Vogue on Yves Saint Laurent

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• Publisher: Abrams Image
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781419718014
• eBook ISBN: 9781613128220

Originally born in Algeria, Yves Saint Laurent moved to Paris when he was 18, and only three years later he was handpicked by Christian Dior to take the reins as designer of his fashion house. Over time, Saint Laurent resur- rected haute couture from the casual mores that predominated in the 1960s, but also offered chic cachet to ready-to-wear clothing. He was among the earliest of designers to incorporate non- European references into his work, and in 1983 he became the first living designer to be feted with a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Vogue on Yves Saint Laurent is a stellar volume in the series from the editors of British Vogue, featuring 20, 000 words of original biography and history and studded with more than 80 images from their unique archive of images taken by leading photographers.

“ALL CREATIVE WORK IS PAINFUL
AND FASHION IS VERY, VERY DIFFICULT.
IT PLAYS ON ALL MY ANXIETIES.”

YVES SAINT LAURENT

THE HOUSE THAT YVES AND PIERRE BUILT

The graceful Bianca Jagger and Saint Laurent had a special affinity, eternally marked by the unforgettable white Saint Laurent couture suit she wore to her wedding. Here she is photographed in Paris by Eric Boman in 1974 wearing a long chiffon and elastic cocktail dress.

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The 1970s evolved into the glory decade for Yves Saint Laurent. Women exuded sensuality in his clothes, as exemplified by two portraits in British Vogue. Catherine Deneuve is stretched out on the designer’s couch, wearing a gray pinstripe gabardine pant suit and strict silk blouse, whereas Bianca Jagger, the rock star’s wife, is spread across her bed at the mythic left bank L’Hôtel, wearing a long fuchsia pink chiffon dress, black hose, and diamanté peep-toe sandals.

That Saint Laurent could produce so perfectly such contrasting styles, the disciplined and the indulgent, explained why key fashion editors and important retailers hungered for Saint Laurent’s couture and ready-to-wear shows, viewing them as the main event. “If my clothes are right, and I believe they are,” he told Joan Juliet Buck, “it is because I think I understand what women want.” Adding to his triumphs was the success of his Rive Gauche Pour Homme line, which the designer had originally started because he could not find clothes for himself. Two years later, it boasted eclectic clients like actor Helmut Berger, ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, and playwright Harold Pinter. Further fame came from the fabled Saint Laurent lifestyle that he officially shared with Pierre Bergé and consisted of homes in Paris, New York, Manhattan, Marrakech, and a chateau in Normandy.

There was also the personal charisma of Saint Laurent, who had acquired iconic status, unusual for a fashion designer. He had become as famous as Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger. L’Amour Fou, the Saint Laurent documentary, unveils a short black-and-white home movie that shows these three individuals in each other’s company. Filmed at the designer’s apartment in the rue de Babylone, noted for its Jean-Michel Frank interiors, a longhaired Jagger in tracksuit is hunched over the Ruhlmann piano, tinkling at the keys. Warhol in blazer and jeans, seated on an armchair, opts to smile but remain mute. It is very much Saint Laurent’s moment. Wearing a suit and bow tie, he smiles and camps it up for the camera, enthusing about his series of mini Warhol portraits.

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“YVES SAINT LAURENT IS ALL ABOUT EXPRESSION. SOME DESIGNERS DO CLOTHING THAT IS MERELY COLOR AND SHAPE, HIS ALWAYS SAYS SOMETHING.”

CATHERINE DENEUVE

Exemplifying the “fire-behind-the-ice” Parisian bourgeois beauty that inspired the couturier, Catherine Deneuve was always a stalwart “Yves” friend and client. Here she sports a couture gabardine pinstripe pant suit with caramel silk shirt. Photographed in Saint Laurent’s apartment by Oliviero Toscani in 1976.

Whatever the occasion, women confidently depended upon Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche in the 1970s. Under Vogue’s title, “Are you huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ clothes?” Norman Parkinson photographed this suggested outfit in 1973, the cloak, jacket, and skirt in traditional loden, soft suede, and tweed.

Saint Laurent was having a second lease of life, fueled by his roaring career and a lack of inhibition via his discovery of casual sex, recreational drugs, and hard alcohol. One of the designer’s chief complaints was that he had missed out on his youth owing to early fame and his responsibilities at Christian Dior. However, because of the atmosphere of Paris in the 1970s—a sizzling and decadent period—Saint Laurent found the excuse to self-indulge on a monumental scale. Being compulsive, he tended to go too far, though instinctively he knew that Bergé was ready and waiting to save him. Whatever the situation—even if Saint Laurent crashed his car because of a lover’s tiff with a toy boy—he could rely on the highly competent Bergé to sort it out. In the drama, passion, and dynamics of their liaison, which affected and occasionally emotionally drained their immediate circle, the Saint Laurent-Bergé relationship was a textbook example of the addict and the enabler.

