One of our favorite trends from Fall 08 is the body con/exaggerated silhouette trend that we've titled 'Shape Up' for today's shoot. Shape Up is by far the most notable trend from the Fall 08 shows. Designers articulated this trend by skimming the body with razor-like precision or by exaggerating the silhouette to comment on the landscape of the body. Whichever direction they went, the physical form was at the forefront of their minds. From Yves Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, Jonathan Saunders, Miu Miu, and of course, Balenciaga, Fall 08 saw the female form (and not florals nor lace--though there was plenty of that, wasn't there?) take center stage. For our purposes we created two looks which articulate the trend.

The modern look called up a pair of Marc by Marc Trousers we'd written about in a while back in an immaterial post. Though there are options galore when it comes to parachute trousers, we thought these appropriately priced and nicely tailored. On top a Harlan Bel blouse tucked everything in to a tailored point (we first discovered Harlan Bel back when we shot our La Belle Dame sans Merci editorial). On the vintage side of things we couldn't really go wrong with a vintage Dior jacket from Zachary's Smile. The cuffed bell sleeve on this jacket inspired many a Fall 08 daydream in our mind. So nicely does it display the Shape Up vantage point.

Below, check out a spread of our favorite pieces from this trend and, below that, a trend gallery from the Fall 08 shows with every sort of Shape Up frock and trouser you can imagine.

YSL is on our list for two reasons. First, that we can't deny our love for the traditional YSL aesthetic. It is, above everything else, classic. Fall 08 gave us just what we asked for which was suiting, suiting, suiting, office-appropriate frocks, and the occasional overtly sexual garment. Secondly, because somewhere along the line the whole Fall 08 show became decidedly Brooklyn hipster. First off, Someone Great by LCD Soundsystem was the soundtrack to the show. The song, eponymous about six months earlier in Brooklyn, was almost as shocking to hear in Paris as was seeing the mop haircuts the models were sporting. Now matter how many people now attribute the haircut to YSL, we'd like to say, for the record, that it was already all over the place in Brooklyn and downtown. In fact, it was Mandy Coon, wife of LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, whom we first saw sporting the haircut and, in the song's video, so does the main character (one of your editors is also in this video though regrettably sans mop top). The energy of this collection, the way it hit home without remotely departing what we know and love about YSL, made this collection a really special one. Months later, when couturier Yves Saint Laurent passed away, it was solidifed in our minds that this would be a show and collection we would never forget.

Our network partner, Fashion Indie, reported this morning on the Marc Jacobs Resort 2009 collection. His take on the collection (and the title to his post)? "Jewel-Toned Heart Adorned Kimono Wearing Gladiators from the 90’s Enslave Powersuit Wearing Women from the 80’s with Bows". Well, 'aint that a mouthful. The Marc Jacobs Resort 2009 collection was, indeed, a menagerie of cultural references (as usual, eh?) but one unified sentiment stood out to us.

Yves Saint Laurent, who passed away this weekend, pioneered the iconic look known as Le Smoking. That suit, in the mid-late 1960's, emboldened suiting for women and gave them, perhaps for the first time in a long time, a sleek, powerful silhouette. Now, it's impossible that Marc Jacobs could have anticipated Yves Saint Laurent's death (Jacobs can be perverse, not that much so) but it does strike us as one of those coincidences we might attribute to the collective unconscious.

Le Smoking, as everyone knows, single handedly gave way to the all-encompassing 'power suit'. The Le Smoking look, reinterpreted many times by Saint Laurent himself, encouraged strong shouldered blouses and jackets and androgynous trousers on every working woman from the 1970's clear through the 1990's. The Jacobs Resort collection, whether referencing the 1980's or 1990's has this silhouette in mind. Jacobs, for Resort, called up the power suit (with a definite nod to French style--also relevant) as a source of inspiration and this, to us, is a coincidence that only solidifies how unforgettable and irreplaceable are both Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Jacobs to fashion.

