Yves Saint Laurent

Oran: a cardboard theatre and eleven paper dolls

He was born Yves Mathieu-Saint-Laurent on 1 August 1936 at the Jarsaillon clinic in Oran, in what was then French Algeria, the eldest child of Charles, an insurance manager who also owned a chain of cinemas, and Lucienne. Two sisters followed, Michèle in 1942 and Brigitte in 1945; the family lived at 11 rue Stora in the Plateau Saint-Michel district and spent summers at Trouville on the Normandy coast. At fourteen he built L'Illustre Théâtre — a wooden crate fitted out as a stage, with cardboard characters dressed in scraps cut from his mother's clothes — and performed with it for his sisters and cousins.[1]

Between 1953 and 1955 he made eleven paper dolls and gave them more than five hundred garments and accessories, modelled on the mannequins — the fashion models — he followed in the fashion magazines. The drawing turned into a career at seventeen: in 1953 he took third prize in the dress category of a Paris competition run by the International Wool Secretariat, and the following year first and third prizes in the same category. In the autumn of 1954 he moved to Paris to study at the school of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, the trade body that trains and regulates the couture houses, and Michel de Brunhoff of French Vogue took up his case.[1]

The youngest couturier in the world

De Brunhoff arranged the meeting at 30 avenue Montaigne in June 1955, and Christian Dior hired the nineteen-year-old into his studio immediately. Dior said of him afterwards that he was 'young, but an immense talent', and that he considered him the father of thirty-four of the 180 designs in his most recent collection. On 24 October 1957 Dior died in Italy, and on 15 November the house named Saint Laurent his successor: at twenty-one, having never run anything, he was running a business of 1,400 people that the Musée Yves Saint Laurent describes as accounting for nearly half of France's exports of haute couture — made-to-measure fashion.[2]

His first collection was shown on 30 January 1958. Where Dior's clothes had gripped the waist, the Trapeze line hung from the shoulders and widened to the hem, so that the body vanished under it — less fabric, a lighter build. The room stood and applauded, and the press called him the little prince of fashion. Six collections followed in three years; the last of them, all dark tones and leather, divided the buyers. On 1 September 1960 he was conscripted into the French army for the war in Algeria — France's war against Algerian independence — broke down within weeks, and was hospitalised at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris; while he was there, the house of Dior replaced him with the designer Marc Bohan. Pierre Bergé, whom he had met in 1958, proposed that they open a house of their own.

4 December 1961: a house of his own

Bergé sold his apartment and found the rest of the money in Atlanta: J. Mack Robinson, an American businessman, became the first American to invest in a Paris couture house, and stayed anonymous for two years. The house opened on 4 December 1961 in borrowed premises — the former studios of the couture house Manguin at 11 rue Jean-Goujon — while the permanent address at 30 bis rue Spontini, in the 16th arrondissement, was fitted out. The first garment, labelled 00001, went to Madame Patricia Lopez-Willshaw. The first collection was shown on 29 January 1962.[3]

1965 and 1966: Mondrian, the tuxedo, and the rue de Tournon

His mother had given him a Christmas present in the 1950s: the art critic Michel Seuphor's 1956 book on Piet Mondrian, the Dutch painter of the black-lined grids filled with red, yellow and blue. On 6 August 1965 Saint Laurent showed an autumn–winter collection of 106 designs, twenty-six of them dresses that reproduced those grids in cloth. They were collarless and sleeveless, and the trick was in the construction: blocks of coloured wool jersey inlaid and joined from the inside, so that no seam shows and the black lines are the joins themselves. The newspaper Combat called it a resounding success the next morning; the weekly Candide used the word revolution a week later. The dresses were copied everywhere, especially in the United States, and they did as much for the painter as for the couturier — Mondrian's first Paris retrospective followed in 1969.[4]

In the autumn–winter collection of 1966 he showed the garment that became his signature: a tuxedo for women, cut to the rules of the men's original and fitted to a woman's body. In French a dinner jacket is un smoking, and the piece has been called Le Smoking ever since. His couture clients wanted nothing to do with it — exactly one was sold — but the ready-to-wear version found younger customers, and he put a version of it in every collection he designed until he retired in 2002. His own explanation was that it was not fashion at all: 'For a woman, the tuxedo is an indispensable garment in which she will always feel in style, for it is a stylish garment and not a fashionable garment. Fashions fade, style is eternal.'[5]

