He was It would indeed seem impossible that one man could consistently create such radical beauty, but seeing is believing! With hindsight, his youthful proposal to free fashion from style rules can be seen as a promise, one that he kept.
Saint Laurent gave each and every individual the right to express and own their uniqueness. As he said back in , it is how we live now. Breaking family tradition turned out for the best for this now institution in the luxury headwear and handbag world. No more stories to load; check out The Study. Pin Share Tweet Email. Overhead shot of Saint Laurent wearing a blue caftan while reclining in his leafy Moroccan garden strewn with rugs and pillows.
Photo by Horst P. From then on, his career was a resounding success. The power couple brought together creative genius and business acumen, becoming a force to be reckoned with. YSL was often inspired by art and exotic places. Early on in his career, Yves Saint Laurent introduced refined and theatrical aesthetics to the traditional post-war Parisian haute couture scene.
Always finding the right note between functionality and elegance, he brought street fashion on the runway. His designs reflected the desires of the increasingly assertive woman of the s. The luxury boutique offered lower-priced but exquisitely made ready-to-wear collections of basic clothing. He found solace, however, in the world of fashion. He liked to create intricate paper dolls, and by his early teen years he was designing dresses for his mother and sisters.
At the age of 17, a whole new world opened up to Saint Laurent when his mother took him to Paris for a meeting she'd arranged with Michael de Brunhoff, the editor of French Vogue. A year later, Saint Laurent, who had impressed de Brunhoff with his drawings, moved to Paris and enrolled at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, where his designs quickly gained notice. He taught me the basis of my art. Whatever was to happen next, I never forgot the years I spent at his side.
In Saint Laurent was called back to his home country of Algeria to fight for its independence. He managed to secure an exemption based on health grounds, but when he returned to Paris, Saint Laurent found that his job with Dior had disappeared. The news, at first, was traumatic for the young, fragile designer.
The money and the freedom soon presented Saint Laurent with a unique opportunity. In cooperation with his partner and lover, Pierre Berge, the designer resolved to open his own fashion house. With the rise of pop culture and a general yearning for original, fresh designs, Saint Laurent's timing couldn't have been better. That image became a desperately effective mask. The paparazzi-friendly Yves who danced the night away in the 60s and 70s was high — on success, on fame and on an ever-changing cocktail of alcohol, acid and cocaine.
Off camera there were fierce, increasingly violent rows with Pierre, who was struggling to keep both the business and Yves himself afloat. They continued to function as a symbiotic double act to the end. And while Pierre became an increasingly belligerent spokesperson, Yves flinched away from the public gaze, exhausted by the fashion treadmill and yet apparently unable to stop.
There were rumours of illness, of Aids, and regular premature reports of his death. In his diaries Warhol recorded: "Loulou [de la Falaise] told us that YSL really was such a genius that he just can't take it, he has to take a million pills and the whole office gets so depressed when he's depressed…". Finally Yves simply withdrew: Pierre commented that his partner had "entered depression as one enters a religion".
Even at his most extroverted moments, Yves had been shielded by his cabal of intimates; towards the end, his world was reduced to his studio on Avenue Marceau, the couple's holiday home in Marrakech and the cloistered apartment on Rue de Babylone to which fewer and fewer people were admitted. At the same time, he signed his name to everything from sunglasses to bed linens to cigarettes — and licensed a range of era-defining fragrances Opium, Jazz, Kouros , which would keep YSL's name firmly in the spotlight as the man behind the initials slowly faded away.
If the two new films are likely to reveal anything it is this: the man himself remains an enigma. Yves was a genius, indulged and excused by a generation that believed that geniuses should live by different rules. In some respects that universe still endures in fashion, particularly in Paris: it's only been three years, after all, since John Galliano — another indulged Dior boy wonder — had his own startlingly public fall from grace.
Saint Laurent continued designing until — every show remorselessly measured against his past hits, and every final bow accompanied by the suspense of waiting to see whether he'd manage the short walk to the end of the runway.
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