The Great Fashion Designers (24 page)

Yves Saint Laurent was, in the words of the man closest to him, born with a nervous breakdown. Even so, he was also probably the most influential fashion designer of the second half of the twentieth century. He synthesised the ingenious modernity of Coco Chanel and the sensuous lyricism of Christian Dior, his mentor and first employer. The addition, as Francois Boudot noted in his account of twentieth-century fashion, of ‘a breath of youth and his extrasensory perception of the needs and wants of his contemporaries … led to the YSL monogram leaving its stamp on a whole era.'

Saint Laurent reinvented Paris fashion for the young, giving the women of the baby-boomer generation a new wardrobe stocked with easy, youthful clothes which, in their energy, flirtatious assertiveness and borrowings from the active male wardrobe, prefigured the social and political emancipation women were just learning to crave. He was among the first couturiers to understand that, instead of standing by while his ideas were copied and disseminated to a wider market by others, he could produce his own ready-to-wear ‘diffusion' or ‘boutique' line (iconically named Rive Gauche), making those clothes more easily accessible to younger, less wealthy women. He was the first couturier truly to understand the importance of accessories in creating a look. Often the clothes were really quite simple; it was the accessory garnish that added the bravura and romance.

Hypersensitive, self-centred, narcissistic and emotionally fragile, Yves Saint Laurent was also highly cultivated, literate, diffident and charming and had a mischievous sense of humour. When he posed nude in the 1970s for the picture to advertise a YSL men's scent, he told the photographer, Jean-Loup Sieff: ‘I want to create a scandal.' The resulting portrait is unforgettable. Backlit and shadowy, wearing only his spectacles, the designer looks directly into the lens, simultaneously confident in his slender, almost adolescent beauty yet projecting an eroticism that is wistful and tentative. In any other period a designer might very well have been ridiculed for such vanity, but this was the hippy moment of the Age of Aquarius, Flower Power, Woodstock, peace and love. He had his scandal and overnight became a gay icon. There were other scandals along the way: the trouser suit which rattled the composure of a thousand maitre d's, the first headline-grabbing transparent blouse, and the steamy mouth to mouth embrace with which he thanked Rudolf Nureyev for launching another fragrance, Kouros, onstage in the packed Opera Comique a decade later.

He attracted a gilded circle of protectors, defenders and friends upon whose loyalty he made great demands. In his latter years, however, there was scant amusement. Mischief turned to melancholy, and his shyness became reclusiveness. Rare sightings on the catwalk revealed an overweight, shambling figure with dyed auburn hair, a pasty complexion and a dazed expression. Even the coterie of rich, hedonistic friends and artistic collaborators fell away as he retreated into an introverted isolation. ‘He is simply,' said his closest friend, former lover and business partner (and the man who made the natal nervous breakdown diagnosis), Pierre Bergé, ‘not interested in other people'.

Rich, famous, multiply honoured by his country and the community of his peers, he succumbed to the despair and pain which had dogged him all his life. He was a man who wore his anguish on his sleeve.
He accepted it, indulged it even, as collateral to his genius. In his office he kept a framed quotation from Marcel Proust, whose
A La Recherche du Temps Perdu
(Remembrance of Things Past) he read and reread throughout his life: ‘The magnificent and lamentable family of the nervous is the salt of the earth. It's they and no one else who founded religions and created masterpieces …'

