Catherine Deneuve once said of her friend Yves Saint Laurent that he “designs for women who lead double lives.” Indeed, the themes of contrast and duality were pervasive in the late designer’s legendary body of work: Saint Laurent was the first to bring gritty streetwear (leather jackets, for instance) into the somber and magisterial couture salon. He appropriated men’s tuxedos and fedoras and put them on women. He glorified proletarian garments (the pea coat and the peasant blouse) in luxurious fabrics. And he debuted African and Asian models on what had been predominantly white runways. In constantly playing double Dutch with his divergent instincts, he created a new fashion template for the ultra-posh woman with a subversive streak.
But the word paradox also sums up the designer himself, whose conflicted and contrarian nature made him one of fashion’s most ambivalent figures—even as he became one of its most feted. Described alternately as “a very strong character who knows exactly what he wants” (by Susan Train, writing in Vogue) and as having been “born with a nervous breakdown” (by his longtime partner, Pierre Bergé), Yves Saint Laurent built a groundbreaking fashion empire, only to feel so trapped by its ritualistic demands that he sank into depression and self-abuse.
Few designers have approached the colossal stature of Saint Laurent. His sprawling, 45-year career can be seen as a capsule version of the modern fashion industry—from its beginnings in couture to the eventual dominance of ready-to-wear to the rise of global conglomerates through branding and licensing. Saint Laurent not only witnessed these changes, he helped instigate them, with the assistance of Bergé.
“Yves was first with everything and has inspired practically everybody,” Vogue wrote upon his retirement in 2002. He took over the house of Christian Dior in 1957, succeeding the legend himself at the vulnerable age of 21. It was a time when politics and society began edging toward a more youthful, antiestablishment, and pop sensibility—the days of Elvis, the Beats, and James Dean. Saint Laurent sampled these countercultural flavors in his designs for Dior. In the 1960s and 1970s, he feasted on the aesthetics of political protest movements, working-class uniforms, the gangster underworld, and the gay demimonde. He provoked both outrage and adoration—and, along the way, spurred fashion’s transformation from the preserve of titled ladies to the inalienable right of the masses. As one commentator noted, “If Chanel liberated women, Yves liberated fashion.”
Yves Saint Laurent grew up in Oran, Algeria, the son of wealthy and prominent French parents. A sensitive and artistic schoolboy who loved drawing and the theater, he was mercilessly taunted by the macho sons of the other French colonists. “I didn’t have what it took to be a boy," he later reflected. At eighteen, he moved to Paris to study couture, and soon found a job assisting Christian Dior.
The meek, bespectacled Saint Laurent started by decorating Dior’s shop but quickly moved on to designing accessories and sketching couture ideas. One of his earliest looks, a black gown with a long white sash, was immortalized in Richard Avedon’s 1955 photograph Dovima with Elephants. He was so precocious that within two years, his mentor confided to Mme Saint Laurent that her son was “the one who’ll succeed me.” Months after his prediction, Dior died of a heart attack, and Yves was named his successor.
The fashion press received the Dauphin of Dior on the salon’s balcony as if they were crowning a new king. But within a few seasons, the grandes dames who frequented the house—who once even boycotted one of Dior’s looks because it was named the Jean-Paul Sartre—became livid at his successor’s looser shapes and impertinent styles. The final straw was Saint Laurent’s Beat collection, inspired by the art students who hung about the Left Bank jazz clubs. Alarmed, the business heads of the house arranged for him to be conscripted into the army, and he soon found himself in the barracks back in Algeria. After nineteen days, he suffered a breakdown and was transferred to Val-de-Grâce, a nightmarish psychiatric hospital in Paris where he was forcibly injected with sedatives and given electroshock therapy. The ordeal turned the shy and fragile Saint Laurent into a frightening wraith, and served as a prelude to his later drug abuse and emotional agony.
