Celebrities and the masters of the fashion world bade adieu yesterday to Yves Saint Laurent at an emotional funeral Mass in the heart of the city where he ruled as king of couture for four decades.

President Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, who modelled for the designer in the 1990s, led mourners at the Église Saint Roch for the tribute to a tortured genius who has been described this week as one of France’s great artists. “YSL” died of a brain tumour on Sunday at the age of 71.

Crowds fell silent outside the artists’ church on the boutique-lined Rue Saint Honoré as loudspeakers and a giant screen carried the words of Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s business partner and long-standing companion. Turning to the yellow-draped coffin, he addressed the man he likened to Marcel Proust, Henri Matisse and Maurice Ravel: “For 50 years, our paths never separated . . . Leaving you, Yves, I shall tell you of my admiration, my deep respect and my love.”

Alongside Mr Bergé at what almost amounted to a state funeral sat Lucienne Saint Laurent, 95, the mother of the reclusive couturier. With them, in an open black trench coat — the designer’s favourite colour — was Catherine Deneuve, the film star and Saint Laurent’s muse when she was the face of the chic Swinging Sixties.

Deneuve, visibly distressed, read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass at the end of a service that was attended by a near-complete roll call of the fashion world. They included Kenzo Takada, Valentino, Hubert de Givenchy, Christian Lacroix, John Galliano, Vivienne Westwood, Valentino, Jean Paul Gaultier and Sonia Rykiel.

Notably absent were Karl Lagerfeld, who was travelling, according to Chanel, his fashion house, and Pierre Cardin, who was also not in Paris.

Most of the women, including Ms Bruni, were dressed in trouser suits, a tribute to Saint Laurent’s reputation as the designer who put women in le tailleur pantalon. Mr Bergé praised his partner for never compromising with the inferior values that he said now ruled couture. “You could have slid into mere fashion at times but instead you remained faithful to your own style, and you were quite right, for that style is now everywhere, perhaps not in fashion but in the streets of the whole world.” Mr Bergé, who founded the YSL house with the designer in 1961, spoke of the headstone in their garden in the Moroccan city of Marrakech where the couturier’s ashes will be buried after cremation in Paris.

“You were the greatest designer of the last half of the 20th century. On your marble plaque, I have had engraved above your name the words ‘French couturier’.”

The rival moguls of the French luxury world, François Pinault, whose PPR group owns the YSL label, and Bernard Arnault, of LVMH, put aside their enmity to share pews. Two generations of stars, from Alain Delon and Jeanne Moreau, the actors, to Claudia Schiffer, the former supermodel, and Laetitia Casta, the YSL model-turned-actress, were applauded as they trooped into the church, decked out in white lilies and jasmine. Among foreign celebrities was Farah Diba, widow of the last Shah of Iran and a big YSL client.

If there was a single theme in the readings and the sermon by Father Roland Letteron, it was the emotional suffering that dogged Saint Laurent throughout his creative career. Father Letteron and Mr Bergé quoted a tribute by Proust to “that great, magnificent and lamentable family of depressed people . . . who founded and composed the great masterpieces”.

Father Letteron touched on the sources of his suffering, which began when he was “bullied by his schoolmates” in French Algeria over his emerging homosexuality. “As a boy he would spend his time dressing his sister’s dolls,” he recalled in his address. As an adult, Saint Laurent “expressed through a minor art form all the grandeur of life”, he said.

“He changed couture, giving women and men another way of seeing one another, with tenderness and real reciprocity,” said the priest.

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