CHAPTER 1
SAINT LAURENT
BELLE DE JOUR
YVES SAINT LAURENT, FALL/WINTER 2012, DESIGNED BY STEFANO PILATI. PHOTOGRAPH BY MERT ALAS & MARCUS PIGGOTT FOR “LE NOIR,” FRENCH VOGUE, SEPTEMBER 2012.
Photograph: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott, “Le Noir,” French Vogue, September 2012. Yves Saint Laurent Dress, fall/winter 2012, designed by Stefano Pilati. © Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott/Art Partner. Photograph: Franco Rubartelli, French Vogue, July-August 1968. Model Veruschka in an off collection Yves Saint Laurent Saharienne, designed by Yves Saint Laurent. © Franco Rubartelli.
ESTABLISHED
1962, haute couture (Yves Saint Laurent)
1966, ready-to-wear
NOTABLE DESIGNERS
Yves Saint Laurent, 1962–2002 (Yves Saint Laurent)
Tom Ford, 1999–2003 (YSL Rive Gauche)
Stefano Pilati, 2004–2012 (Yves Saint Laurent)
Hedi Slimane, 2012–2016 (SAINT LAURENT)
MODEL VERUSCHKA IN AN OFF COLLECTION YVES SAINT LAURENT SAHARIENNE, DESIGNED BY YVES SAINT LAURENT. PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCO RUBARTELLI FOR FRENCH VOGUE, JULY-AUGUST 1968.
Upon the official retirement of Yves Saint Laurent and the close of his haute couture atelier in 2002, brand loyalists, critical press, and fashion enthusiasts alike turned to Tom Ford to reinvigorate the Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche brand, and to carry on the sartorial joie de vivre that Saint Laurent had cultivated during a fifty-year career in fashion. The task was neither easy nor straightforward: Saint Laurent had conceived a range of iconic signatures, and has often been credited with simultaneously securing the relevance of the haute couture and validating ready-to-wear with the establishment of his Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche boutique in 1966. His passion for women encompassed more than simply their shape (Christian Dior’s focus) or their movement (Balenciaga’s) but extended to their very spirit. And his clothes served to embody and broadcast the stylistic essence of each of his muses to millions of women, so that they too could embrace this spirit of the contemporary, the dynamic zeitgeist that surrounded Saint Laurent throughout his career.
Saint Laurent has seen two successors since Ford: Stefano Pilati and Hedi Slimane. With each atelier director came new interpretations of the mandates set forth by the “Little Prince of Couture.” His clothes have become fashion classics, building blocks mined from Chanel’s and Schiaparelli’s strategies of separates dressing, the practicalities of modern life, and the sex of the street. The wild mythology of Saint Laurent’s life—with his society muses, notorious addictions, exclusive circles of friends and admirers that included Andy Warhol, Rudolf Nureyev, and Talitha Getty—sat in opposition to the premeditation of his designs, and together these halves imparted an enviable, ever-fashionable present. The Saint Laurent legacy relies crucially on both histories—design and personal— fused into a single, unified vision: the dynamic yet potent persona of the belle de jour.
Embodied prototypically by Catherine Deneuve in Luis Buñuel’s 1967 French film of the same name, the belle de jour, or beauty of the day, is a view, as the journalist Tim Blanks has described, of “the bon genre babe with a dark side.” Deneuve’s character, Séverine, is an aristocratic housewife whose recalcitrance emerges when she moonlights as a prostitute. Her wardrobe is exemplified in the Saint Laurent collections: impeccable, look-of-the-minute luxuries underscored by kinky, sexy fetishisms.
Though the spirit of Saint Laurent is tied to everything au courant, the legend of Yves has been born from tradition: as Le Dauphin of Dior Haute Couture. With Christian Dior’s death in fall 1957, just ten years after the sea change impact of his New Look and the consequent reign of French couture over the underdogs of American sportswear, Yves stepped into very big shoes as head designer at Christian Dior S.A. The events that followed are immortalized into one of fashion’s greatest coups of all time: a twenty-one-year-old Yves designed a spring 1958 collection that fused the exquisite refinement of Dior’s haute couture with the dynamic energy of a youthquake to come. On January 31, 1958, Eugenia Sheppard of the New York Herald Tribune gushed, “I never saw a better Dior collection.” The Trapèze, with its diminutive fitted shoulder, streamlined shape, and swinging hem, was the presentation’s crown. Though decades of influence followed for Yves, the Trapèze embodies the delicate balance between reverence and revolution that defines Saint Laurent to this day.
OAK DOE ARMCHAIR, DESIGNED BY JEAN-MICHEL FRANK AND MADE BY COMTE, BUENOS AIRES, FOR THE LLAO LLAO HOTEL IN PATAGONIA, CIRCA 1938.
Chair: Jean-Michel Frank, oak doe armchair made by Comte, Buenos Aires, for the Llao Llao Hotel in Patagonia, 1930s. Photograph by Mathew Stacey, compliments BAC NYC.
Whether at the House of Dior or at the House of Saint Laurent, which Yves established in 1962, a diverse and informed range of inspirations flowed through the designer’s sketch pads, from the painterly (Mondrian, Matisse, Braque, and Picasso, most famously) to the exotic (by way of Russia, Turkey, China, and Japan), and, finally, to the decorative (Yves’s homes both within Paris and at Dar el Hanch in Marrakech held a bric-a-brac of treasures to inspire unusual shapes).
The designer’s Parisian flat on Rue de Babylone included a suite of furniture by early twentieth-century interior designer Jean-Michel Frank. Not unlike Yves’s early collections, Frank’s works ascribed to a particular brand of minimalism, where the lines are modern and clean, and luxury is conveyed via material and craftsmanship. In Frank’s oak doe armchair, the balanced polarity of the belle de jour is manifest: the clean and modern (polished wood) meet the wild and untethered (hide).
These poles are similarly clarified by the YSL Saharienne, or safari outfit, from the summer 1966 haute couture collection. The Saharienne in its most memorable form appeared two years later in a photograph by Franco Rubartelli for French Vogue, on the model Veruschka (Vera von Lehndorff). The iconic design conjures the militant—even dangerous—aesthetic of African army garb, yet the look achieved retail success due to its versatility and adaptability in the global ready-to-wear market. A pillar of YSL Rive Gauche, it could be worn as a minidress, a belted tunic à la Veruschka, half of a unisex cotton drill pant ensemble, or in any number of other stylings. The safari outfit is so established within the brand lexicon that when Hedi Slimane approached the design for his spring/summer 2013 collection, the hunting knife, frayed safari hat, and shoulder-slung rifle used to accessorize the original look in Rubartelli’s iconic photograph easily fell away, revealing a silhouette with the same potency: a chic, full-length safari suede dress, laced simply at center front and topped by a sun-shielding, wide-brimmed hat.
SAINT LAURENT, SPRING/SUMMER 2013, DESIGNED BY HEDI SLIMANE.
Dress, Saint Laurent, spring/summer 2013, designed by Hedi Slimane. Photograph courtesy of MCV Photo/Maria Valentino.
SAINT LAURENT, SPRING/SUMMER 2013, DESIGNED BY HEDI SLIMANE. PHOTOGRAPH BY TERRY RICHARDSON FOR “BEST OF THE SEASON,” PURPLE MAGAZINE, S/S 2013, ISSUE 19.
Photograph: Terry Richardson, “Best of the Season SS13,” Purple Magazine, spring/summer 2013: dress by Hedi Slimane for Saint Laurent. © Terry Richardson/Art Partner.