Yves Saint Laurent's only real training was a brief period understudying Dior, the master of a formal and archaic ultra-feminine glamour, yet his only equal in innovation was Chanel who, in 1967 when she was eighty-four, declared him her ‘only inheritor'. Like Chanel in the 1920s and 1930s, Saint Laurent perfectly answered the mood and needs of his time. Both responded intuitively to overwhelming impulses towards political and social emancipation for women, giving women the clothes in which to grasp equality. It became easy to forget, given the decades of Saint Laurent's decline into a threadbare and solipsistic reworking of his own best ideas, how dramatic and beautiful those epoch-defining collections were. The Mondrian (1965), with its bright blocks of colour; the Pop-Art (1966), inspired by Andy Warhol; the African (1967); the Safari (1968); the Marlene Dietrich inspired collection of 1969, when he introduced both the mini and the tuxedo; the Moroccan (1970); the Opera/Ballets Russes (1976) with its opulently clad peasants and gypsies (‘My most beautiful collection,' said Saint Laurent); the Velasquez (1977); the Chinoiserie (1977); the Picasso (1979); the Collection Shakespeare (1980), dedicated to literature and poetry, Aragon, Cocteau and Apollinaire; the Matisse (1981); and the Cubist (1988) collections all stand out as milestones in fashion history.

Christian Lacroix, a designer of the generation which grew up in Saint Laurent's shadow, told Saint Laurent's biographer, Alice Rawsthorn: ‘There have been other great designers this century but none with the same range. Chanel, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga and Dior all did extraordinary things. But they worked within a particular style. Yves Saint Laurent is much more versatile, like a combination of all of them. I sometimes think he's got the form of Chanel with the opulence of Dior and the wit of Schiaparelli.'

Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent was born in 1936 in Oran, Algeria, into a wealthy and prominent family. He grew up knowing himself a misfit in the close, conservative and Catholic
colon
community. ‘No doubt,' he told
Le Figaro
in 1991, ‘because I was homosexual.' It was a terrible secret, a preference to be expressed only in furtive encounters with Arab street boys. The gentle, fragile and timid youngster was doted upon by his mother and sisters—whose dolls he dressed. He excelled academically but was bullied and beaten by his classmates, who sensed that the puny, artistic and unathletic boy was unacceptably different. ‘Maybe,' he said much later, ‘I didn't have what it took to be a boy.' He had, however, all the vanity and arrogance of the outcast who knows himself to be better then his tormentors. He dreamed of escape, of Paris and, as he wrote in his introduction to the catalogue to the 1983–4 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, his ‘name written in fiery letters on the Champs Elysées'.

Theatre and costume design were his first passion (and he was later to prove a brilliant designer for Roland Petit's ballets, for theatre and film) but at seventeen, he seized the first opportunity to present itself when he entered a competition for young fashion designers run by
Paris Match
magazine and the International Wool Secretariat. In Paris with his mother to receive third prize, he met Michel de Brunhoff, the influential editor of French
Vogue
, who advised him to finish school and then enrol on a design course at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. The course, which he started in the autumn of 1954, quickly bored him and, having won that year's International Wool Secretariat competition, he was dispatched by de Brunhoff to show his sketch book to Christian Dior, who employed him immediately. When the originator of the New Look died of a heart attack in 1957, he had already made it clear that he considered Saint Laurent his natural successor.

In January 1958 Saint Laurent showed his first collection after Dior's unexpected death. The collection, which introduced the Trapeze Line, was a success;
The Sunday Times
fashion editor, Ernestine Carter, later noted that it was to become the classic and enduring maternity dress shape. So central was Dior's image to French couture and the lucrative concept of Paris fashion that the next day's newspaper placards announced: ‘Saint Laurent has
saved France.' He was just twenty-one years old. A quarter-century later he wrote, ‘Luckily there is a destructive kind of suffering I've never known, the one that comes from lack of recognition.'

Perhaps that initial reaction caused the owner of Dior, the textile magnate, Marcel Boussac to give his stripling designer too much freedom. Instead of moving the collection forward by client-comforting increments each season, Saint Laurent went for a new look with every succeeding collection. When his second collection dropped skirts to calf length (ten years too soon, as Carter noted) the French press turned against him. When, in a hasty over-correction, he hobbled them above the knee for spring 1959, the response was vitriolic. Then in 1960, searching for a means of ‘poetic expression', he elected to pay homage to the beat culture of the Left Bank with a collection that featured the biker's black leather blouson jackets (albeit trimmed with mink), black cashmere turtlenecks and short bubble skirts flattering only to the young and hipless. The predominantly mature couture clients showed their displeasure. So did Marcel Boussac, who had been protecting Saint Laurent from military conscription by pulling political strings. Boussac opted for patriotism and profits before poetry and lifted his protection.

