Saint Laurent's Hedi Slimane Finally Gives an In-Depth Interview

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Notoriously press-shy Hedi Slimane has come out of the shadows for Yahoo Style, where he has opened up for his longest interview to date. The entire interview was conducted over email by Dirk Standen, the former editor-in-chief of Style.com who now works at W as the magazine's digital creative director.

While Slimane gives his thoughts on plenty of topics in the wide-ranging interview, Standen does spend some time asking about how Slimane handled his critics when he first was hired onto the brand. "I completely understand the reactions," Slimane told Standen. "There was a particular context, like someone switching off the music at a birthday party, but I knew my project would be sensitive."

The outrage over the name change, however, seemed unwarranted to Slimane since he was trying to bring the brand back to what Yves Saint Laurent originally had labeled the company. "I needed to keep a distance with all the outside commotion that felt unrelated to me and my intentions for the house," Slimane says. "The discussions about the name change was, for instance, were misleading and oblivious to the history of Saint Laurent Rive Gauche."

But when Standen asked if all the criticism affected Slimane in a negative way, he immediately refuted the idea. "Quite the contrary, my determination was only stronger," Slimane says. "If there is no reaction, it means nobody cares. If nobody cares, then we have a problem."