Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008) was one of the most influential fashion designers of the 20th century. Very often simply referred to as YSL, he is credited with making ready-to-wear clothes which were comfortable as well as elegant.
Born and brought up in Algeria, where his wealthy French family had lived since 1871, he was a shy, sensitive child.
He loved reading his mother’s fashion magazines, and as he grew up, his talent for sketching became apparent.
He loved theatre and built his own stage set for cardboard characters wearing costumes he designed for them. He was interested in literature and wrote poetry.
Christian Dior's assistant
He moved to Paris in 1954, aged 18, to study couture. In 1955, he showed a few of his sketches to Michel de Brunhoff, the editor of French Vogue. “I have never met anyone more gifted,” wrote Brunhoff later, and who then showed the sketches to Christian Dior.
The designs were extraordinarily similar to Dior’s but could not possibly have been copied, and Dior employed him as an assistant.
“Dior fascinated me,” Yves Saint Laurent once said. “I couldn’t speak in front of him. He taught me the basis of my art. Whatever was to happen next, I never forgot the years I spent at his side.”
Dior said, “Yves Saint Laurent is young, but he is an immense talent. In my last collection, I consider him to be the father of 34 of the 180 designs. I think the time has come to reveal it to the press. My prestige won’t suffer from it.”
Brilliant debut
In line with his wishes, when Christian Dior died of a heart attack in 1957, Saint Laurent took over the artistic direction of the fashion house, and in January 1958 presented his first collection, called Trapèze.
It received a standing ovation at the show, and propelled him to international fame overnight. The trapeze was a variation on Dior’s A-line, flaring from a narrow shoulder to a wide hem just below the knee.
Saint Laurent soon began a relationship with the wealthy industrialist Pierre Bergé, with whom he would spend much of his life.
After his brilliant debut, it was almost inevitable that Saint Laurent would suffer a fall from grace. His autumn 1958 collection was panned, his spring 1959 collection tolerated, and his autumn 1959 collection met with fury.
Despite being chosen to design Farah Diba’s wedding dress for her marriage to the Shah of Iran, his beatnik collection in autumn 1960 also failed to impress.
He was conscripted into the military, which he endured for three weeks before he was hospitalised with a nervous breakdown.
He received brutal treatment there, including large doses of sedatives, psychoactive drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Whilst undergoing all this, he learned that he had been sacked from Dior.
Start of Yves Saint Laurent
When his lover Pierre Bergé told him, Saint Laurent said, “We will found an haute couture house together, and you will manage it.” To which Pierre Bergé replied, “then that’s what we’ll do.”
As soon as Saint Laurent was released from hospital, he successfully sued Dior, and then he and Bergé started their own fashion house, Yves Saint Laurent. The trauma of his experiences in the military and in hospital stayed with him, however, resulting in poor mental health and repeated struggles with drug addiction.
The famous YSL logo was designed in 1961, and the first collection was shown in spring 1962. The reception was lukewarm, but six months later his autumn collection was said to be his best since Trapèze.
Yves Saint Laurent was at the heart of the Swinging 60s, hanging out with other celebrities at all the most famous – and infamous – clubs, including the extraordinary and outrageous Le Palace.
“It was all about partying, every night partying. We’d only do fun things. Be mischievous. Drink. Everything to excess. Exactly what people are no longer doing. To us, living meant having fun,” said one of his close friends, Betty Catroux.
They had been inseparable since they met in 1967, with Saint Laurent calling her his twin, his double, and his accomplice. They declared that they shared a taste for ‘everything seedy’.
'My collections are love stories'
With his designs, he changed the fashion industry. He normalised women wearing trousers, not just for manual labour, but as office wear, leisurewear, and even evening wear. His tuxedos for women became iconic, but also acceptable evening attire for women.
“Women and I love each other,” he said in 1997. “My collections are love stories.”
He was the first designer to offer prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) collections to make his clothes accessible to all women. This was so successful that he opened a chain of Rive Gauche boutiques in France with branches in New York and London.
His clothes were designed to be comfortable and empowering, giving women confidence and freedom of movement. His designs played with cross-dressing women without ever disguising their femininity; le smoking, the trench coat, the Safari jacket, the pantsuit.
His only regret, he said, was not inventing jeans. He was also one of the first designers to send black models down the catwalk.
In parallel he designed costumes for theatre, ballet and cinema, working with leading directors and dressing all the big stars of the day, including Jeanne Moreau, Claudia Cardinale, Isabelle Adjani, and Catherine Deneuve, who he called his ‘lucky charm’.
He formed the habit of retiring to Marrakech twice a year to design his next collection, and in 1980, he and Pierre Bergé bought a botanical garden there, which they opened to the public.
During the 60s and 70s, Yves Saint Laurent continued partying almost as hard as he was working, abusing alcohol and cocaine.
In 1978, he introduced the wide shoulder pads which went on to dominate fashion in the 80s, and he was one of the last designers to abandon them. His favoured silhouette was big-shouldered jackets, narrow skirts or trousers and flats.
His ready-to-wear lines were earning far more than his haute couture collections, but designers have to present a new collection twice a year.
Excesses and honours
The stress he felt became evident. At the end of some fashion shows he could barely walk. His excesses were beginning to catch up with him.
In 1983, he was the first fashion designer to be honoured by a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
In 2001, he was made a Commander of the Légion d’Honneur by Jacques Chirac. He retired in 2002, and in 2007 was made a Grand Officier of the Légion d’Honneur by Nicolas Sarkozy.
He died of brain cancer in 2008 in Paris, shortly after having signed a PACS (Pacte Civil de Solidarité) with Pierre Bergé. Catherine Deneuve, Nicholas Sarkozy, and Carla Bruni attended his funeral.
His ashes were scattered in the botanical gardens he and Pierre Bergé had bought together. “I know that I will never forget what I owe you, and that one day I will join you under the Moroccan palms,” said Bergé at the funeral.
It is possible to trace much of Saint Laurent’s life in museums. His childhood home in Oran, Algeria, has been redecorated to look exactly as it did when he was growing up there, down to the smallest details.
The small YSL museum in Paris contains plenty of information about both Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent. There is a video about the fashion icon’s life plus numerous photographs, and visitors can see his studio as well as many examples of his designs
