A photographic tribute to the couturier’s career, assembled by the French novelist
What the Work Is
Yves Saint Laurent is a book first published in 1988 that documents the career of the French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent through fashion photography. It belongs to the categories of fashion design, fashion photography, and exhibition catalogues, and it was issued in connection with the designer’s work rather than as a biography or a critical study. The text is by Marguerite Duras, the French writer, playwright, screenwriter, and film director, whose best-known screenplay is that of Hiroshima, mon amour (1959). The volume is primarily a photographic collection: its pages are given over to images of Saint Laurent’s creations, and it is remembered as a classic of its kind.
What the Book Is About
The book’s subject is the body of work of Yves Saint Laurent, the French couturier who founded his fashion house in Paris in 1961 and who was regarded during his lifetime as a revolutionary of fashion design. Its aim is to present that career as a visual record — to show, through the work of many photographers, the clothes Saint Laurent made and the way they were seen. The book’s framing claim, as stated in its own jacket description, is that Saint Laurent was one of the few designers to have raised fashion to the level of art, and that his work speaks to every woman who appreciates beauty. The volume sets out to document a career of what it calls history-making photography and design, and to display both the breadth of Saint Laurent’s appeal and the collective achievement of the photographers who interpreted his work.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central theme of the book is the collaboration between couture and photography. Its images come from nearly fifty photographers, among them Richard Avedon, Horst, Peter Lindbergh, Duane Michals, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Francesco Scavullo, Snowdon, and Bruce Weber. By gathering so many different photographic hands around a single designer’s output, the book makes the case that Saint Laurent’s creations were not merely garments but subjects — objects that invited, and rewarded, the eye of the camera.
A second theme is range. The book moves across the full span of Saint Laurent’s production, from prêt-à-porter to haute couture, and across settings that run from the runway to the studio to what the jacket description calls the earth’s most exotic locations. This structure implies an argument about the work itself: that Saint Laurent’s designs were equally at home in the commercial and the rarefied, in the controlled space of the studio and in the wider world.
A third theme, stated directly in the book’s own description, is the elevation of fashion into art. The volume presents Saint Laurent as a designer whose accumulated body of work amounts to something more than a sequence of seasonal collections — a claim that places him in the small company of those couturiers whose output is treated as a cultural achievement rather than a commercial one. The book’s subtitle-like framing — a career of history-making photography and design — ties the two halves of its subject together: the designs and the images made of them are presented as a single, intertwined legacy.
Structure and Approach
The book is organised as a photographic volume. Its content is dominated by images rather than by extended prose, and its method is retrospective and celebratory: it surveys Saint Laurent’s career by assembling photographs of his creations taken by a large roster of photographers. The settings of those photographs vary deliberately, moving between the runway, the studio, and distant locations, and the clothes shown span both ready-to-wear and haute couture. The book was reissued in a smaller format on the eve of Saint Laurent’s fortieth anniversary, a fact that indicates both its enduring status as a reference on his work and the occasion for which that later edition was prepared.
Significance and Influence
The book’s significance lies in its status as a photographic record of a designer whose influence extended well beyond the clothes themselves. Saint Laurent was described by the fashion world during his lifetime as a revolutionary, and he is credited with shaping style in ways that outlasted him — most famously with the 1967 trouser suit for women, known as Le Smoking, which presented the female form as elegant and matter-of-fact at once and carried an emancipatory charge. He was also among the first designers to book Black models, and in 1983 he became the first living fashion designer to be honoured with an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A book that gathers the photographic record of such a career serves as a companion to that reputation, preserving the images through which Saint Laurent’s work was presented to the public. Its own jacket description positions it as a classic volume, and its reissue for the designer’s fortieth anniversary confirms that it continued to be treated as a standard visual account of his output.
