The late Yves Saint Laurent was one of the most famous and influential couturiers of the late 20th century. Yet beyond the celebrated style, writes William Langley, lay a man whose genius was often inseparable from his psychological torment.
Along the perfumed, lantern-lit corridors of a vast white villa, beneath soaring, mosaic ceilings and through the shadows of filigree stonework, a slender, shaven-headed man in a silk caftan is being dragged by his friends towards a waiting limousine. His face is gaunt and ghostly, his eyes luminous with terror, and as he descends a sweeping marble staircase, he cries, “Assassins! Assassins!” into the moist Moroccan night.
A few hours later, after a private jet flight to Paris, Yves Saint Laurent, the most celebrated fashion designer of the age, is in a psychiatric clinic. Watched over by nurses and a handful of aides who have followed him from his fabled “pleasure palace” in Marrakech, he now sleeps the deep sleep into which the night’’ opium has delivered him. Yet, as all who have watched his slow slide into madness know, the horrors will soon begin again.
Yves’catastrophic breakdown — anticipated by his circle and painful for those around him to witness — can, in retrospect, be seen as a turning point in a remarkable life. The psychological frailty which had beset him since childhood had finally reached a watershed. While Yves’ recovery was slow and incomplete, it can at least be said that, by the time of his death on June 1 at the age of 71, he had found a kind of peace.
A sense of fulfilment, too. For Yves had genuinely changed the world, the way it looked and felt about itself. In a business filled with colliding egos and shallow vanities, he had incontestably established himself as the homme sérieux he had always aspired to be. It may be trite to say that he freed women from their corsets, but only because it is now almost impossible to imagine a world in which women were unable to wear trousers to the office or to a certain kind of restaurant.
“He understood women’s need for clothes that worked as hard as we did,” says Suzy Menkes, the Paris-based doyenne of fashion writing, “but at the same time, he could create these incredibly glamorous things that looked as though they had dropped straight onto your body from heaven.”
At Yves’ nationally televised funeral in the church of Saint-Roch in Paris on June 5, many prominent female mourners — including Carla Bruni, the ex-model wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy — wore black trouser suits by way of homage. On the pavement outside, actress Catherine Deneuve, dressed in a signature YSL black trench coat and as glacially beautiful as ever at 64, paid tribute to the designer as “a pioneer feminist”. Yves, she said, “had read his [feminist author] Simone de Beauvoir. He was at our side through those battles of the 1970s.”
Yet it was Yves’ misfortune that his creativity was largely inseparable from, perhaps dependent upon, his torment. His best work was done at the worst times of his life and the best of all during the long descent into debauchery and drug addiction that consumed him for much of the 1970s and 1980s. During these years, while the world saw a beaming, bespectacled, dark-suited couturier shyly collecting bouquets and air-kisses at the end of each successful collection, the other Yves was a despairing and manic presence, raging against his demons in his grand Paris apartment, filled with fabulous works of art.
To read the full story on YSL, pick up a copy of the July issue of The Weekly.
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