by Brenda Polan
Carnegie never allowed Norell to take any credit. He worked for more than a decade in ‘complete anonymity’, as one Vogue editor put it. A shy and gentle man, this did not appear to put him out: the clash with Carnegie that led to his departure in 1940 was creative rather than ambition driven. They had a row over a dress worn by Gertrude Lawrence in Lady in the Dark on Broadway (he thought it perfect; she wanted it toned down). His decision to go solo came at a moment when the American fashion industry was poised to come of age—cut off from the influences of Paris during wartime and ready to make its own mark. Anthony Traina, a manufacturer best known for larger sizes, contacted him. ‘He offered me a larger salary if my name were not used,’ recalled Norell. ‘A smaller amount if it were.’ Thus Traina-Norell was created. From the beginning, it was conceived as a full collection rather than a series of pieces, which tended to be the way on Seventh Avenue. The principles of the Paris couture, founded on precision of fit, were now applied to ready-to-wear. Norell was therefore an important bridge between couture and ready-to-wear. Bettina Ballard, an influential editor at Vogue with a razor-sharp eye, recalled in her autobiography: ‘I loved Norman’s clothes. They had the same single-mindedness as Balenciaga’s or Chanel’s, and the same fanatical attention to quality … I bought as many as I could afford.’
He drew inspiration from the 1920s, a favourite decade for him, including silk jersey dresses and long wool evening dresses in his first collection. Norell had a sure sense of timing, a key ingredient of any designer’s success. A full-length sweater dress, also shown in 1941, was another star piece. His friend, the fashion editor Bernadine Morris, wrote later: ‘What Norman Norell had accomplished in that first collection was to give American fashion—producers and wearers alike—a freedom from dependence on foreign sources of inspiration. The American industry felt it could set its own directions, its own styles.’ Norell went on to play a dominant role in American fashion for three decades. As early as 1943, his achievement was recognized with the first Coty American Fashion Critics Award, recognising the quality of his chemise dresses, sequined cocktail dresses and fur-lined coats. An invitation to a Norell show was a prized ticket: the collection was shown at 9 p.m. (the dress code was black-tie) right through until 1969, when the time was shifted to 5 p.m.
No doubt drawing on his twelve years of visiting Paris, Norell had an instinctive feel for trends and very rarely got it wrong. In 1942, he introduced the no-waistline chemise or shirt dress, not seen since the 1920s, which became a staple of his collections. When he was once asked to sum up his major contribution to fashion, Norell chose to focus on a detail: simple, high round necklines. ‘I hated necklines. I always thought they made women look older. So I started making simple Peter Pan collars or no collars at all. Just a plain round neckline, no crap on it … I do think it changed the look of clothes.’ Another recurring theme was nautical, inspired by a childhood sailor suit he had worn and introduced as early as 1933 at Hattie Carnegie. Indeed, many of his ideas, according to Bernadine Morris, had their origin in the styles he bought in Paris for Carnegie in the 1930s. The influence of menswear, recalling his own father’s roots in menswear retailing, also percolated through his work, such as in the creation of a sleeveless jacket over a bowed blouse and slim wool skirt.
Norell’s own personal style was neat and precise. He believed day wear should be simple with the razzmatazz saved for evening, an attitude that is still at the heart of the New York way of dressing. During the 1950s, however, he adapted to changing tastes, creating shirtwaist dresses with full skirts in silk and lace and mixing tweed jackets with satin collars with satin ball gowns. Norell’s sequined dresses were much admired, dubbed mermaid dresses for their slithery, sensual appeal. In 1960, Anthony Traina was obliged through ill health to step down, allowing Norell to take over the business entirely, with some financial backing. Traina-Norell became Norman Norell, and he created an immediate sensation with a culotte-skirted wool flannel day suit in his very first solo collection. Eventually, he bought out his backers too, buoyed by the success of a fragrance launched with Revlon. Norell was copied, naturally. But this time the flow was back across the Atlantic: Paris-based companies picked up many of his designs, such as his culotte suit and his gored ice-skating skirt. With great magnanimity, Norell produced working sketches of the culotte suit free of charge to the trade with the intention of ensuring that his design would be copied properly—an extraordinary gesture that won him huge goodwill on Seventh Avenue and beyond.
