Friday, Sep 5, 2008
In 1962 Saint Laurent and his business partner (to this day), Pierre Bergé, founded the house of Yves Saint Laurent. (Bergé and Saint Laurent were also a couple until the early '80s.) Their relationship is often depicted as volatile -- there's a bit of lore about Saint Laurent's inducing Bergé to chase him with a knife down a flight of stairs -- but it's also far too complicated for any outsider to fathom. It was Bergé who broke the news to Saint Laurent that he'd been dismissed by the house of Dior, as the young designer lay in a hospital bed after suffering a nervous breakdown: Saint Laurent, always a fragile man, had been drafted into the French army to fight against his homeland, Algeria, and apparently the emotional strain was too much to bear. The two decided that day to go into business together.
Saint Laurent became a success partly because he was able to translate the youthful excitement of street fashion into luxe, gorgeous garments for his couture clients. He has sometimes been criticized for trying to make his garments "relevant" to their time; but his earliest clothes look so fresh and so free -- and so devoid of the stodginess that had come to define the world of couture -- that it's just as easy to believe that he loved street fashion for its energy alone. In 1966 he opened his ready-to-wear boutique, Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. He may have started out (as well as ended up) devoted to the couture, but he wanted his clothes to be worn and enjoyed by the masses, and not just by a relatively small handful of rich clients.
Saint Laurent has often professed his love for women, but never so loudly as in the lines of his garments. Season after season, for many years, they were romantic, wearable and deeply thrilling. His 1965 "Mondrian" dress, a simple shift divided into strong color blocks, at first glance seems to work at odds with the roundness of a woman's body. Look at it some more, and you realize that the heavy black lines that divide the dress into chunks of color, like pop-art stained glass, are so carefully placed that they sketch out and hint at, rather than obliterate, the curves beneath them. It's a trick dress: Its very "hardness" is the thing that allows it to be so aggressively feminine -- it's like a game to see how many right angles the feminine form can bear (and the woman wins).
Saint Laurent's idea of femininity embraced innocence only some of the time, occasionally taking the form of a big sugar-pink bow or a touch of lace. But he was far more interested in implied femininity, in feeling out the thrumming subterranean pulse that made women feel sexy, playful and unconstrained.
He loved putting trousers on women -- not the sporty flannel Katharine Hepburn kind, and not even the winkingly masculine Marlene Dietrich kind, but softly tailored ones that were generally worn with heels. It wasn't that women's trousers had never been seen before: It was simply that Saint Laurent made them suitable for all occasions. These were intended not as sportswear and not as costume but as clothing to be worn in the workplace and for evenings out.
In 1966 he revealed le smoking, which is easiest to explain as a softened version of a tuxedo, although that doesn't come near to describing its supple elegance. The most famous story about Saint Laurent's trousers and the stir they caused is the one about the evening sometime in the late '60s when socialite Nan Kempner (who has been a vocally enthusiastic Saint Laurent client for nearly all the 40 years of his career) stepped into a tony Manhattan restaurant wearing one of Saint Laurent's remarkable trouser suits, only to be told that women in trousers (I'll bet anything the hostess actually used the word "slacks") were not allowed. Kempner stepped out of the pants and strode into the restaurant wearing only the jacket. Many years later, giving a lecture on couture at New York University, Kempner wanted to make sure people understood the degree of workmanship that went into a completely handmade couture garment (which can take hundreds of hours to make, and tens of thousands of dollars to buy): She slipped out of her Saint Laurent skirt and jacket and passed them around the room. (Her Saint Laurent blouse stayed on.)
As his former employer Dior had done with his New Look, and as his spiritual predecessors Coco Chanel and Paul Poiret had done even earlier, Saint Laurent unveiled certain collections that not only changed the silhouettes of fashion, but changed people's thinking about fashion overall. His 1976 "Ballets Russes" collection -- an assortment of flowing skirts shown with slouchy boots, belted Cossack shirts and luxurious fur hats -- put the women of the world into longer, fuller skirts.
But even then, the romance inherent in Saint Laurent's different looks always counted more than the individual pieces. In 1971, a collection inspired by French wartime fashion started an uproar: Who wanted to look back 30 years? And wasn't it just resurrecting and tarting up tired old ideas? But Saint Laurent made those clothes seem fresh again, allowing later designers the freedom of mining the past with impunity. (Miuccia Prada, a longtime Saint Laurent fan herself -- she proudly proclaims that she wore his clothes even as a student radical handing out pamphlets in the late '60s -- is just one designer who benefited from Saint Laurent's backward-looking foresight. Her highly successful collections of the past few years have mined everything from flirty '40s dresses to '50s bowling bags to '60s Biba wear.)
In some cases, Saint Laurent's clothes have become inseparable from the iconic women who wore them. His outfits for Catherine Deneuve (also a longtime client) in Luis Buñel's 1967 "Belle de Jour" suited both the actress and her character's understated elegance. Among the most famous images associated with Saint Laurent is a 1968 Franco Rubartelli photograph of the luscious Veruschka laced (but just barely) into a canvas safari jacket. The picture captures the essence of how easily Saint Laurent could slip into a woman's world and share her sexiest, most secretive jokes, and also proves that he wasn't afraid to allow the idea of sex to seem at least a little dangerous: This is an outfit just made for big game hunting. Saint Laurent, outfitting a woman for every occasion, could be counted on as a staunch ally.
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