YVES SAINT LAURENT is known for being a design mould breaker (le smoking, anyone?), so it's somewhat understandable that the house's current creative director, Stefano Pilati, has admitted to feeling frustrated with the speed at which the fashion industry is moving forward.

"Look at Courrèges. His space-age fashion model is still just that - a dream of an unrealised future. We haven't caught up with what he was proposing, even now," asserts the designer, who pushed the envelope with baggy-crotch trousers for spring/summer 2009. "Where are the new fabrics and techniques? Compared with, say, the automobile industry, fashion has hardly moved."

So what is Pilati's personal vision of fashion's future?

"Synthetic fibres are so cool. I believe in the nobility of sport and the self-respect that being fit and alert brings to the individual. And it has a lesson for fashion," he tells Colin McDowell in this week's Style magazine. "If the industry is to survive, we can't work in a self-feeding, inward-looking circle of the privileged. We must look wider than that. I love floaty gowns on a catwalk, but we need more than that if fashion is to be relevant."

Source: http://www.vogue.co.uk