The source material supplies a detailed account of Saint Laurent’s life that the book’s photographs document only indirectly. He was born Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent on 1 August 1936 in Oran, French Algeria, the eldest child of Charles Saint-Laurent, who owned an insurance company and a cinema chain, and Lucienne-Andrée, née Wilbaux. Two daughters, Michèle and Brigitte, followed him. Both sides of the family had come from Alsace and fled to North Africa during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. He attended secondary school in Oran through the Baccalauréat, and discovered his passion for costumes at a performance of Molière’s Critique de l’École des femmes; by the age of eleven he was already producing sketches and designs for the stage. Fashion was also a refuge from the bullying of his schoolmates, and he was his mother’s favourite child — she subscribed to French fashion magazines and liked to discuss her new dresses with her tailors.
In 1953, at seventeen, he answered an advertisement in Paris Match and submitted three designs from Algeria to the annual fashion competition of the International Wool Secretariat, taking third place with an evening dress. After first contacts at the prize ceremony in Paris, he began training in 1954 as a fashion and stage draughtsman at the school of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, which he did not finish. That same year he submitted three more designs to the IWS fashion-drawing competition, including a cocktail dress that won first place; Karl Lagerfeld won first prize in the coat category of the same competition, and what began as a friendship between the two men developed over the years into rivalry. Saint Laurent’s drawings were published in Vogue, and the cocktail dress went into series production at Givenchy.
Michel de Brunhoff, then director of French Vogue, introduced the young designer to Christian Dior. Saint Laurent worked for him until Dior’s death in 1957, and at twenty-one was promoted to artistic director by Marcel Boussac, the owner of the house of Dior — who had actually wanted to close the firm but had been pressed to continue by licensees. In March 1958 Saint Laurent met his later life partner and business partner Pierre Bergé at a dinner with the French fashion journalist Marie-Louise Bousquet of Harper’s Bazaar.
In 1960 Saint Laurent was called up for military service in Algeria, where the Algerian War had been raging since 1955. Before his departure he suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a psychiatric institution at the Val-de-Grâce hospital, where he was treated with electroshocks and drugs (sedatives). His employer, the house of Dior, therefore released him from his contract — a development not unwelcome to Boussac, who had ceased to agree with Saint Laurent’s creations for Dior. Bergé, by contrast, believed in Saint Laurent’s talent and did everything to get him out of the psychiatric ward. The two sued Dior for breach of contract and received 680,000 francs in compensation. With this start-up capital they were able to go into business for themselves in 1961. Through the investment of the American financier J. Mack Robinson (1923–2014) of Georgia, who held 80 percent of the shares in return, Saint Laurent and Bergé founded the fashion company Yves Saint Laurent Couture. The graphic designer A. M. Cassandre contributed the YSL logo in 1963. Saint Laurent and Bergé separated in 1976 in amicable attachment; they remained business partners and confidants, and Bergé continued to look after Saint Laurent and stood by him in his worst times.
From the mid-1970s Saint Laurent’s health deteriorated increasingly; in 1977 the press falsely reported his death. With brief periods of recovery, he was plagued by medication side effects, anxiety states, nervous breakdowns and depression, and sought refuge in alcohol and drug abuse. In the 1990s he wrote prose poems in the style of Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror. After withdrawing from the fashion business in 2002, he lived largely in isolation at the Villa Majorelle in Marrakech, in his art-filled Paris apartment on the Rue de Babylone, and at the Norman Château Gabriel in Deauville, whose rooms were named after figures from Marcel Proust’s novel cycle À la recherche du temps perdu. In 2007 a malignant brain tumour (glioblastoma) was discovered. Shortly before his death on 1 June 2008 in Paris, he and Bergé sealed their lifelong bond with a formal marriage. The Catholic funeral service at the parish church of St-Roch in Paris on 5 June 2008 was attended by 800 invited mourners, among them President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni, Bernadette Chirac, Bertrand Delanoë, Farah Diba, Catherine Deneuve, Loulou de la Falaise, Betty Catroux and numerous befriended fashion designers such as Sonia Rykiel, Christian Lacroix, Jean Paul Gaultier, Valentino Garavani, John Galliano and Marc Jacobs. Saint Laurent’s ashes were scattered in the rose garden of the Jardin Majorelle of his villa in Marrakech, which he and Bergé had bought in 1980.