Through the 1960s, Norell remained a vibrant force in American fashion, often ahead of the pack. He designed the first evening jumpsuit in 1961, created trouser suits for 1963, and set the pace again by bringing back belts in 1966, heralding the return of emphasis on the waistline. He made news too, sending back his Coty Hall of Fame award in 1963 in protest at an award for the provocative Rudi Gernreich. There were mistakes: his culottes of 1960 were judged too early for the market. American trade newspaper Women’s Wear Daily, then entering its golden age under the dynamic editorship of John Fairchild, also chose to give him the cold shoulder for a period. But by then Norell had attained the status of eminence grise. As the founder and first president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, he can rightly be acclaimed as the father of the country’s fashion industry. Sadly, the Metropolitan Museum’s retrospective of 1972 was never seen by Norell. He suffered a stroke only a day before the opening and died ten days later. The house continued for a further five years with designer Gustave Tassell. In 2004, Patrick Michael Hughes, a lecturer at Parsons, attempted to revive the label.
Norell always downplayed his approach to design. He could make it sound very easy, but this was founded on decades of study and reflection. ‘I believe in thinking out what the next logical and natural trend in fashion will be,’ he said in 1952. ‘Once I have decided, the rest is easy. I simply take the most straightforward approach to it, without any extra, fancy trimmings. I don’t like over-designed anything.’
Further reading: Bernadine Morris, who was fashion editor of The New York Times and a friend of Norell, summarised his career in American Fashion: The Life and Lines of Adrian, Mainbocher, McCardell, Norell, and Trigére (1975), edited by Sarah Tomerlin Lee. Norell also features in Caroline Rennolds Milbank’s New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style (1989).
24 YVES SAINT LAURENT (1936–2008)
Yves Saint Laurent was, in the words of the man closest to him, born with a nervous breakdown. Even so, he was also probably the most influential fashion designer of the second half of the twentieth century. He synthesised the ingenious modernity of Coco Chanel and the sensuous lyricism of Christian Dior, his mentor and first employer. The addition, as Francois Boudot noted in his account of twentieth-century fashion, of ‘a breath of youth and his extrasensory perception of the needs and wants of his contemporaries … led to the YSL monogram leaving its stamp on a whole era.’
Saint Laurent reinvented Paris fashion for the young, giving the women of the baby-boomer generation a new wardrobe stocked with easy, youthful clothes which, in their energy, flirtatious assertiveness and borrowings from the active male wardrobe, prefigured the social and political emancipation women were just learning to crave. He was among the first couturiers to understand that, instead of standing by while his ideas were copied and disseminated to a wider market by others, he could produce his own ready-to-wear ‘diffusion’ or ‘boutique’ line (iconically named Rive Gauche), making those clothes more easily accessible to younger, less wealthy women. He was the first couturier truly to understand the importance of accessories in creating a look. Often the clothes were really quite simple; it was the accessory garnish that added the bravura and romance.
Hypersensitive, self-centred, narcissistic and emotionally fragile, Yves Saint Laurent was also highly cultivated, literate, diffident and charming and had a mischievous sense of humour. When he posed nude in the 1970s for the picture to advertise a YSL men’s scent, he told the photographer, J
ean-Loup Sieff: ‘I want to create a scandal.’ The resulting portrait is unforgettable. Backlit and shadowy, wearing only his spectacles, the designer looks directly into the lens, simultaneously confident in his slender, almost adolescent beauty yet projecting an eroticism that is wistful and tentative. In any other period a designer might very well have been ridiculed for such vanity, but this was the hippy moment of the Age of Aquarius, Flower Power, Woodstock, peace and love. He had his scandal and overnight became a gay icon. There were other scandals along the way: the trouser suit which rattled the composure of a thousand maitre d’s, the first headline-grabbing transparent blouse, and the steamy mouth to mouth embrace with which he thanked Rudolf Nureyev for launching another fragrance, Kouros, onstage in the packed Opera Comique a decade later.
