French fashion designer Louis Feraud, who designed clothes for Brigitte Bardot in the 1960s, has died aged 79.

He died at his Paris home after a four year battle against Alzheimer's disease.

Feraud was born in Arles, southern France and left his job as a ski instructor in the Alps to open his first boutique in the 1950s in the French Riviera city of Cannes, where he sold clothes to the sun-worshipping jet set.

His first success came in 1955 when Brigitte Bardot walked into his shop and purchased a girlish, white sun dress.

"Photographers and journalists followed her," he once said.

"Within a week, every woman up and down the Cote d'Azur was wearing my little white dress. We sold 500 of them in a matter of days."

In 1956 he opened a boutique in Paris for clients including actresses Kim Novak and Ingrid Bergman as well as Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the late French president Francois Mitterrand.

As much artist as couturier, he kept painting throughout most his life, crafting stylish nudes, landscapes and flowers which were exhibited and sold in Paris and New York.

His clever and amusing black and white geometrics and graphics often went directly into his outfits, and some of his most beautiful, luminous scarves were his own colourful designs.

"What I always wanted to do was please women," he once said.

There are about 50 Feraud outlets around the world whose annual turnover is about £81m.

Feraud also created several perfumes for the American company Avon and made contributions to the work of other designers, including Daniel Hechter and Jean-Louis Scherrer.

After he retired in 1995, his business was run by his daughter Kiki - his only child - his ex-wife Zizi, and colleagues until earlier this year when it was taken over by Dutch firm Secon.

He will be buried in his home town of Arles.