Catwalk finale for Saint Laurent

PARIS, France -- The French fashion designer, Yves Saint Laurent, launched his final catwalk show to mark his recently announced retirement.

Tuesday night's fashion parade, in the Pompidou Centre, Paris's distinctive home of modern art, was the highlight of this week's Paris haute couture collections.

About 2,000 guests saw the presentation of more than 300 creations ranging from classics like the safari jacket and the women's tuxedo to embroidered jackets recreating the paintings of Van Gogh and Picasso.

Guests were also able to buy the outfits and large numbers of orders are expected to keep Saint Laurent's workshops busy until July, when the legendary designer finally retires.

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Saint Laurent's house of haute couture will close but the name will stay. The rights to his label were sold in 1999 to Gucci Group NV and since then Gucci's creative director, Tom Ford, has been in charge of the ready-to-wear collection, fragrances and cosmetics.

Saint Laurent, 65, says he is retiring because he is frustrated with an industry that puts money before art.

"We live in a world of confusion and decadence," he told French newspaper Le Monde earlier this month. "This battle for elegance and beauty was causing me a lot of sadness."

The designer is seen as a national treasure in France and his statement announcing his departure prompted an emotional debate about the future of the exclusive fashion industry.

The Saint Laurent camp has predicted an end to haute couture but rival designer, Karl Lagerfeld, has called the retirement a dramatisation. He told newspaper Journal du Dimanche: "It is not as if this were the funeral in the presence of the corpse."

Saint Laurent once declared he would die when he stopped designing but another designer, Christian Lacroix, told France Inter radio that it was time for him to leave the industry.