Deneuve remembered a fashion show she had attended two years earlier put on by a young French designer named Yves Saint Laurent. He had begun making headlines with radical designs like trapeze dresses and shifts based on Mondrian paintings, and Deneuve thought his clothes had a classic line with just the right touch of naughtiness. So she suggested Saint Laurent and, as she recalled recently, “luckily, Bunuel was open to the idea.”
Luckily indeed. “Belle de Jour”–with its soft belted shifts, masculine trench coats and solid-heel black pumps with oversize gold buckles–essentially launched Saint Laurent’s long and influential career. Now that career is coming to a close. Last week Saint Laurent, 65, announced that he will retire next Wednesday, with a final fashion show/retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His company will carry on in name through his ready-to-wear, perfume and cosmetics lines under the sure hand of Tom Ford, the American-born designer of Gucci, which bought YSL two years ago for $1 billion. But the money-losing haute couture division, which Saint Laurent held on to and continued to run, personally cutting and pinning the $25,000 suits and $100,000 gowns, will be shuttered.
No wonder women everywhere are feeling so nostalgic. From his very first show at Christian Dior 44 years ago, through his four decades at his own house, Saint Laurent personally changed the way women dress. The last of the great couturiers–he learned his craft during the heyday of 1950s Paris fashion–Saint Laurent took everyday items such as men’s suits and military uniforms, and used couture techniques, the finest fabrics and an artist’s deft touch to transform them into stylish, wearable clothes. He anticipated as well as echoed society’s changes in a way that no other designer ever has–and likely ever will. He captured the beginnings of the women’s liberation movement and the sexual revolution in those designs–frank and strong, without being radical. “I have believed for a long time now that fashion is not merely there to embellish women,” he said at the press conference where he announced his retirement last week. “I believe it is also a means to give them confidence, to enable them to assert themselves.”
Sadly, Saint Laurent himself never was as confident or assertive as his devoted clients. Born to a conservative French family and raised in Algeria, Saint Laurent has always epitomized the fragile artist tormented by secret demons. (He didn’t confess his homosexuality to his own father until 10 years ago, shortly before his father’s death.) At 17, Saint Laurent was hired to work as the assistant to the legendary designer Christian Dior in Paris, and in those first few years Dior “was instrumental in revealing to me the mysteries of haute couture,” Saint Laurent said last week. When Dior dropped dead of a heart attack in 1957, Saint Laurent, then just 21, took over the design duties of the house. His first show at the Dior headquarters in January 1958 was such a success that hundreds of Parisians stood applauding in the street below. “The king is dead. Long live the king,” fashion editor Marylou Luther wrote in the Chicago Tribune at the time.
In 1960, Saint Laurent was forced to take leave from Dior to do his French military service, and within six weeks he had suffered the first in a series of nervous breakdowns. He was committed to the psychiatric ward of Val de Grace military hospital in Paris for several months, where he was treated with drugs and electric-shock therapy. He recalled those days last week in a rare moment of candor. “I have been through sheer hell,” he said. “I have known fear and terrors of solitude… the prison of depression, the confinement of hospital.”
While Saint Laurent was in Val de Grace, Dior executives hired a new designer, Marc Bohan. When Saint Laurent’s longtime lover, Pierre Berge, told him the news, Saint Laurent responded, “OK, there is only one thing that we can do, and that’s for you and me to open a couture house.” In January 1962, they did. Saint Laurent became the first to put women in pantsuits, in tuxedos, in peacoats and trenches. He dared to show transparent dresses and blouses on his runway when women were still nervous about wearing bikinis on the beach. As longtime client Paloma Picasso said last year: “He has had the capacity for 40 years to know what was right before we did.”
During much of his career, Saint Laurent battled with drug and alcohol addiction. Ten years ago, after a binge that landed him in a psychiatric ward for weeks, he was unable for the first time to finish a collection. “That,” Berge said, “was a very difficult day.”
Saint Laurent recovered, and through his new sobriety he’s been able to see the renaissance of his now classic creations in modern fashion–in his own Rive Gauche line, now designed brilliantly by Ford, as well as at Prada, Marc Jacobs and others. “Saint Laurent’s work keeps coming back because he basically created the contemporary wardrobe,” says Lawrence Steele, a young American designer in Milan. “His work will always be present in ours.” And in the everyday clothes that women wear.