The Career the Photographs Record
Saint Laurent’s first collection for Dior in January 1958, the Ligne Trapèze, was an overwhelming worldwide success. The trapeze line freed women from the compulsion of the wasp waist and presented them in a less stiff form while remaining elegant. He liberated costumes once more, this time from padding and stiffening at the waist, chest and shoulders, without however forgoing the splendour and fullness of costumes à la Dior. Over six seasons he dramatically rejuvenated and modernised the Dior collections in an “Op-Art fashion” style, which made him unpopular with older customers and with the owner of the house of Dior. His employment at Dior ended in 1960.
Saint Laurent’s collections under his own name were considered partly scandalous in the 1960s. He was one of the first fashion designers to use transparent fabrics. His first, conservatively conceived couture presentation in 1962 met with a mixed response. His consistent use of black fabrics and of jersey found little favour in the early 1960s, until this too established itself as a trend. In 1965, to the delight of the international fashion press, there followed colourful, geometrically patterned costumes and Mondrian dresses in the style of Piet Mondrian. In 1966 came the “Zhivago look” with the first transparent tops, which provoked a scandal: the sheer black chiffon blouses with bow collars were meant to be worn without underwear. Subsequently the transparent look established itself in the advertising photography of the Western world.
During the 1960s and 1970s the company popularised fashion trends such as the beatnik look, tweed suits, tight trousers and tight thigh-high boots, and in 1966 also the classic trouser suit for women (ladies’ smoking). As early as 1962 the French actress Catherine Deneuve had been the first woman to wear, to great public effect, a haute couture smoking modified for ladies by Yves Saint Laurent. Saint Laurent took up the smoking, which he called Le Smoking, in 1965 for the 1966 season in his newly created luxury prêt-à-porter line Rive Gauche and from then on offered it in numerous variations for ladies. Saint Laurent’s smoking for women was a fashion symbol of the second wave of the women’s movement and thus of women’s emancipation in the 1960s. To this day the house of Yves Saint Laurent offers versions of Le Smoking for women adapted to the present in its collections.
Also in 1966 Saint Laurent opened his first shop in Paris for the somewhat cheaper prêt-à-porter line Rive Gauche, thereby opening up new customer groups. The company Yves Saint Laurent was thus the first haute couture house to have established a ready-to-wear line. In 1968 a Rive Gauche boutique opened in New York City. In 1969, four years after the women’s line, men’s fashion by Rive Gauche followed for the 1970 season. As early as 1963 Bergé had concluded licence agreements for a YSL perfume with the American perfume manufacturer Charles of the Ritz; in 1964 the cosmetics division YSL Beauté was created and the women’s fragrance Y launched. Charles of the Ritz, by then merged with Lanvin, bought out the American investor Robinson’s 80 percent share in the fashion company YSL in 1965 for one million dollars, and in 1969 sold its shares in both the fashion and the perfume divisions to the American company Squibb Beech-Nut. In 1972 Bergé and Saint Laurent acquired all the shares of the fashion division and in return left Squibb Beech-Nut the perfume division YSL Beauté with low licence fees. In 1971, alongside the women’s fragrance Rive Gauche, the men’s fragrance YSL pour Homme appeared, for whose advertising Saint Laurent had himself photographed naked in an artistic pose to great press effect. From the mid-1970s the YSL range was massively expanded through licences, for example for women’s stockings, sunglasses, writing implements, home articles and cigarettes.
In 1977 the extremely successful women’s fragrance Opium appeared, which critics however understood as an “invitation to drug abuse”. In 1986 Saint Laurent and Bergé, supported by a 25 percent investment in the fashion house YSL by Carlo de Benedetti, bought the perfume division YSL Beauté back from Squibb for 630 million dollars. Over the years countless fragrances and their variations have appeared from YSL, among them Kouros (men, 1981), Paris (women, 1983), Jazz (men, 1988), Champagne (women, 1993, renamed Yvresse), Opium pour Homme (men, 1995), Baby Doll (women, 1999), M7 (men, 2002), Rive Gauche pour Homme (men, 2002), L’Homme (men, numerous variations, from 2006), Elle (women, 2007), Parisienne (women, 2009), Manifesto (women, 2012), Le Vestiaire des Parfums (a series of especially high-priced fragrances, from 2015), Black Opium (women, 2015), Y (men, 2017), Mon Paris Couture (women, 2017) and others.