He attracted a gilded circle of protectors, defenders and friends upon whose loyalty he made great demands. In his latter years, however, there was scant amusement. Mischief turned to melancholy, and his shyness became reclusiveness. Rare sightings on the catwalk revealed an overweight, shambling figure with dyed auburn hair, a pasty complexion and a dazed expression. Even the coterie of rich, hedonistic friends and artistic collaborators fell away as he retreated into an introverted isolation. ‘He is simply,’ said his closest friend, former lover and business partner (and the man who made the natal nervous breakdown diagnosis), Pierre Bergé, ‘not interested in other people’.
Rich, famous, multiply honoured by his country and the community of his peers, he succumbed to the despair and pain which had dogged him all his life. He was a man who wore his anguish on his sleeve. He accepted it, indulged it even, as collateral to his genius. In his office he kept a framed quotation from Marcel Proust, whose A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) he read and reread throughout his life: ‘The magnificent and lamentable family of the nervous is the salt of the earth. It’s they and no one else who founded religions and created masterpieces …’
Yves Saint Laurent’s only real training was a brief period understudying Dior, the master of a formal and archaic ultra-feminine glamour, yet his only equal in innovation was Chanel who, in 1967 when she was eighty-four, declared him her ‘only inheritor’. Like Chanel in the 1920s and 1930s, Saint Laurent perfectly answered the mood and needs of his time. Both responded intuitively to overwhelming impulses towards political and social emancipation for women, giving women the clothes in which to grasp equality. It became easy to forget, given the decades of Saint Laurent’s decline into a threadbare and solipsistic reworking of his own best ideas, how dramatic and beautiful those epoch-defining collections were. The Mondrian (1965), with its bright blocks of colour; the Pop-Art (1966), inspired by Andy Warhol; the African (1967); the Safari (1968); the Marlene Dietrich inspired collection of 1969, when he introduced both the mini and the tuxedo; the Moroccan (1970); the Opera/Ballets Russes (1976) with its opulently clad peasants and gypsies (‘My most beautiful collection,’ said Saint Laurent); the Velasquez (1977); the Chinoiserie (1977); the Picasso (1979); the Collection Shakespeare (1980), dedicated to literature and poetry, Aragon, Cocteau and Apollinaire; the Matisse (1981); and the Cubist (1988) collections all stand out as milestones in fashion history.
Christian Lacroix, a designer of the generation which grew up in Saint Laurent’s shadow, told Saint Laurent’s biographer, Alice Rawsthorn: ‘There have been other great designers this century but none with the same range. Chanel, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga and Dior all did extraordinary things. But they worked within a particular style. Yves Saint Laurent is much more versatile, like a combination of all of them. I sometimes think he’s got the form of Chanel with the opulence of Dior and the wit of Schiaparelli.’
Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent was born in 1936 in Oran, Algeria, into a wealthy and prominent family. He grew up knowing himself a misfit in the close, conservative and Catholic colon community. ‘No doubt,’ he told Le Figaro in 1991, ‘because I was homosexual.’ It was a terrible secret, a preference to be expressed only in furtive encounters with Arab street boys. The gentle, fragile and timid youngster was doted upon by his mother and sisters—whose dolls he dressed. He excelled academically but was bullied and beaten by his classmates, who sensed that the puny, artistic and unathletic boy was unacceptably different. ‘Maybe,’ he said much later, ‘I didn’t have what it took to be a boy.’ He had, however, all the vanity and arrogance of the outcast who knows himself to be better then his tormentors. He dreamed of escape, of Paris and, as he wrote in his introduction to the catalogue to the 1983–4 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, his ‘name written in fiery letters on the Champs Elysées’.
Theatre and costume design were his first passion (and he was later to prove a brilliant designer for Roland Petit’s ballets, for theatre and film) but at seventeen, he seized the first opportunity to present itself when he entered a competition for young fashion designers run by Paris Match magazine and the International Wool Secretariat. In Paris with his mother to receive third prize, he met Michel de Brunhoff, the influential editor of French Vogue, who advised him to finish school and then enrol on a design course at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. The course, which he started in the autumn of 1954, quickly bored him and, having won that year’s International Wool Secretariat competition, he was dispatched by de Brunhoff to show his sketch book to Christian Dior, who employed him immediately. When the originator of the New Look died of a heart attack in 1957, he had already made it clear that he considered Saint Laurent his natural successor.
