Fashion

In 1998, Yves Saint Laurent celebrates forty years as a fashion designer. From the first see-through effects to the scandal of black, the career of the couturier who was the first to dare break the rules of haute couture, someone whose work continues to celebrate his love of women.

Yves Saint Laurent was the first couturier to dress women in see-through fabric; he is also the first living couturier to feature in a museum: New York’s Metropolitan Museum, in 1983. His name is legendary. His label, an empire. His shows, a celebration. Forty years after his « Trapèze » collection, which earned him his nickname as « the little one of haute couture », Yves Saint Laurent remains an enigma, a billionaire anarchist capable of stating: « I have but one regret: not to have invented jeans ». Not only was he the first couturier to launch a black blouson (for Dior, in 1960) and to replace low-fronted shoes with thigh-length boots, he is also one of the last to subject himself, with great humility, to the rigours he has imposed on himself since his apprenticeship years at Dior...

When millimetres count...

The couture house at 5 Avenue Marceau in Paris is his domain, the refuge to which he repairs to be among « his children », as he likes to call his senior design staff. As soon as he enters through the tradesman’s entrance, he is back in the familiar environment of a universe where every inch counts, where hours are spent on just a few millimetres too many. « All my dresses are created out of a gesture. A dress that does not reflect or is not reminiscent of a gesture is not a good dress. Once the gesture has been determined, its colour and definitive shape are a matter of choice... »

Thousands of dresses and accessories are kept in YSL’s private museum, now housed at La Villette, in Paris. Indeed, he was the first couturier to set up his own private collection. Yet another paradox for the man whose clothes are created first and foremost for women and those who will wear them: « With Yves Saint Laurent, you sense the drawing behind the garment. There’s the hand, the eye, the spirit, the taste you also find among the seamstresses who know your shape. The dress exists because they have observed you, and they know..., » remarks one couture client.

Madame Renée, a former head seamstress, pinpoints - without giving it away - the secret of YSL’s draping: « We try and capture the movement of a sari, to retain the flowing aspect of the sketch. When we do our fittings on the models, I ask them to move around the atelier. They must forget what they are wearing. They need to feel supported yet unrestrained. Monsieur Saint Laurent detests constraints. He hates to see a woman impeded in her movements. »

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The YSL scandals

In 1966, his see-through blouse caused a scandal in the United States. Two years later, a customer arriving at a New York restaurant wearing a jersey trouser tunic was refused admission. When she reappeared in the tunic (now turned into a mini-skirt), she was let in... « I want to find the woman’s equivalent of a man’s suit, » he explained in 1967, releasing fashion from a history dictated by hem lengths and colours, and pushing it forward into a new age. His biggest scandal will have been to magnify the body, to replace the word elegance by seduction, fanning the fires of desire where decency and respectability had once been the norm.

Tom Ford’s androgynous being could not have existed without YSL’s amazone; indeed, in 1966, while launching his Rive Gauche ready-to-wear collection, YSL declared: « Beauty? Beauty is irrelevant. What counts is seduction, the shock effect. What you feel. It’s entirely subjective. Personally, I am more aware of a gesture than a look, a silhouette or anything else... » He broke every rule in the book, talking of colours rather than « shades », creating clashes of reds, blues and greens, pushing haute couture headlong into the oriental universe of bazaars and souks spiced with visions.

The six little-known collections he designed for Dior, between 1958 and 1960, already implicitly reveal the obsessions of a young couturier, eager to continue the work of his master and attracted by the new age dawning before him, the decade of total liberation, according to his friend Andy Warhol.

The « trapèze » dress of 1958, a complete break with the conventional post-war tightly corseted woman, heralded a transition that would be followed by many others: the reefer jacket (1962), the dinner jacket (1966), the bush shirt and the man’s suit (1967), the jumpsuit (1968), the see-through dresses (1969). It signalled the end of fashion dictates, expressed in the seasonal lines of haute couture. Inspired by the flea market, the 1940 collection (1971) marked the advent of « street life » in the fashion world, turning couturiers into potential « antique hunters ».

The chameleon couturier

« Black is my refuge, » says YSL, « black is a line

on a white page. » He turned black into a colour, a chameleon capable of passing from day to night, of weathering spring and winter with the same force. He turned the black formal wear previously reserved for « big occasions » into an everyday classic. And yet he is also the couturier of light, whose pinks - Toréro, Magenta, Amour, Aurore - shimmer and glow on naked skin, transforming women into heroines. With YSL, the black that simplifies, condenses and purifies is offset by the colour of all colours, dresses from the Arabian Nights, draped like charms over ebony-skinned idols.

At 21, he seemed to have aged. « His youth was shattered in 1958, » says his mother, Lucienne Mathieu Saint Laurent. Hidden behind his glasses, he appeared in the seventies in the guise of an ephebe, modelling his Rive Gauche collection for men, even to the extreme of posing nude before Jean-Loup Sieff’s camera lenses to promote his perfume. A first. He liked to confuse the issue, emerging as a dandy in a duffle-coat à la Cocteau, a white-suited Gatsby, a Swann in a dinner jacket, dyeing his hair, putting on weight, then losing it.

The first to turn fashion into a show (with his Russian Ballet Opera in 1976) he was also the first to cherish solitude like an idol, to make himself appear older, even to shield himself from others and from himself. « I am alone more and more. I cannot go out. I fear the outside world, the street, the crowds. I feel comfortable only at home, with my dog, my pencils and my drawings..., » says YSL today. From the vantage point of his solitude he observes - and comments on - Paris life, to which he prefers « the energy of New York: its way of blending sport and urban life, of not collapsing behind one’s parka... »

The dizzy heights of art

Ever since his beginnings with Dior in 1959, YSL’s collections have celebrated artists such as Goya, whose heroines are the « infanta », their faces veiled in tulle « point d’esprit ». The Mondrian collection with its dresses like « mobiles suspended in space » (1965) was to prelude a new adventure that would turn YSL into the « Beatle of the Rue Spontini », the creator of the Pop Art collection inspired by Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselman. During the seventies, the references to art, which served as a link with real life and the consumerism of modern times, became a refuge, a sort of ideal, a sacred territory of all the alchemies, a place where pain turns into beauty.

Yves Saint Laurent became an image, something of an icon, surrounded by a golden wall of silence. From the Russian Ballet Opera collection to the « Picasso » collection, the dizzy heights continued to soar, at the interface between fashion, by definition the domain of the ephemeral and transitory, and History and its masterpieces. Presented in a climate dominated by the speculation of the art market, the Irises and Sunflowers inspired by Van Gogh, jackets whose embroidery work was to make them the world’s most expensive, yet again highlight YSL’s double-edged temptation: the desire to be in step with one’s time and, simultaneously, to suspend it. To be the only one who could dare to say, when talking about the modern woman: « I invented her past, I offered her her future, and that will go on long after I have died. »