Saint Laurent created the androgynous type at a time when femininity was still the prevailing doctrine for women. In 1968 he invented the safari look; in the 1970s he drew inspiration from Russian folklore. Further designs that became popular were a novel “nostalgia look” in the late 1960s and the “elegant peasant-woman look” in poppy colours in the mid-1970s. From the late 1970s Saint Laurent withdrew from the Rive Gauche fashion line, left the design to others such as his muse since 1972, Loulou de la Falaise, and concentrated on haute couture. In the early 1980s he designed bolero and lift-boy jackets.
The rather publicity-shy couturier and his brand YSL gained increasing international attention. Saint Laurent’s well-known muses were Loulou de la Falaise, Betty Catroux and Catherine Deneuve. Saint Laurent was among the first fashion designers to book Black models. Because the fashion magazine Vogue refused to put Naomi Campbell on the cover of the French edition, he threatened the editorial team in 1988 with cancelling advertising. He remained true to the world of the stage since his childhood days, making costumes among others for Zizi Jeanmaire, Roland Petit, Rudolf Nureyev and Catherine Deneuve. Saint Laurent also drew inspiration from the style of the painters Delacroix, Goya, Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso, van Gogh and Velázquez. In 1983 works by Yves Saint Laurent were exhibited at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, making him the first living fashion designer to be accorded this honour there.
In 1989 the company Yves Saint Laurent went to the Paris stock exchange. In 1991 Saint Laurent and Bergé personally paid out the investor de Benedetti in times of global recession. A takeover of YSL by L’Oréal failed on the unwillingness of Saint Laurent and Bergé to sell to L’Oréal’s shareholder Nestlé. A buyout by LVMH failed because Saint Laurent and Bergé wanted to retain control not only of the YSL fashion division but also of the fashion division of the LVMH subsidiary Dior. In 1993 YSL was sold by Saint Laurent and Bergé for nearly 600 million US dollars to the pharmaceutical group Sanofi, as sales figures had fallen sharply in times of recession; Saint Laurent and Bergé however retained control of the fashion division. In 1997 the later Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz was hired for women’s fashion and the later Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane for men’s fashion at Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche; both remained with YSL until 2000.
Through his holding Artémis, the PPR chief François Pinault bought the company Sanofi at the beginning of 1999. At the same time PPR bought a 40 percent share in Gucci. At the end of 1999 Gucci in turn bought from Sanofi the brand Yves Saint Laurent with the fashion division YSL and the cosmetics division YSL Beauté for six billion francs (about 917 million euros). The American fashion designer Tom Ford, then chief designer at Gucci, took over responsibility for the Rive Gauche collections from 2000, while Yves Saint Laurent himself continued to design the haute couture collections. In 2002 Yves Saint Laurent withdrew from the business with a much-noted and much-mourned fashion défilé. Prominent figures from the fashion world and cultural life took their leave of Saint Laurent; his favourite models Naomi Campbell, Jerry Hall and Laetitia Casta appeared for him one last time and Catherine Deneuve sang a love song. Vogue judged his life’s work: “Coco Chanel and Christian Dior were first-class, but Yves Saint Laurent is a genius.” With Saint Laurent’s withdrawal the house’s haute couture line was discontinued on 31 July 2002. Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé have since held no shares in the company.
Original dresses and accessories that were still designed by Saint Laurent himself are kept in a private museum in the Paris district of La Villette. The Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent, founded in 2004, conserves 5,000 dresses, 15,000 accessories and drawings by Saint Laurent at a constant temperature of 18 degrees Celsius and a humidity of 50 percent. In 2017 the Yves Saint Laurent Museum opened in Marrakech on the initiative of the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent; about 50 original dresses by Saint Laurent are exhibited there, exchanged at regular intervals for other dresses by Saint Laurent.
