The earth moved at designer Hedi Slimane’s womenswear ready-to-wear debut at Yves Saint Laurent – or at least the ceiling did.

Even the famous black dress with white cuffs and sleeves worn by Catherine Deneuve in Luis Bunuel’s 1967 film Belle de Jour was given a new lease of life

The palpable excitement among those gathered recently around a dark runway inside the Grand Palais in Paris to witness how the grand couture brand would look under a new interpreter cranked up a notch as the show began. Individual ceiling panels shifted upwards one by one to create a cathedral ceiling, eliciting oohs from the crowd.

The temple may have been to Yves Saint Laurent – who died in 2008 after a decades-long career in which he put women in tuxedos, invented streetwear and democratised fashion – but Slimane did not copy blindly, instead bringing a modern, edgy yet elegant feel to the YSL classics.

Here again was the fringed safari look, the finely tailored trouser suit with lean legs and fitted jacket, the sheer black blouse and the ruffled dress with peasant collar – all given an up-to-the-minute urban sensibility that never felt dated.

Even the famous black dress with white cuffs and sleeves worn by Catherine Deneuve in Luis Bunuel’s 1967 film Belle de Jour was given a new lease of life as Slimane offered up two different lengths for front and back.

“The house is going to live again,” said Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent’s business partner and former companion. “This house is finally saved... by someone with immense talent.”

Berge said Slimane brought to the brand a more supple approach than Saint Laurent, who was grounded in the culture of couture tailoring. “He doesn’t copy, he modernises,” he said.

Slimane’s YSL ready-to-wear debut had been hotly anticipated by the fashion world, anxious to see how the former creative head at Christian Dior menswear would meld with the brand that once counted Deneuve, Bianca Jagger and Loulou de la Falaise among its greatest fans.

Slimane took the reins of the brand earlier this year from Stefano Pilati, recently hired at Ermenegildo Zegna after a seven-year stint at YSL.

Slimane has already re-branded the label as Saint Laurent Paris in a move that has frustrated some purists.

But the fashion world came out to support Slimane, including Lanvin’s Alber Elbaz and Louis Vuitton’s Marc Jacobs, as did Valerie Trierweiler, the companion of French President François Hollande.

“I don’t know the terminology of fashion, but I found it sublime,” Trierweiler said after the show.

With floppy, wide-brimmed hats on their heads and flounces at the neck, models looked like bohemian, urban gunslingers in tight leather trousers and fitted jackets.

Others in long tunic robes of blood red, green and royal blue and black capes swept onto the runway with the exoticism that characterised Saint Laurent’s work in the 1970s.