by Jeanne Beker
On my way back to the tents, a woman came up to me and asked if I was a designer. “No, I’m just reporting on the shows,” I told her. “Well, you should come see me,” she said. “I’m a psychic, and I see lots of good things coming your way. Big changes. Many good things.” She scribbled down her name and address. And as I watched her disappear down the street, I somehow believed in her forecast, awed by the new-found optimism in the New York air.
ON THE EDGE
THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL DESIGNER I interviewed, even before the launch of Fashion Television, was the Italian-born genius Pierre Cardin. It was circa 1984, and Cardin had just acquired the legendary French restaurant Maxim’s. In an effort to promote the country’s culture, Air France had generously offered our entertainment news department a free trip to Paris to interview the celebrated designer, who revolutionized the fashion industry in 1960 when he famously, and controversially, introduced the idea of licensing his name. Cardin also treated our crew to a couture show at his Espace Cardin. I was awed by this charming but egotistical creator, who dreamed of one day opening a restaurant on the moon.
As recently as 2010, I had the pleasure of interviewing Cardin at length in his Paris office across from the Élysée Palace. At eighty-eight, he was as spry, astute, and productive as ever. Days earlier, he had sent a new spring collection down a Paris runway. And he delighted in showing me the sketches for a futuristic building he had designed, which was being erected outside of Venice. I was stunned by Cardin’s ability to recall names, dates, and experiences. Could it be that the secret to his sharp mind and ageless spirit was his active sex life? I commented on the fact that he was so impressively sound of mind and body. And then I asked him what shape his heart was in, romantically speaking. “Oh, I’m never alone in my bed!” he said, laughing mischievously. Evidently, his passion for work had kept Cardin young. But I was happy to hear him insinuate that a good helping of sex wasn’t hurting. It was no surprise to me that the billionaire couturier enjoyed an association with history’s most notorious playboy, the Marquis de Sade.
Now, it isn’t every day that a girl gets invited to the château of the Marquis de Sade. But when Cardin bought the historic castle of the infamous libertine, he was eager to show it off, and to establish the village of Lacoste as a cultural destination. So in July 2001, when Paris couture week wrapped, the visionary entrepreneur and philanthropist, who was then seventy-eight, invited me and 880 other guests to an unparalleled Provence experience: Cardin’s arts foundation was hosting a grande soirée at the marquis’ abandoned château, complete with a full-scale production of a new musical Cardin had commissioned, based on the legend of Tristan and Yseult, which also happened to be the name of Cardin’s new fragrance. Evidently, Cardin’s marketing savvy was still going strong.
The coveted invitation requested that we dress “léger, en noir et blanche”—lightly, in black and white. As a tribute to the infamous marquis, I was tempted to get outrageously decked out in skimpy black leather. But at the last minute, I opted for prudence, donning a lacy cocktail number and a pair of strappy Sergio Rossi stilettos, which definitely had the right S&M attitude—I knew they would be torturing me by the end of the night! And so, feeling a little like a true fashion victim, I drove past the fields of sunflowers and lavender to Lacoste, about forty kilometres east of Avignon.
I knew little of the history of de Sade’s château—only that it was to him what Walden was to Thoreau: a place of inspiration. I imagined a lush and decadent fortress. But when we finally reached the summit where the château stood, I was disappointed to find little more than ruins—a few half-demolished rooms, parts of walls and ramparts. The forty-two-room château had been destroyed in 1792. Midway through the past century, the remains of the château and its surrounding terrain were purchased by a local schoolteacher and his wife, who built a large theatre in the stone quarry on the property. It was here that the rock opera Cardin had commissioned was going to be staged.
Cardin was wandering the moonlit grounds of the château as his guests arrived. They were all dressed in black and white, with outfits that ran the gamut from jeans to evening gowns, while the designer himself looked a bit like an absent-minded professor, defying his own dress code in casual khaki and beige, glasses perched on the end of his nose, his thinning grey hair badly in need of a cut. The Champagne flowed as the spectacle began, with a Chinese acrobatic troupe dressed in space-age outfits acting as a kind of chorus. The play was bizarre and banal, and after being subjected to it for nearly two hours, guests began leaving their seats to go off in search of more Champagne.
Finally, the show ended, and then another theatrical offering was afoot. I was standing next to Cardin as we watched a horse and wagon pull up in the yard, with a white-wigged passenger, meant to be the marquis himself, aboard. The “marquis” was handcuffed and dragged off the cart. He was then escorted to a jail cell and sat down at a desk to write. Suddenly, over the loudspeaker, we heard the marquis’ words, quotes from his philosophical writings. Out of nowhere, a vinyl-clad dominatrix appeared, leading a maiden on a leash. I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch much more, but the proceedings were too preposterous to miss. Cardin looked intrigued. The dominatrix led the maiden behind a backlit screen. We watched their silhouettes as the maiden fell to her knees and slowly began licking the thighs of the dominatrix. Cardin was fixated, but I couldn’t tell whether he thought this was all very hot or all very silly.
