Friday, May 16, 2008
Yves Saint Laurent's love for women was never so loudly professed as in the lines of his garments.
Jan 22, 2002 | Looking back at the clothes Yves Saint Laurent has presented us in the past 10 years or so -- largely retreads of his greatest hits, including lots of strong-shouldered jackets and trimly tailored trousers and trenches -- it seems that, yes, it probably is time for one of the greatest designers of the 20th century to hang up his shears. But flipping through photographs of the clothes he's given us in a career that spans more than 40 years, I can't help feeling that somehow his time has come too soon.
It's not that he hasn't already given us enough. It's just that there's no one in the current landscape of fashion -- not Alexander McQueen with his outlandish horned frocks, nor John Galliano with his magnificent mastery of bias, nor Hussein Chalayan with his wooden table dresses -- who has proved able to jolt the world awake, as Saint Laurent did in the early '60s, with clothes that were also perfectly cut and beautifully wearable.
The reason for that is simple, and it isn't the fault of any of the contemporary designers mentioned or their colleagues: It's just that in 2002, we're fairly unjoltable when it comes to fashion. Part of what makes Saint Laurent's retirement so hard to bear is that we can't turn back time to an era when fashion could still shock us out of our armchairs. There is no present-day equivalent to Saint Laurent, although the last comforting fact is that there doesn't need to be: He was the right designer at the right time, doing his best work from the early '60s to the late '70s, when the world seemed to be changing at its very fastest. The body of work he leaves is a challenge to everyone who follows, not just for its innovation and its craftsmanship but for its inherent passion. It's fine to make a skirt out of wood, but the next frontier may lie in rediscovering the knowledge of just where a dart should fall. Saint Laurent was there first.
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What must Saint Laurent's "Robin Hood" collection have looked like in 1962? In a photograph from the collection, a model wears a futuristic-beatnik leather balaclava and A-line jacket with crocodile-print boots that stretch from her toes clear up to the place where most decent ladies were still wearing garter belts. Later, Saint Laurent would be accused of stealing street fashion and making it acceptable for proper, moneyed ladies (and for what it's worth, unlike street fashion, his clothes were so expertly crafted they were almost works of art in themselves). "Everyone knows Saint Laurent has been ripping off the kids' street gear for years and even those knock-off waves of his roll in about six months to a year too late," Village Voice fashion columnist Blair Sobol wrote in 1970. It's not that she was exactly wrong: It's just that -- well, what does it matter? The '60s belonged to young people, and they knew it. But by the end of the decade, many of them had forgotten that Saint Laurent was one of the people who'd handed it to them.
The Algerian-born Saint Laurent began his career in the late '50s at the venerable house of Christian Dior, taking it over in 1958, at the age of 21, after Monsieur Dior's death. His fifth collection at Dior, in 1960, was inspired by the Beats of the Left Bank (it featured turtlenecks and a mink-lined alligator jacket), and it caused an uproar among Dior's regular clients and the press. Dior was a couture house, and Saint Laurent was a couturier: That meant the clothes were meticulously handmade for individual clients, who expected a certain gravity and dignity in the product. Those clients also tended to be a bit older than the youngsters from whom Saint Laurent drew his inspiration. Neither Saint Laurent's employer nor the house's clients nor the French press were amused; the collection gave the house of Dior an excuse to dismiss its young star.
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