| The first intimation, apparently, was
when three-year-old Yves told his mother that her shoes did not go with her
dress. They were at home in Oran, a dull commercial town in French-ruled
Algeria, where Yves's father sold insurance and ran a chain of cinemas, and Mrs.
Mathieu-Saint-Laurent cut an elegant figure in colonial society. Oran had once
enjoyed some small renown as the westernmost outpost of the Ottoman empire, and
was to gain more later as the setting for Albert Camus's "The Plague". But after
1936 it had a genius in the making. So, at any rate, the tribute-payers are saying. "Pure genius", "the world's greatest fashion designer", "the most important designer of the. 20th century": such superlatives have been lavished on Yves Saint Laurent for years, and perhaps they are not meant to be taken at face value. The fashion business is, after all, a part of the entertainment industry, where sycophancy, exaggeration and gushing insincerity are not unknown. Mr. Saint Laurent fitted perfectly into it. He was, for a start, quite literally a showman, a shy and stage-frightened one, but what shows he could put on! Dazzling girls smarted down the catwalk, wearing startling creations of gauze, or velvet, or feathers, or not much at all. He was an artist, a delicate, attenuated figure who drew his inspiration from the pages of Marcel Proust, the paintings of Braque, Matisse, Picasso and Van Gogh, and the counsels of his assistant, Loulou de la Falaise. And he was troubled: by drink, by drugs and by physical frailty. He teetered perpetually on the brink of emotional collapse and sometimes fell over it. In 1961, when Mt. Saint Laurent set up shop in Paris under his own name, most couturiers were not quite like this. But the times were propitious for something new. He had by then done a stint at the House of Dior, whose reputation he had restored with some dramatic designs and, in 1958, after the famous founder had died, an iconoclastic collection of his own. The summous to do military service, a ghastly mental dégringolade and dismissal from Dior then intervened, and might have cut short a great career had he not gone into partnership with Mr. Berg6. As it was, a series of innovations followed, with Mr. Saint Lament responsible for the designs, Mr. Berg6 for the business, including the scents, scarves, unguents and over 100 other products marketed with a YSL label. The dress designs now started flying off Mr. Saint Laurent's drawing board, though increasingly often with the aid of helpers. Many were short-lived, this being fashion and fashion being, by definition, ephemeral. But two departures were to last. One was that haute couture, hitherto available only to the very rich or vicariously through magazines and newspapers, should be sold worldwide in ready-to-wear shops at a fraction of the posh price. The other was that women should be put into men's clothes—safari outfits, smoking jackets, trench coats and, most enduringly, trouser suits. Women, for some reason, saw this as liberation. He was always imaginative, taking inspiration not just from artists like Mondrian but also from Africa and Russian ballet. He was also capable of creating the absurd, producing, for example, a dress with conical bosoms more likely to impale than to support. But his clothes, however outr6, were usually redeemed by wonderful colors and exquisite tailoring. Above all, they were stylish, and the best have certainly stood the test of time. That is no doubt because most were unusually wearable, even comfortable. At a reverential extravaganza in (and outside) the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2002, soon after Mr. Saint Laurent had announced his retirement, many of the guests wore a lovingly preserved YSL garment. The "anarchist", as Mr. Berg6 recently called him; had by now become more conservative, seeing the merits of "timeless classics" and lamenting the banishment of "elegance and beauty" in fashion. He believed, he said, in "the silence of clothing". Yet perhaps he must take some of the blame for the new cacophony. The trouser suit prepared the way for the off-track track suit; and lesser designers, believing they share his flair and originality, now think they have a license to make clothes that are merely idiotic. Perhaps it would have happened without him. In an industry largely devoid of any sense of the ridiculous, he was usually an exception. He believed in beauty, recognized it in women and, amid the meretricious, created his share of it. |