“It’s as though he has a layer of skin missing. He’s very sensitive to whatever is going on and feels things very, very deeply,” Susan Train once said. Saint Laurent acquired that protective layer of skin in the form of Pierre Bergé, his ferociously loyal companion, whom he had met before his military service. It was Bergé who finally extricated him from Val-de-Grâce. When Saint Laurent came home to find that he had been supplanted at Dior by Marc Bohan, Bergé blunted this fresh trauma by springing into action. He tended to Saint Laurent’s daily needs with single-minded devotion, while quickly assembling the elements—a salon space, an investor—for their own couture house.
Yves Saint Laurent opened for business in 1962. Fashion editors packed into the salon to see what this upstart would unveil—and over the next several years would be treated to a dazzling parade of ingenuity, wit, and transgression. “The brightest and freshest he has ever done,” crowed The New York Times of his 1965 Mondrian-inspired shift dresses, which were a feat of engineering that allowed the fabric to hang as flat as the artist’s canvases while still conforming to the curves of the body. “It was quite a look,” declared the same paper of his landmark 1967 gangster-inspired le smoking trouser suit. Later, it was “a joke”—after he presented a sheer black chiffon dress with the model’s breasts clearly visible beneath. And “a tour de force of bad taste” when, in 1971, he showed a collection of forties-inspired palazzo pantsuits and platform sandals that evoked the days of the Nazi Occupation. These looks have all long since become canonical, accepted as groundbreaking and visionary for their time.
Sensing that ready-to-wear—and not couture—was the future of fashion, Saint Laurent opened his Rive Gauche prêt-à-porter boutique in 1966. It was a move that tapped into the 1960s spirit of democratization, youth, and rebellion. A telling symbol of Rive Gauche’s revolutionary significance was that the future designer Miuccia Prada, then a student from a Milanese family of luxury-goods makers, would wear his Rive Gauche ensembles to political protests. “I’d stand on street corners handing out left-wing leaflets in my YSL outfits. Maybe it looked a little strange to other people, but I didn’t care, I loved the clothes so much,” she would later say.
The emotional seesawing of the fashion cycle, along with Saint Laurent’s drinking, drugs, and club-going, were taking their toll by the 1970s. By 1973, when the house switched to a grueling new schedule of presenting four shows a year—two couture and two prêt-à-porter, instead of just two couture shows—the designer was feeling increasingly shackled in his own ever-expanding kingdom, which now included not only two clothing lines but numerous licenses for perfumes, sunglasses, and beach towels—all engineered by the shrewd business genius of Bergé. Saint Laurent confessed to Newsweek, “I’ve made a rope to hang myself with. I’d love to be able to do fashion when I want to, but I’m a prisoner of my own commercial empire.” He described couture to Vogue as “quite horrible—a system of meshing cogs, a cycle that one is caught up in which cuts short many relationships one could have with friends, family . . . lots of things.”
The despairing designer again suffered a nervous breakdown in 1976 but, while hospitalized, conceived of his most stunning and exotic couture collection to date: lush furs and foulards inspired by the fantastical costumes of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. It was yet another sudden and astonishing shift in Saint Laurent’s career—away from the streamlined ready-to-wear that he so boldly championed in the 1960s, and toward a more theatrical, ornate, escapist aesthetic. The collection also represented a turning point in Saint Laurent’s private life, as he became increasingly fearful and reclusive, retreating to the apartment he now kept separate from Bergé, obsessively rereading the works of Proust and amassing a vast collection of opulent objets d’art.
More meltdowns would follow in subsequent years. While Saint Laurent always commanded respect—as an oracle touched with genius—his collections would never quite regain their luster or originality. By the time he retired, he had become a man all but crippled by his own fears, an image of “leonine decrepitude” who had long since passed day-to-day operations to the hands of others. AsThe New Yorker noted, “The dauphin of couture had become its King Lear”—with his own Learjet, and a succession of pampered French bulldogs who all bore the name Moujik.
Yet the legacy of Saint Laurent endures. More people in the world today no doubt recognize the pure elements of the Saint Laurent style than did in his glory days. When asked toward the end of his career what his motto was, the aging designer replied, “The main thing is to last!" Judging by his legions of admirers—including Marc Jacobs, Miuccia Prada, Donna Karan, Giorgio Armani, and Christian Lacroix—he has had his wish.
