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From The Times
June 3, 2008
Yves Saint Laurent: The Times obituary
Couturier who introduced trousers for women and whose elegant and practical designs shaped attitudes to fashion worldwide
It is the job of the good couturier to reflect the mood of his times. The role of the great couturier is to articulate those times by not merely creating clothes that are right for the moment but also leading us into — and making possible — times to come. In this, he is no different from a great architect or artist. Would Vanbrugh have designed houses as he did without the precedent of Inigo Jones? Could Anthony Caro have arisen without Henry Moore in the background?
Leading figures are rare in any field. In fashion, there were only five in the 20th century: Poiret, Chanel, Dior, Balenciaga — and Saint Laurent. All the dress ideas of the past century have come from them. There is a strong case to be made for Yves Saint Laurent as the most inventive, original and influential of all five. Certainly, it is time to say that the way women have dressed in the past 40 years — regardless of age, class or wealth — has been the direct result of the ideas, often radical and even initially unacceptable, of Saint Laurent.
As a couturier — that is, a maker of high-class individual clothes for private customers — he was supreme. As a dress designer, a creator of ready-to-wear fashion ranges, he was the dynamo from which hundreds of lesser men made their own light. Without his fecundity, fashion in the second half of the 20th century would have been much less exciting and fast-paced. He was the catalyst for a worldwide industry.
Yves Henri Donat Saint Laurent was born in Oran, Algeria, in 1936. His father was an insurance broker who owned several cinemas, and his mother was a woman of fashion. His family background was secure and tranquil, and his childhood years were barely affected by the Second World War. His father was frequently away and young Yves was used to spending most of his time with his mother, to whom he was devoted. His two sisters, who were born during the war, did nothing to loosen the bond.
School was not a happy place for Saint Laurent. He hated all sport, except swimming, and hid in his own dream world, largely fired by the pages of Vogue, which brought him close to the fashionable world of Paris. He was obsessed with the theatre and ballet, and spent many hours recreating in miniature the sets and costumes of the plays he had seen performed by travelling companies, often with the original Paris sets and costumes.
His father’s hope for Saint Laurent was that he would enter the legal profession, but his son had different dreams, supported by his mother. When he won third prize in a dress-
designing competition sponsored by the International Wool Secretariat, she took him to Paris, having arranged through a friend for him to meet Michel de Brunhoff, editor-in-chief of French Vogue, a man of great influence in the fashion world. He advised Saint Laurent to obtain his baccalaureate before deciding on a career.
Having done so, and again on the advice of de Brunhoff, Saint Laurent enrolled in the design school of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, the controlling body of French fashion at that time. He was very bored but he entered the Wool Secretariat competition a second time. He won first prize.
At this stage, he was seriously thinking of returning to his first love, designing theatre and ballet. He had made friends with the dancer Roland Petit and his wife Renée “Zizi” Jeanmaire, and had got as far as arranging a meeting with an official of the Comédie Française. But de Brunhoff, seeing his portfolio of fashion designs, was so impressed that he showed them to Christian Dior, at that time considered the greatest couturier in the world. Dior instantly made Saint Laurent his design assistant. It was 1953 and he was 17.
When Dior died suddenly three years later, responsibility for designing the new collection fell on Saint Laurent. He was 21 when he presented his first show, in January 1958. It was hailed as such a triumph that he was dubbed not just the saviour of the house of Dior, but of French fashion itself. By 1960 the euphoria had dispersed and Dior clients were becoming concerned. His clothes were too young and radical for them.
Having had his National Service twice postponed, he was conscripted. After 19 days he was in hospital with a nervous breakdown. Pierre Bergé, his lover and future business partner, managed to have him transferred to a civilian hospital where he was given huge quantities of barely tested tranquillisers, many of which have been subsequently banned because of their side-effects. Bergé once joked that Saint Laurent had been born with a nervous breakdown, but the truth is that the draconian and largely ignorant measures taken to cure his first collapse left a legacy that dogged him all his life and by middle age had made him a valetudinarian.
But ill-health did little to interrupt the creative process. Saint Laurent went through his design career as he began, in a white heat of creative fervour, and the non-stop glare of publicity. Everything about him was newsworthy — in his life as in his art. His regular nervous breakdowns, his homes in Marrakesh; his intense friendships with the world’s most glamorous women: his muse Catherine Deneuve, Paloma Picasso, Loulou Klossowski and Betty Catroux (another muse); his passionate relationship with Bergé; it was all grist to the journalist’s mill.
Pure brillance that cannot be matched by any other fasion house, we are unlikely to see another person with that kind of talent anythime soon.
R Young, sussex, United Kingdom
Like his clothes, he was the stuff of legend.
David Russell, Sheffield, South Yorkshire