Saint Laurent's brief induction into the army of France, then engaged in a savage struggle against Algerian nationalists, was a turning point in his life. It ensured that he was forced to start his own label because, as the barracks doors slammed behind the recruit, Boussac hurried to replace him at Dior with Marc Bohan. But it also precipitated his first breakdown—just nineteen days into his army career—and resulted in the treatment which wrecked his health and launched him on a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse. At the Val-de-Grace mental hospital he was subjected to a primitive regimen of dangerously addictive heavy-duty sedatives. He could not eat and by the time his friend and lover, Pierre Bergé, secured his release two months later he was utterly debilitated. Bergé, supported by
Women's Wear Daily
, ever Saint Laurent's champion, set about suing the house of Dior and establishing Saint Laurent's own couture house. ‘I had never, ever wanted to be a businessman,' said Bergé, whose interests lay in the arts and politics, ‘but I agreed to do it for him.' He found an American backer, Jesse Mack Robinson, and in February 1962 the first YSL collection was shown in a small villa in Passy to a packed crowd of fashion cognoscenti. It nodded towards the sobriety of Balenciaga and the reviews were ecstatic;
Life
magazine announced, ‘The best collection of suits since Chanel.'

It was the second collection, six months later, which established him as the man who was to dominate international fashion for two decades. It gave a glossy spin to youthful styles culled from the street, introducing the tunic over a pencil skirt, the Norman smock and the upmarket version of the working man's pea jacket. In this Saint Laurent's work paralleled that of the young Chanel who had plagiarised the clothes of French sailors and Scottish ghillies.

Twenty years later Saint Laurent reflected, ‘The things I like best of all that I have done are the ones I borrowed from a man's wardrobe: the blazer, the trouser suit, the trench coat, knickerbockers, shorts, the safari jacket, the T-shirt, the suit, the whole suit idiom, the ambiguity of all that interests me.' The potent sexual content of androgynous dressing was a factor. Like most homosexual fashion designers, he adored women as long as they had boyish bodies yet, unlike some of the others, he created clean-lined, rational clothes which flattered the most womanly of figures. Breasts did not actually frighten him, but he liked them small, free and pert in a transparent chiffon shirt under a strict tuxedo rather than magnified into cushiony cleavage by archaic corsetry. His way was the way young women of the 1960s and 1970s perceived themselves—slender and lithe with an up-front, natural coquetry. Like them, he hated what he called ‘transvestite' or ‘Easter Parade' clothing, the elaborate, tortured confections which betray the essential misogyny of so many male designers.

Yves Saint Laurent retired in 2002, and died in June 2008.

Further reading:
Alice Rawsthorn's biography,
Yves Saint Laurent
(1998), is excellent and Alicia Drake's
The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris
(2006) is good background reading. For a critical appraisal, see Marguerite Duras in the 1988 catalogue
Yves Saint Laurent: Images of Design 1958–1988
.

The debate about who exactly invented the miniskirt is best settled by quoting the designer credited with an earlier fashion sensation, Christian Dior. Speaking to Carmel Snow, editor of
Harper's Bazaar
, he said, ‘No one person can change fashion—a big fashion change imposes itself.' Indeed, if all the theories of dress have any validity, it must be so. Designers essentially respond to the political, economic and social mood of their day. André Courrèges, Pierre Cardin. Mary Quant, John Bates, Yves Saint Laurent; they were all raising skirts to round about the knee at the same time. And they all exposed the knee and then the thigh at much the same time. As the 1950s, so much in the shadow of the war and so much about recovery of what had been lost, gave way to the 1960s, huge changes were in the air. The generation born during and immediately after the war had no memory of privation, no fear of risk. In Europe and America economies were booming, further education was more widely available and there were jobs and disposable incomes for everyone—including women.