Yves Saint Laurent sent the first women’s tuxedo suit down a haute couture runway in 1966 — and it sold exactly one unit that season. Sixty years later, the design he called “Le Smoking” is still considered the moment tailored menswear became permanent vocabulary in women’s fashion.

Key Points

• Saint Laurent introduced “Le Smoking” in his Autumn-Winter 1966 haute couture collection, according to the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris’s official archive.
• The museum’s own records note that only one tuxedo sold directly from that couture collection — though the more affordable Saint Laurent rive gauche version quickly found an audience with younger buyers.
• Saint Laurent kept a version of the tuxedo in his collections for 36 years, through his final years designing before retiring in 2002, per the museum’s “Smoking Forever” exhibition history.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute holds multiple iterations of the design in its permanent collection, including a Fall/Winter 2000–2001 wool-and-silk ensemble that reworked the silhouette into a bolero jacket and jumpsuit.

Saint Laurent’s approach wasn’t a costume gag or a runway stunt. According to the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, he adapted the actual construction of a men’s smoking jacket to a woman’s body rather than simply shrinking a men’s garment to fit — cutting the shoulders, lapels, and trousers to work as real tailoring, not a novelty. In his own words, preserved in the museum’s official biography of the piece:

“For a woman, the tuxedo is an indispensable garment in which she will always feel in style, for it is a stylish garment and a not a fashionable garment. Fashions fade, style is eternal.”

That distinction is why the tuxedo never left his lineup. The museum’s exhibition record describes the garment as coming to “symbolize female liberation,” carrying “notions of strategy and the struggle for power” that made it as much a political statement as a fashion one — a woman in a room dressed exactly as commandingly as any man in it.

Saint Laurent didn’t freeze the design in 1966, either. Over the following decades he reworked it into short-skirt versions, long coatdresses, and jumpsuits, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s own collection catalog, which holds a Fall/Winter 2000–2001 example combining a bolero jacket and jumpsuit “seductively freighted” with the same androgynous tailoring codes he established at the start. The Met acquired that piece as a gift to its Costume Institute in 2006, four years after Saint Laurent’s retirement — proof the house, and the fashion world at large, still treated the tuxedo as a defining artifact of his career rather than a one-off moment.

Six decades on, the tuxedo suit is no longer a debate. It’s a category on its own, sitting in nearly every designer’s ready-to-wear lineup and in ordinary closets, built on a template one Paris collection first put on record in 1966 — and sold, at the time, exactly once.