Fashion world bids farewell to Yves Saint Laurent

Celebrities he clothed and designers he inspired gathered for the funeral of Yves Saint Laurent in Paris today.

Stars, couturiers and President Nicolas Sarkozy filed into the Saint-Roche church 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, the French president. Both wore black, the funereal color that also was the designer's preferred shade.

Actress Catherine Deneuve and 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 decorated yellow cloth.

Saint Laurent was among the most influential designers during the most important era of Parisian fashion. He made changed the way women dressed, most enduringly by making it glamorous and feminine to wear pants.

"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's body will be cremated and his ashes kept in the Majorelle botanical garden near a home in Marrakech, Morocco, that he and Pierre Berge, his business partner and friend of 40 years owned.