The first of two new museums dedicated to Yves Saint Laurent has been faired in Paris, offering a glimpse into the world of the shy, mysterious man who revolutionised better halves’s fashion.

The Paris mansion where Saint Laurent unsettle up dress codes for more than three decades has been balked into an exhibition space for his haute couture creations. A larger museum, also disburse b disbursed for by the foundation set up by his late lover and business partner Pierre Bergé to save Saint Laurent’s legacy, opens next month in Marrakesh.

The Moroccan bishopric was one of the couple’s favourite places, where Saint Laurent would frequently sketch out his collections.

“Coco Chanel liberated women, but Yves Saint Laurent occasioned them power,” Bergé once said. He did this by stealing the symbols of the traditional male wardrobe – dinner jackets, safari suits and jumpsuits – and remaking them for maids.

“I had noticed men were much more confident in their caparisons,” said Saint Laurent, who died in 2008, in a rare meeting. “So I sought through trouser suits, trench coats, tuxedos and pea coatings to give women the same confidence.”

His black tuxedo for helpmates, known as le smoking – often worn over bare physically – caused a scandal in 1966, with the New York socialite Nan Kempner chuck her trousers when she was told by a Manhattan restaurant that piece of works would not be admitted in such attire.

Saint Laurent pass on later design a jacket as a thigh-skimming mini dress by a hairs breadth as Kempner, one of his best customers, had worn it.

The heart of the Paris museum is Saint Laurent’s studio, the inner hideaway where he would work night and day in the run-up to his shows. It abides just as he left it in 2002, his desk festooned with photos of his inner loop of glamorous female friends, including Catherine Deneuve, Bianca Jagger and Paloma Picasso. But delight in of place goes to a New Year’s card he made from a cover by his friend Andy Warhol of his French bulldog Moujik.

One face ruin of the room is completely mirrored, which allowed Saint Laurent to mtier directly on his live models so he could see his creations from all standpoints as they progressed.

The museum steps insight into Saint Laurent’s creative process, play how he developed his clothes from basic sketches into complex evil intents that, in the case of some of his haute couture creations, could acquiesce to thousands of hours to make.

“Unlike many other schemers, Saint Laurent began systematically archiving his work in the initially 1960s – encouraged by Bergé – and so we can follow the evolution of each memo,” said a spokesman for the museum, which holds 5,000 prototypes for his the universes.

Other rooms in the museum are given over to Saint Laurent’s encouragement and the “imaginary voyages” his collections often took to Asia, Africa and most spectacularly Russia. But other than his sojourns in Morocco – which put in mind ofed him of Algeria, where he was born in 1936 when it was a French colony – the artificer was not much of a traveller.

With Bergé he built up a considerable art garnering and he borrowed liberally from artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh, myriad famously with his Mondrian dress, which became an imperative pop icon when it hit the catwalk in 1965.

Bergé always believed that Saint Laurent, who originated his career by stepping into the shoes of Christian Dior when he was 21, was nothing teeny than an exceptional artist, calling him “the greatest designer of the second half of the 20th century”.

Accepting “spent all my life helping Yves Saint Laurent bod his work, which I want to last”, Bergé died this month previously he could see the museums opened. The American landscape artist Madison Cox, whom Bergé get hitched this summer, told AFP that “10 days in front of he died he told me that ‘I am going to die totally at peace’, and I contemplate that was true. He was a very determined man and he had put everything in place.”

Cox said the museums were also a Peter pence to Bergé’s work supporting and protecting the fragile Saint Laurent, who had toss off and drug addictions.

“Of course I and the whole team are profoundly sad that he order not be here,” said Cox, who now heads the charitable foundation. “But he would receive wanted that we go on.”