, bore a stalk of green wheat, which Saint Laurent loved, as she entered. She read a poem by Walt Whitman during the service.
Designers Vivienne Westwood, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Sonia Rykiel and John Galliano were among luminaries in the crowd, as was Farah Diba Pahlavi, the exiled widow of the Shah of Iran.
Applause rose among the guests as Saint Laurent's casket was taken into the flower bedecked church near the Louvre Museum and Tuileries Gardens and placed before the altar, draped in a yellow silk cloth decorated with bunches of wheat.
"This style, we find it everywhere, maybe not on the podiums but in the streets," said Pierre Berge, his companion and business partner of some 40 years.
Berge delivered a moving homage that recalled Saint Laurent's fashion debut and his extraordinary rise to fame by capturing his era and, notably, dressing women in trousers. Hundreds watched the ceremony from a giant screen outside.
Saint Laurent was among the most influential designers during the most important era of Parisian fashion. He changed the way women dressed, most enduringly by making it glamorous and feminine to wear pants.
He was widely considered the last of a generation that included Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, and he made Paris the fashion capital of the world with the Rive Gauche, or Left Bank, as its elegant headquarters.
He got his first break at the tender age of 21, named to head the House of Dior when the master died suddenly in 1957. He opened his own haute couture fashion house with Berge in 1962. The pair later started a chain of Rive Gauche ready-to-wear boutiques.
Part of the designer's genius was empowering women without forsaking femininity and in the process changing the way women dress.
"It was truly a love story with fashion and, I would say ... a true love story with women," Jean-Paul Gaultier said in an interview with Associated Press Television News. His clothes "were the incarnation of the modern woman. ... His death won't change his work."
Saint Laurent's navy blue pea coat over white pants, which the designer first showed in 1962, was another one of his hallmarks. His "smoking," or tuxedo jacket, of 1966 remade the tux as a high fashion statement for both sexes. It remained the designer's trademark item and was updated yearly until he retired.
"He changed couture through his art," said the Rev. Roland Letteron, considered a priest of artists, during the service. Saint Laurent used the art of fashion, Letteron said, "to expose the grandeur of life. ... It is more than brocade he prints on silk. It is light."
Saint Laurent was born in the Algerian coastal city of Oran. His ashes will rest in neighboring Morocco, at the Majorelle botanical garden beside a villa in Marrakech that he and Berge bought years ago.
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