Still, the brilliant Bergé convinced himself otherwise. “What endures in Yves is his sense of childhood, and his refusal to leave it,” he said. “His work absorbed him and he took refuge in a cocoon—imaginary or otherwise—which he created totally and which he inhabited full time. Yves is [the poets] Hölderlin and Rimbaud. A fire maker.” Had Bergé disappeared, Saint Laurent might have been forced to shape up and change. Yet his business partner did not abandon him, both smitten by his genius and aware that their growing empire depended on looking after Saint Laurent’s talent. Besides, his partner was not the only one behaving badly in Paris.

For an article entitled “70s Paris, The Party Years,” Karl Lagerfeld, at the time Chloé’s ready-to-wear designer, told W magazine that he “hated to be out of town for more than 24 hours … There was the feeling that, wherever you were in Europe, you did whatever you had to do to make it back to Paris for drinks at the Café de Flore, then dinner and dancing at Le Sept.” But apart from the actress and model Marisa Berenson, who lived on orange juice and meditation, and Lagerfeld himself, who never dabbled in drugs or alcohol, fashionable Paris had become as decadent as Manhattan in the Jazz Age or Berlin in the 1930s, with vodka the drink and cocaine the drug of choice. Berenson, the star of the movie Cabaret, recalled “a complete intensity about everything” and how “it was a dangerous time for some … Like anything that doesn’t have boundaries, many people went too far.” Nevertheless, there was an amazing exuberance and euphoria and a sense that something different and brand new was happening in Paris, a sort of unofficial creative movement, featuring fashion talents such as Saint Laurent, Lagerfeld, the designer Kenzo Takada, and the illustrator Antonio Lopez, Loulou de la Falaise, and Vogue photographers like Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin.

According to Marian McEvoy, then working at Woman’s Wear Daily, it was a time “of such extravagance” in Paris. “No one had discreet little cars or passe-partout suits. There was no slinking in wearing a simple black dress—people were there to show off.” “We would just throw together some kind of turban or experiment with something ethnic,” said de la Falaise. “The idea was, ‘what can I invent tonight?’” It was a kind of inventiveness that blurred the distinction between day and night. “Private life, professional life, fashion business, and fashion expression—it all overlapped,” said Lagerfeld. Later, Saint Laurent described all the feverish partying as boosting his creativity. “We went out constantly but we also worked so much,” he told W magazine. “Going out only made us more creative.”

“Even if I am doing a man’s suit, I try to make it feminine.”

YVES SAINT LAURENT

The Austrian actor Helmut Berger was the perfect poster-boy for Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche Pour Homme; he and the designer were physically similar and equally ambiguously seductive. Here, Berger wears an evening tunic, satin pants, and belt with metal butterfly buckle. Photograph by David Bailey, 1971.

“Are you visibly Saint Laurent?” asked Vogue of these “wicked black chiffons, shrugged off the shoulders” photographed by Guy Bourdin in 1977, styled by Grace Coddington using models Kathy Quirk, Audrey Matson, and Carrie Nygren. Every item was signature Rive Gauche, ranging from the feathered chiffon, gilt, and silk braid accessories to the iconic black satin, gold lace shoes.

“DRESSING IS A WAY OF LIFE.”

YVES SAINT LAURENT

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Vogue’s André Leon Talley recalled a night out on the town with Saint Laurent and Betty Catroux. “Dressed to the nines for a night at Le Sept club, we would start at his apartment on rue de Babylone. First we might sit in his grand salon, with a Goya perched on an artist’s easel surrounded by Picassos mounted on the walls and museum quality Art Deco furniture. Downstairs in the white library, we fueled ourselves with caviar and chilled Stolichnaya like runners before a marathon.” Occasionally, Saint Laurent’s absent-minded behavior needed to be watched. One of his “ubiquitous dangling cigarettes” caused a fire on the white couch that Catroux and Leon Talley quickly doused “with water from the ice bucket.”

During that period, Leon Talley described Saint Laurent as speaking “like a shy schoolchild, startled at being called upon to talk.” “But in top form, and in private, he was wickedly witty and funny: his imitations of competitors were nothing less than mini theatrical productions,” he wrote. When staying at Château Gabriel, the Normandy retreat where Bergé would deposit guests by helicopter, and was decorated by interior designer Jacques Grange, Leon Talley was tickled by how every guest room was named after a character from Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. “M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• DIOR’S DAUPHIN
• FASHION’S NEW GENIUS
• A STYLE REVOLUTION
• THE HOUSE THAT YVES AND PIERRE BUILT
• A GIANT OF COUTURE
• Index of Searchable Terms
• References
• Picture credits
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright Page