by coloring in the 1960s with Piet Mondrian’s graphic squares or embroidering Van Gogh paintings on a jacket, but by himself collecting fine art, with Bergé, and by having the first museum show of a living fashion creator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983. Every designer who now stages a retrospective display can trace the concept back to Yves saint Laurent. In almost any respect the Saint Laurent trajectory from half a century ago was the template for new generations of designers. He was ridiculously young—at 21—to be entrusted with the house of Christian Dior, after its founder died in 1957. Yet he invented what is now the norm: youth and cool. Yves Saint Laurent celebrated that both on the runway with an alligator biker jacket, inspired by Marlon Brando, and in his young life with a louche group of friends. Among the other 20th-century icons, Coco Chanel had been at pains to hide her humble origins and rackety early years, and Cristóbal Balenciaga and Christian Dior reveled in their role as stately couturiers. The Bergé/Saint Laurent partnership, openly, but never vulgarly, homosexual, became the pattern for other houses, even if Bergé would say waspishly to any young designer sighing for a mentor: “First, you need to be Yves Saint Laurent.” When they opened the Rive Gauche boutique, named for the then-anarchic Left Bank of Paris, Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent started another fashion revolution. It was the birth of luxury ready-to-wear as a democratization of haute couture. And every plate glass designer “flagship” across the globe today is rooted in that original 1966 concept.
“I don’t know if fashion is an art—but I know that fashion
Other early steps he made were noble and visionary: the first black model on
opening of an exhibition of the work of Yves Saint Laurent, the iconic couturier
collection; and of ethnic craftsmanship such as African beading transformed
needs an artist,” said Pierre Bergé last week, speaking in Montreal at the
the runway; the elevation of folklore as an inspiration with the Ballets Russes
and Bergé’s partner of 50 years.
with couture skills.
On Sunday night, after the death of Saint Laurent at 71 was announced,
Saint Laurent’s imaginative shows could also be said to have triggered the
Bergé made a bolder statement about the designer’s role in dressing women in a way that mirrored society’s new sexual freedom and gender role play.” He was a libertarian, an anarchic, and he threw bombs at the legs of society,” said Bergé. “That’s how he transformed society, and that’s how he has
runway madness that has led to parades of unwearable show-stoppers. Yet he always favored what he called “the silence of clothing” and bowed out in 2002 with these words: “I have nothing in common with this new world of fashion, which has been reduced to mere window-dressing. Elegance and
empowered women.”
beauty have been banished.”
France, which has been holding a month-long soul-searching over the 40th
The mantra that a new generation rejected was harmony. Yves Saint Laurent
anniversary of the May 1968 social revolution, has found a special significance in the passing of its fashion Sun King. No matter that Saint Laurent, dogged by ill health—mental and physical—had retired from fashion in 2002 saying that it was “the end of a long love affair.” Nor that Gucci Group, which bought the house in 1999, has already fielded two new designers and is stemming financial losses. “The greatest couturier in the world,” claimed Le Figaro in a banner headline, citing Saint Laurent’s contrasting characteristics of “rebellion and tradition, liberty and rigor” and, above all, “creativity.”
shows became a rigid ritual on the runway at the InterContinental hotel in Paris, never containing a note of the remixed cacophony of modern music. And as other designers explored deconstruction and asymmetry, Saint Laurent refused to accept that true fashion could exist without the harmonious cut, drape and color, of which he was an artistic master. For all the pop culture that he absorbed and harnessed in the 1960s and 1970s, and for all his success in inventing the way that modern women dressed, Saint Laurent’s yearning was for the past, and especially for his mother as a
President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had added an extra order of merit to Saint Laurent’s Legion d’Honneur in December 2007, endorsed the idea that the designer was a national treasure. (Even if that same designer had once been vilified for embracing a fashion vision of the Vietnam War, for showing breasts
1940s belle in the family’s colonial home in Algeria. Although in his close circle, Paloma Picasso and his muse Betty Catroux both claimed credit for inspiring the 1940s wartime silhouette that he reworked, causing shock and outrage in French society, he himself insisted that it was a tender interpretation of his
through transparent clothing and for introducing a perfume called Opium.) “He
childhood memories.
was the first to elevate haute couture to the rank of art —and that gave him
The irony is that as his health faded and he himself disappeared entirely from
global influence,” Sarkozy said.
public view, the designer’s legacy became not just revered, but revived.
From the Yves Saint Laurent stable came clothes that we now accept as women’s wear classics: the pantsuit, peacoat, the blazer, the safari jacket and the tuxedo—as well as evening clothes that were as soft and gentle as the tailoring was sharp and linear. But the real importance of Saint Laurent—and the reason why his death has sent a frisson through even those who knew only the respectable and respectful later years—is that the designer not only broke the mold. He also remade it. The shape and texture of high fashion today owes as much to Saint Laurent as do those women who were given the unisex freedom of a pantsuit—from Bianca Jagger in her wedding attire, through Catherine Deneuve in her “le smoking” tuxedo to Hillary Clinton in a female politician’s uniform. It was indeed Yves Saint Laurent who equated fashion with art, not just
4
Designers such as Marc Jacobs looked to Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970 glory years for inspiration. John Galliano backed off from the inspired frenzy of his revival of the house of Dior and sent Carla Sarkozy, the president’s new wife, on a state visit to London in elegant coats and pants that followed the pattern of stylish elegance first set out by Saint Laurent. In an era of corporate couture and fast fashion, there has not been much time or space for grace—the essence of the spirit and soul for which Saint Laurent will be remembered. As Sarkozy himself put it: “Yves Saint Laurent infused his label with his creative genius, elegant and refined personality ... because he was convinced that beauty was a necessary luxury for all men and women.”
BRIDGE | December 2019