On 26 September 1966 he opened a shop at 21 rue de Tournon, in the 6th arrondissement near the Luxembourg gardens, and called the line SAINT LAURENT rive gauche — 'left bank', after the side of the Seine it stood on and the young, unstuffy Paris it meant. The clothes were ready-made and sold off the rail, but they were designed as a collection in their own right rather than as discounted couture, which was new. 'I had had enough of making dresses for jaded billionaires,' he said. New York followed in 1968, London and a men's shop in 1969.[6]

5 avenue Marceau, and the farewell

In 1974 the house moved to 5 avenue Marceau, a hôtel particulier — a private mansion — built under the Second Empire, the reign of Napoleon III in the 1850s and 1860s, a few streets from the Champs-Élysées. Saint Laurent worked upstairs with six or seven collaborators; nearly two hundred tailors and seamstresses made the clothes in the ateliers; downstairs, in the salons, each client was received by her own saleswoman. He designed there for close to thirty years.[7]

On 7 January 2002 he announced at a press conference that he was closing the couture house. 'I am proud that women all over the world wear pantsuits, tuxedoes, pea coats, and trench coats,' he said. 'I tell myself that I have created the contemporary woman's wardrobe.' A retrospective opened at the Centre Pompidou, Paris's modern-art centre, on 22 January 2002. Two years later, after the building was renovated, the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent opened in the same rooms at 5 avenue Marceau, and since October 2017 the address has been the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris — the studio, the archive of drawings, and the clothes, in the house where they were made.[8][9]

He died in Paris on 1 June 2008, at seventy-one. The funeral was held at the church of Saint-Roch on the rue Saint-Honoré, with President Nicolas Sarkozy among the mourners and screens outside for the crowd that could not get in. Pierre Bergé, his companion of over fifty years, spoke: the ashes, he said, would join the resting place waiting in the gardens at Marrakesh in Morocco, the city where he and Saint Laurent had long kept a home.[10]

Dior, and being twenty-one when it fell to him

Christian Dior died suddenly in October 1957. Saint Laurent had been working for him for two years and was twenty-one when the house named him its designer, which made him overnight the most exposed young man in French fashion.

His first collection, the Trapeze line of spring 1958, was a success on a national scale: it loosened the waist Dior had cinched, and the Paris press treated it as a rescue. The goodwill did not last. The Beat collection of 1960, which put black leather, turtlenecks and crocodile jackets on the couture runway, was what the house had not asked for and did not want.[11]

Conscription, Val-de-Grâce, and losing the job, 1960

In 1960 Saint Laurent was called up for military service during the Algerian war. He lasted about three weeks. He was admitted to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris and treated for a breakdown with heavy sedation; biographers, though not the Fondation and not Saint Laurent himself, have also described electroconvulsive therapy.[11]

While he was in hospital, Dior replaced him with Marc Bohan. He came out of Val-de-Grâce without the job that had made him famous. He spoke about that period publicly only once, at the end of his career. He described the fair-weather friends that tranquillisers and narcotics turn out to be, and the prison of depression and of clinics.

Rive Gauche, 1966, and dressing women in trousers

In 1966 Saint Laurent opened Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, a ready-to-wear line with its own boutique. It was the first time a couturier had put his own name over a shop selling clothes off the peg, and he regarded it as the most consequential thing he did. He said so in his retirement speech: he had let women into a world that had been closed to them.

The garments that came with it are the ones the wardrobe kept. Le Smoking, the dinner jacket cut for a woman, arrived in 1966. The safari jacket and the jumpsuit followed. He was relaxed about imitation, pointing out that Chanel had been too, and said he was proud that women everywhere wore trouser suits, dinner jackets and pea coats.

In 1971 he was photographed naked by Jeanloup Sieff for the launch of his men's fragrance, an advertisement no couturier had attempted before. In 1977 the scent Opium arrived and the objection was to the name rather than the bottle.

Marrakech, the collection, and his death in 2008

Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé bought the Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech in 1980, saving the painter Jacques Majorelle's garden from developers, and restored it along with the neighbouring Villa Oasis. Morocco is where he went to draw each collection.[12]

The art collection the two men built together was sold at Christie's in Paris in February 2009 over three days. It made in the region of €374 million, the largest sum a private collection had raised at auction. The Fondation and the French press report slightly different totals, differing by a few hundred thousand euros.

He died at home in Paris on the evening of 1 June 2008, of a glioblastoma that had been found fourteen months earlier. The funeral was at Saint-Roch. His ashes were scattered at the Villa Oasis in Marrakech on 11 June, and a memorial stele was raised for him in the Jardin Majorelle. Two museums devoted to his work opened in 2017, one at 5 avenue Marceau in Paris and one in Marrakech.[13]