As the fashion world mourns the loss of one of its most talented and influential icons, our network partners pay tribute with an outpouring of content. Their reflections, retrospectives, and photos of the designer, his work, and the women who wore it are wrapped up for you below. Whether or not you've ever worn Yves Saint Laurent yourself, most of us can agree that his designs heralded a change in direction that was both liberating and revolutionary, and the effects of which were felt from Paris to mass market retailers.

Ma Petite Chou and Fashion Projects tip us off to a YSL retrospective exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which will run through September 28.

The Shoe Goddess offers a timeline of important events and milestones in the designer's life and career, and We Are the Market nicely summarizes his most significant achievements.

The Coveted reflects on the YSL paper doll collection that was among her earliest fashion influences.

Hope Robertson finds YSL pieces at Bluefly.

From the fragrance camp, The Scented Salamander reminds us that his reach extended beyond fashion, as the cult following that developed around his luxury perfumes can attest, as well as the groundbreaking marketing tactics used in his ad campaigns.

Shoe Blog rounds up YSL footwear finds and feels that his work is now more relevant that ever.

Debutante Clothing points out that YSL's talents lay not only in his sartorial skills, but also in his ability to understand and interpret Ready-to-Wear from a business perspective and in terms of customers' needs.

Style Bubble revisits the book The Beautiful Fall, which chronicles a friendship between the designer and Karl Largerfeld that turned into a fierce rivalry, and questions what YSL's death will mean in those terms.

Chic Alert and Cult of Couture have a great black and white video from 1962, in which his collection is being hotly discussed. It offers glimpses of the designer backstage as he prepares the looks, as well as famous persons of the era anticipating the show.

The Business of Fashion points out the many ways in which YSL was an innovator, from being the first to use black models on the runway to being the first to license his name to other businesses.

SlamxHype and Poetic and Chic both have a great black and white photo of the designer standing in his storefront wearing one of his safari jackets, a style he invented.

The wider fashion press is likely to spend most of today memorializing one of fashion's true greats. Yves Saint Laurent died at his home in Paris late Sunday at 71 after a long, undisclosed illness. We here at Coutorture feel a great burden upon us as we discuss this life, for after all what can we say that you cannot hear elsewhere in the news media?

We do not doubt that all of the blogosphere will be buzzing for days to come. We wish we knew in our sadness over this passing what it is we should say. Should we focus on a straight obituary? Published biographies recounting the lives of those who have recently died have value no doubt. But certainly you can learn just as much from a wikipedia page.

Perhaps a eulogy would be more appropriate? We come here not to bury Yves Saint Laurent but to praise him? There is much to be said about Yves's incredible innovations, his work in the acceptance of ready to wear as a viable form of fashion for instance, his smoking jackets, his ever ingenious ability with menswear as womenswear, and yet we must assume that our readers are well aware of these praise worthy facts.

We imagine then perhaps our musings are more on the line of an elegy. The term "elegy" was originally used for a type of poetic metre (Elegiac metre), but is also used for a poem of mourning, from the Greek elegos, a reflection on the death of someone or on a sorrow generally. We cannot say we are much for poetry but we are certainly musing.

And so we have decided to leave you with another last form writing on death. The funeral oration is a storied tradition in classicism given by many a great leader. The true original oration came from one Pericles of Athens after the first year of the Peloponnesian War. In it, as Pericles mourns Athen's war dead, a vision of the Athenian people is given. Should you choose, you can read it in its entirety here. Pericles proposes to focus on "the road by which we reached our position, the form of government under which our greatness grew, and the national habits out of which it sprang."

Thus you can see why an ancient Greek funeral oration may have some use to grieving fashion lovers. Yves Saint Laurent embodies much of modern fashion history. Fashion today exists from the road laid by this great designer. Eulogies, obituaries, and even elegies are essentially the orations of our collective media painting a picture of who we are as fashion lovers and where we came from. Like Pericles, we may be mourning the passing of Yves Saint Laurent but we are also seeing our own fashion lineage and preparing for our fashion future.

Yves Saint Laurent once said "I tried to show that fashion is an art. For that, I followed the counsel of my master Christian Dior and the imperishable lesson of Mademoiselle Chanel. I created for my era and I tried to foresee what tomorrow would be." (1983)