After the Founder
Tom Ford left YSL at the end of 2003 to concentrate on his own fashion line. In 2004 PPR increased its shares in the Gucci group, to which YSL had belonged since 1999 after the purchase from Sanofi, to 99.4 percent. The Italian Stefano Pilati — a former designer for Giorgio Armani and Prada who had already worked for YSL as a designer since 2000 at Ford’s suggestion — was appointed Ford’s successor in the same year. In 2005 more than 900 employees worked for the company and achieved a turnover of 162 million euros.
At the beginning of 2008 PPR sold the cosmetics and perfume group YSL Beauté, to which by then also belonged the brands Roger & Gallet, Boucheron Parfums, Stella McCartney Parfums and, under licence, the perfume divisions of Ermenegildo Zegna and Oscar de la Renta, for 1.15 billion euros to the French cosmetics manufacturer L’Oréal. In the same year, after ten years of continuous losses at YSL, the company returned to profit with a turnover of 263 million euros and an operating profit of 300,000 euros. Turnover in the 2009 financial year stood at 238 million euros with a renewed operating loss of 10 million euros, and in 2010 at 269 million euros with an operating profit of 12 million euros, which accounted for 12 percent of the Gucci group’s annual turnover. In 2010 there were 78 boutiques maintained directly by YSL worldwide. In 2011 PPR dissolved the Gucci group within the group, so that since then all group brands, including Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci, operate as equal subsidiaries. Chief designer Pilati was replaced in 2012 by the former Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane, who had already worked for YSL from 1997 to 2000, and subsequently moved to Ermenegildo Zegna.
In the summer of 2012 it was announced that the prêt-à-porter line for women and men, launched by Yves Saint Laurent in 1965 under the name Saint Laurent – Rive Gauche and later established as Yves Saint Laurent – Rive Gauche, which since the end of the haute couture line in 2004 had been the house’s only fashion line, would be renamed Saint Laurent or officially Saint Laurent Paris, and designed by Hedi Slimane in his studio in Los Angeles. The company itself and especially the house’s cosmetics division continue to operate under the name YSL Yves Saint Laurent. Slimane’s first presentation of Saint Laurent women’s fashion was shown at the beginning of October 2012 at Paris Fashion Week in a side wing of the Grand Palais and received mixed reviews. In his first presentation of Saint Laurent men’s fashion on 20 January 2013, Slimane showed in a “grunge homage with shredded skinny jeans and long knitted scarves” an “ultra-slim silhouette” embodied by androgynous models as an “almost frightening army of gaunt rock musicians with long hair”, as he had once presented it at Dior Homme, thereby prompting critics to ask about the timeliness of this style. Despite the moderate reviews of the trade press, the change initiated by Slimane brought the company high retail sales figures from consumers. According to Kering board chairman François-Henri Pinault (until 2013: PPR), Slimane, who was publicly praised by Pierre Bergé for his restructuring measures at YSL, had “successfully rejuvenated and repositioned” the YSL brand. In 2015 Slimane launched the Reform Project, within whose framework ateliers were set up in Paris and Slimane designed selected haute couture models as so-called Couture Privé, intended for friends of the house and not presented at the official haute couture shows in Paris.
Slimane’s contract was not extended by Kering in March 2016. Under Slimane’s creative leadership turnover had risen from 353 million euros in 2011 to 974 million in 2015. On 4 April 2016 Kering appointed the Belgian and former Versus designer Anthony Vaccarello as creative director of Saint Laurent Paris. For the 2017 financial year Kering reported turnover growth of 27.3 percent at Saint Laurent. The ateliers and studios of Saint Laurent Paris are located on the Rue de l’Université in Paris, not far from the École des Beaux-Arts in the Quartier Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In a former abbey on the Rue de Bellechasse near the Solférino Métro station, the YSL group headquarters is being built for 2018. On the Avenue Marceau, between Avenue Montaigne and the Musée Galliera, is the Musée Yves Saint Laurent (until 2017: Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent).
