Hedi Slimane’s Trend designer

It has been a yr since Mr. Slimane, who made his title designing skinny fits for skinny males more than a decade ago, took over as the creative director of Yves Saint Laurent, in what has proved to be the most contentious endeavor of a model reinvention in latest memory. Each week there's a new uproar, from spats with critics to the relocation of his studio.

The most recent, although hardly the largest, is a sequence of commercials by which Mr. Slimane has cast unwholesome rock stars like Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson to symbolize what was as soon as essentially the most revered trend home in Paris, synonymous with Catherine Deneuve and Betty Catroux. One image reveals Ms. Love, in a noticed fur coat, crawling on the floor. One other is an in depth-up of Mr. Manson’s brooding face reverse the brand new title Mr. Slimane has placed on the label, “Saint Laurent Paris.”

“Hedi wants to shock,” said Pierre Bergé, the former partner of Mr. Saint Laurent and Mr. Slimane’s biggest champion. Dismissing the criticism that has shadowed the designer’s every move, Mr. Bergé, who no longer has a financial stake in the company but has been front and center for both of Mr. Slimane’s women’s shows, described him as the one true heir to the legacy of Saint Laurent. It is a house, he noted, that has long thrived on creating great controversy, as well as great fashion.

“When you are an artist,” Mr. Bergé said, “you are obliged to shock.”

This, more than anything, Mr. Slimane has done well.

Since he replaced the designer Stefano Pilati in a creative takeover that bordered on a coup, Mr. Slimane, 44, has introduced a vision for Saint Laurent that has been so divisive among critics and retailers that no one can quite be sure whether, in hindsight, it will be seen as brilliant or absurd. Reviews of his first two women’s collections, luxe boho and floppy hats for spring and baby-doll grunge dresses for fall, have ranged from the underwhelming to the scathing. Meanwhile, much of the news coverage about the designer, an elusive figure at best, has centered on his antagonistic relations with newspaper critics and magazine editors, banning some journalists from the shows and challenging the tone of coverage.

Yet store buyers have fallen all over themselves to be the first to stock Mr. Slimane’s designs, which they say have been selling briskly this spring, despite some problems with deliveries.

“We would have liked to have had it sooner,” said one retail chief, who declined to be named because Saint Laurent is a potentially lucrative business.

In assessing whether his first year has been a success, there is little doubt that people are talking about Saint Laurent, even without the participation of Mr. Slimane in the conversation. Since joining the company, he has taken a provocative stance against the fashion system. He has made few comments to reporters, only to acknowledge that his ideas are indeed rooted in music and to rebut criticism that he was being disrespectful when he dropped the word “Yves” from the label, one of his first moves that gave offense.

The new logo and its modified Helvetica font were inspired by the storefront of Mr. Saint Laurent’s ready-to-wear business in the 1960s, called Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. But mostly, his intentions have been anyone’s guess, resulting in passionate debates both for and against Mr. Slimane’s rock-chic sensibility. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

“What is interesting to me is how extreme the reactions are,” said Dirk Standen, the editor in chief of Style.com, which has monitored its readers’ reactions to the show through their online comments. “They are fairly evenly split,” he said, “though possibly slightly more negative than positive. At the end of the day, they are clothes. People could just shrug.”