In January 1958 Saint Laurent showed his first collection after Dior’s unexpected death. The collection, which introduced the Trapeze Line, was a success; The Sunday Times fashion editor, Ernestine Carter, later noted that it was to become the classic and enduring maternity dress shape. So central was Dior’s image to French couture and the lucrative concept of Paris fashion that the next day’s newspaper placards announced: ‘Saint Laurent has saved France.’ He was just twenty-one years old. A quarter-century later he wrote, ‘Luckily there is a destructive kind of suffering I’ve never known, the one that comes from lack of recognition.’
Perhaps that initial reaction caused the owner of Dior, the textile magnate, Marcel Boussac to give his stripling designer too much freedom. Instead of moving the collection forward by client-comforting increments each season, Saint Laurent went for a new look with every succeeding collection. When his second collection dropped skirts to calf length (ten years too soon, as Carter noted) the French press turned against him. When, in a hasty over-correction, he hobbled them above the knee for spring 1959, the response was vitriolic. Then in 1960, searching for a means of ‘poetic expression’, he elected to pay homage to the beat culture of the Left Bank with a collection that featured the biker’s black leather blouson jackets (albeit trimmed with mink), black cashmere turtlenecks and short bubble skirts flattering only to the young and hipless. The predominantly mature couture clients showed their displeasure. So did Marcel Boussac, who had been protecting Saint Laurent from military conscription by pulling political strings. Boussac opted for patriotism and profits before poetry and lifted his protection.
Saint Laurent’s brief induction into the army of France, then engaged in a savage struggle against Algerian nationalists, was a turning point in his life. It ensured that he was forced to start his own label because, as the barracks doors slammed behind the recruit, Boussac hurried to replace him at Dior with Marc Bohan. But it also precipitated his first breakdown—just nineteen days into his army career—and resulted in the treatment which wrecked his health and launched him on a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse. At the Val-de-Grace mental hospital he was subjected to a primitive regimen of dangerously addictive heavy-duty sedatives. He could not eat and by the time his friend and lover, Pierre Bergé, secured his release two months later he was utterly debilitated. Bergé, supported by Women’s Wear Daily, ever Saint Laurent’s champion, set about suing the house of Dior and establishing Saint Laurent
’s own couture house. ‘I had never, ever wanted to be a businessman,’ said Bergé, whose interests lay in the arts and politics, ‘but I agreed to do it for him.’ He found an American backer, Jesse Mack Robinson, and in February 1962 the first YSL collection was shown in a small villa in Passy to a packed crowd of fashion cognoscenti. It nodded towards the sobriety of Balenciaga and the reviews were ecstatic; Life magazine announced, ‘The best collection of suits since Chanel.’
It was the second collection, six months later, which established him as the man who was to dominate international fashion for two decades. It gave a glossy spin to youthful styles culled from the street, introducing the tunic over a pencil skirt, the Norman smock and the upmarket version of the working man’s pea jacket. In this Saint Laurent’s work paralleled that of the young Chanel who had plagiarised the clothes of French sailors and Scottish ghillies.
Twenty years later Saint Laurent reflected, ‘The things I like best of all that I have done are the ones I borrowed from a man’s wardrobe: the blazer, the trouser suit, the trench coat, knickerbockers, shorts, the safari jacket, the T-shirt, the suit, the whole suit idiom, the ambiguity of all that interests me.’ The potent sexual content of androgynous dressing was a factor. Like most homosexual fashion designers, he adored women as long as they had boyish bodies yet, unlike some of the others, he created clean-lined, rational clothes which flattered the most womanly of figures. Breasts did not actually frighten him, but he liked them small, free and pert in a transparent chiffon shirt under a strict tuxedo rather than magnified into cushiony cleavage by archaic corsetry. His way was the way young women of the 1960s and 1970s perceived themselves—slender and lithe with an up-front, natural coquetry. Like them, he hated what he called ‘transvestite’ or ‘Easter Parade’ clothing, the elaborate, tortured confections which betray the essential misogyny of so many male designers.