The Collection
Over the course of his life Yves Saint Laurent acquired hundreds of art objects and paintings of the highest quality and from all stylistic epochs. Art was for him reassurance and inspiration, as his art dealer Alexis Kugel said. The principle of such a mixture of styles was consciously chosen from the outset; the Vicomte Charles and Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles were the model for an ensemble of precious objects. “From them we learned to mix styles, epochs and continents,” said his life partner Pierre Bergé. The Paris art dealers Alexis and Nicolas Kugel and the picture dealer Alain Tarica were their most important sources. From 23 to 25 February 2009, after half a year of preparation, their collection of 733 artworks was dissolved at the Paris Grand Palais in an auction noted worldwide and repeatedly described as the auction of the century.
The collection included — alongside goldsmith work from the House of Hanover — Art Deco furniture as well as paintings by artists such as Henri Matisse, Giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, James Ensor, Marcel Duchamp and Frans Hals. Matisse’s painting Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose (“The Primroses, Tablecloth in Blue and Pink”) from 1911 achieved at the auction of the private collection on 23 February 2009 the record sum of 32.1 million euros and is the highest auction proceeds ever achieved for a French painter. The painting Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow and Black by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian was auctioned for 19.2 million euros. The auction brought in a total sum of 374 million euros, the highest amount to date for a private art collection in Europe. The proceeds of the joint private collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé go half each to a new foundation for research projects in the fight against AIDS and to the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent, which is to conserve and make accessible the designer’s complete collection.
Awards
In 1982 Saint Laurent received the International Fashion Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA). In 1985 he received the Oscar de la mode, the highest distinction of the fashion world. Yves Saint Laurent was admitted to the Legion of Honour in 1985 by François Mitterrand; in 1995 he was named Officer of the Legion of Honour; in 2001 Commander of the Legion of Honour by President Jacques Chirac; and in 2007 Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour by President Nicolas Sarkozy.
On Film
The source material also records the film and television treatments of Saint Laurent’s life and work. Yves Saint Laurent – wahnsinnig schön is a portrait of the fashion designer, France, 1994, 45 min., written and directed by Jérôme de Missolz, produced by La Sept and arte. Yves Saint Laurent – Die wiedergefundene Zeit is a documentary, France, 2001, 78 min., written and directed by David Teboul, produced by Movimento, Canal+, INA, first German broadcast 28 February 2011; the young documentary filmmaker David Teboul accompanied Yves Saint Laurent for three months in 2000, and two films resulted — a biography (Yves Saint Laurent – Die wiedergefundene Zeit) and a workshop report (Yves Saint Laurent. 5, Avenue Marceau) — both broadcast on German television in 2002. Celebration is a documentary film, France, 2007, written and directed by Olivier Meyrou. Modezar Yves Saint Laurent gestorben is a television report, Germany, 2009, 3:16 min., directed by Alexander von Sobeck, produced by ZDF, heute-journal, first broadcast 2 June 2008. Die YSL-Auktion bricht Rekorde is a television report, Germany, 2009, 2:20 min., directed by Alexander von Sobeck, produced by ZDF, heute in europa, first broadcast 24 February 2009. Yves Saint Laurent – Pierre Bergé. L’Amour fou is a documentary film, France, 2009, 98 min., directed by Pierre Thoretton, produced by Les Films du Lendemain, Les Films de Pierre, France 3 Cinéma, premiere 22 September 2010. Yves Saint Laurent: Die letzte Show is a documentary film, France, 2013, 51 min., written and directed by Loïc Prigent, produced by arte France, Deralf, Story Box Press, first broadcast 3 March 2013 on arte. Yves Saint Laurent is a biopic, France, 2014, 104 min., written and directed by Jalil Lespert, with Pierre Niney in the title role, cinema release 17 April 2014; the film biography begins in 1957 with the young Yves Saint Laurent’s hiring at Christian Dior and treats the collaboration and relationship with his partner Pierre Bergé up to the fateful year 1976. Saint Laurent is a biopic, France, 2014, 135 min., written and directed by Bertrand Bonello, with Gaspard Ulliel as YSL and Helmut Berger as the ageing Yves Saint Laurent.
