In 1953, Saint Laurent submitted three sketches to a contest for young fashion designers organized by the International Wool Secretariat. Saint Laurent won first place. Subsequently, he was invited to attend the awards ceremony held in Paris in December.
During his stay in Paris, Saint Laurent met Michel de Brunhoff, editor-in-chief of the French edition of Vogue magazine and a connection to his father. Michel De Brunhoff, a considerate person who encouraged new talent, was impressed by the sketches that Saint Laurent brought with him and suggested he should become a fashion designer. Saint Laurent eventually considered a course of study at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the council which regulates the haute couture industry and provides training to its employees. Saint Laurent followed the advice, left Oran for Paris after graduation, began his studies there and eventually graduated as a star pupil. Later that same year, he entered the International Wool Secretariat competition again and won, beating his friend Fernando Sánchez and young German student Karl Lagerfeld.
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Shortly after his win, he brought a number of sketches to de Brunhoff who recognized close similarities to sketches he had been shown that morning by Christian Dior. Knowing that Dior had created the sketches that morning and that the young man could not have seen them, de Brunhoff sent him to Dior, who hired him on the spot.
Although Dior recognised his talent immediately, Saint Laurent spent his first year at the House of Dior on mundane tasks, decorating the studio and designing accessories. Eventually he was allowed to submit sketches for the couture collection. With each passing season, more of his sketches were accepted by Dior. Some Dior collections from this period contain themes that would appear in Saint Laurent's independent work years later, such as the smock tops and safari jackets in Dior's 1957 "Libre" line.[13] In August 1957, Dior met with Saint Laurent's mother to tell her that he had chosen Saint Laurent to succeed him as a designer. His mother later said that she had been confused by the remark, as Dior was only 52 years old at the time. Both she and her son were surprised when Dior died at a health spa in northern Italy of a massive heart attack in October 1957.
In 1957, Saint Laurent found himself at age 21 the head designer of the House of Dior. His spring 1958 collection almost certainly saved the enterprise from financial ruin. The simple, flaring lines of his first collection for Dior, called the Trapeze line, a variation of Dior's 1955 A-Line, catapulted him to international stardom. Dresses in the collection featured a narrow shoulder that flared gently to a hem that just covered the knee.
In his second collection for Dior, presented for fall 1958, he iconoclastically lowered hemlines by five inches and was not greeted with the same level of approval that his first collection received, with many considering it a major misstep. Soon after, Marc Bohan was hired to assist St. Laurent, and the spring 1959 Dior collection brought lengths back to the knee in a well-received collection inspired by the 1930s.Later collections for the House of Dior featuring hobble skirts (fall 1959) and beatnik fashions (fall 1960) were savaged by the press.
In 1959, he was chosen by Farah Diba, who was a student in Paris, to design her wedding dress for her marriage to the Shah of Iran.
In 1960, Saint Laurent found himself conscripted to serve in the French Army during the Algerian War.[33] Neri Karra writes that there was speculation at the time that Marcel Boussac, the owner of the House of Dior and a powerful press baron, had put pressure on the government not to conscript Saint Laurent in 1958 and 1959, but after the disastrous Fall 1958 season, reversed course and asked that the designer be conscripted so that he could be replaced.
Saint Laurent was in the military for 20 days before the stress of hazing by fellow soldiers led to him being admitted to a military hospital, where he received news that he had been fired from Dior, to be replaced by Marc Bohan.This exacerbated his condition, and he was transferred to Val-de-Grâce military hospital, where he was given large doses of sedatives and psychoactive drugs and subjected to electroshock therapy. Saint Laurent himself traced the origin of both his mental problems and his drug addictions to this time in hospital.
