Fashion’s Yves

A pantsuit designed Yves Saint Laurent from 1962. (Reuters)

The morning news shows carried Saint Laurent’s death—last night in his Left Bank apartment around 11:10—and I was surprised to hear a news reader say he was the last of a generation of couturiers that included Coco Chanel and Christian Dior. Chanel was born in 1883, Dior in 1905. At his death, Saint Laurent was 71: do the math.

Of course he had qualities in common with Chanel and Dior, starting with exceptional talent, but Saint Laurent was of a different generation and time. You could this in his clothes, beginning with the stylishly Mod Mondrian dress and the street coolness of the pea jacket and the safari dress. It wasn’t that Saint Laurent put women in pantsuits. One could argue that half a dozen Hollywood actresses in the 1940s made men’s trousers look chic and influenced women to least think about wearing them. But Saint Laurent did put women in the right kind of pantsuit for the time, defined by those sharp shoulders and the after-dark, let’s-see-what-happens glamour of a tuxedo.

Some years ago, in the course of interviewing Saint Laurent and his entourage for a piece in the Times Magazine, Thadee Klossowski, the husband of Loulou de la Falaise, recalled sitting twice through a very long YSL fashion show, just because it was so spell-binding. And Klossowski didn’t go to many shows. But he said there was an incredible rightness about Saint Laurent’s clothes, and I can’t think of a simpler and better description. It says as much about the proportion and cut of the clothes, their joie de vivre and delicious combination of colors, as it does our emotional response to them. Saint Laurent’s clothes were just right.

I remember going to the Rive Gauche shows in Paris in the early 90s, when Saint Laurent was suffering—he had ingested a great deal of alcohol and drugs during the previous decade and a half—and hearing editors exclaim, if the collection was good, “Oh, he’s back mexico Soccer Jersey!” Of course, the next season it might be a different story. Those were difficult times—confusing and morbid times. It is a pity that we focused (and I include myself) on that particular tremor in his career, with very few people really knowing what was going on behind the scenes at 5 Avenue Marceau, especially the difficulty that Pierre Bergé had with Saint Laurent. I learned some of that later. But in a way the dramas on the runway had to be played out, life and bitter, complex personality drove them forward, and I wouldn’t have wanted to miss them—not for the world. Later on, between 1999 and 2001, I attended Saint Laurent’s couture shows, after the ready-to-wear division of YSL was sold to Gucci and Tom Ford had taken over that side of the brand. I loved going to those shows—glancing to the corner where the friends and family of Saint Laurent always sat (Mrs. Kempner sitting forward in her chair and looking sharply at every outfit), studying the bored faces of some of the editors (didn’t they realize this was a spectacle worthy of a great French film director?), and then falling into the weird isolating rhythm of the show, each ensemble being called out by a number in French and English. The collections were long, usually about 90 exits, and at some point, inevitably, you were pulled into his thought process, like a narcotic. It was incredibly enjoyable, incredibly right.

Saint Laurent died at his home in the Rue de Babylone. I’m told that Bergé and Betty Catroux, his great friend since the 1960s, were with him. His funeral will be Thursday afternoon at the Église Saint-Roch.

 

Read Cathy Horyn’s article “Yves of Destruction” from the Sunday Magazine, published Dec. 24, 2000.

Read the Yves Saint Laurent Obiturary.