Within a couple of minutes, the lewd act ended. I engaged Cardin in a conversation about the synergy between fashion and art. He told me that he had wanted to be an actor and dancer when he was young, but instead he began designing costumes for Jean Cocteau, the great poet, playwright, and filmmaker. I asked Cardin if he identified with the Marquis de Sade at all, at least in terms of his efforts to entertain and enlighten people. “Not exactly,” he said. “That’s not my mentality. But he was such a free writer, such a free man. And that was two centuries ago. The one thing we can at least do today is say, ‘Thank you, sir … Merci, Monsieur Marquis.’”
I reluctantly left the party at 2:00 a.m. True to form, my Sergio Rossis were killing me! But I heard that the hedonistic dancing at the château that night went on until dawn. I’m not sure just how raunchy the party got, but the Marquis de Sade would have undoubtedly been proud—and probably would have thanked Pierre Cardin not only for hosting such a theatrically wild celebration, but for trying to keep a dark sense of daring alive.
ACHING FOR ART
OF ALL THE FASCINATING PEOPLE I’m privileged to rub shoulders with on a regular basis, it’s the designers I admire the most. Their passion and creativity, coupled with their technical mastery and disciplined work habits, are a constant source of inspiration for me. Their sheer tenacity to come back each season and reinvent the wheel, as well as the courage they have to oppose convention and make their voices heard, fills me with reverence. While none of them may ever save the planet, they all make the world a more beautiful place.
For some designers—like many sensitive souls who sacrifice so much for their art—life is especially complicated and difficult. They experience a level of suffering that becomes part of their personal fabric. Of all the great designers I have met over the years, I always had the suspicion that the inimitable Yves Saint Laurent, a gentle giant of a man, had a particularly painful life. As celebrated as he was, he always seemed to exude a profound and unrelenting sadness as he struggled to come to terms with his place in an arena whose ideals and values were so rapidly changing.
Saint Laurent was born in Algeria, and his career ambitions formed when he was still in high school. He won third place in a sketching competition organized by the International Wool Secretariat and was invited to Paris for the awards ceremony. While he and his mother were there, they met the editor of the French edition of Vogue, Michel de Brunhoff, who encouraged Saint Laurent to pursue his fashion dreams. The aspiring young designer enrolled at the famous Chambre Syndicale as soon as he fini
shed high school. Before long (and shortly after winning a design competition against a young German student, Karl Lagerfeld), Saint Laurent was hired as Christian Dior’s assistant. He was only seventeen. Four years later, Dior told Saint Laurent’s mother that he had chosen her talented son to succeed him. He was only fifty-two at the time, so Saint Laurent’s mother was puzzled by his remark. But a few months later, Dior died suddenly of a massive heart attack. At the age of twenty-one, Saint Laurent took the reins at the illustrious fashion house.
He shot to international stardom with his spring 1958 collection. But the fashion world can be distressingly fickle, and his subsequent collections were panned by the press. In 1960, Saint Laurent was conscripted by the French army. After less than three weeks in the barracks, where he was hazed by fellow soldiers, he was institutionalized at a military hospital. There, he was pumped full of sedatives and subjected to electroshock therapy. He was also informed that he had been fired from Dior. In later years, Saint Laurent blamed many of his mental problems and his addiction to drugs on this wretched time in his life.
Right after his release from hospital, Saint Laurent sued Dior for breach of contract and eventually started his own label with his lover, Pierre Bergé. He democratized fashion by becoming the first French haute couturier to come out with a full line of ready-to-wear, and he opened his first Rive Gauche store in 1966, just to sell this prêt-à-porter collection. (Catherine Deneuve was his first customer.) While not always applauded by the critics, Saint Laurent’s vision was embraced by legions of stylish women, and he empowered them by offering clothes that were wearable, artful, and always in tune with the cultural zeitgeist. He and Bergé went on to rule a fashion empire that inspired a generation.
On January 7, 2002, the sixty-five-year-old designer read a statement to a group of journalists announcing his retirement. And while he spoke in that speech of his personal battles with solitude, depression, and drugs, these weren’t the reasons that Saint Laurent was stepping down. It was, according to the great designer, simply time.
Three years earlier, his company had been taken over by the French billionaire François Pinault, who also controlled the House of Gucci. It was a lucrative deal that still allowed Saint Laurent to retain control of his precious haute couture business, but it put the YSL ready-to-wear collections and accessories under the management of Gucci. The word was that Saint Laurent was outraged by the way Pinault’s company was using the YSL name, and that he became resentful of the creative direction Gucci’s head designer, the suave and talented Tom Ford, was taking with the YSL brand. Saint Laurent was simply disillusioned by how crassly commercial the fashion world had become.
“I’m afraid Yves Saint Laurent is the last one to think about elegant women,” Pierre Bergé, the designer’s long-time business partner and former lover, had told me six months earlier, at what was to be YSL’s last full couture collection. “Now things are different … Life’s changed. Maybe, in a way, it’s more modern and easier … I don’t want to argue with that. Everybody has a right to design clothes the way they feel. But for Saint Laurent, who loves and respects women and their bodies, it’s very difficult to understand the feel of today.” Bergé went on to explain that creativity, not marketing, always came first for Saint Laurent. And because of that, he was at odds with the way the fashion world now functioned. At the end of that show, Saint Laurent hinted at his impending departure. He told me, “The work is very, very hard for me now. I’m beginning to be old, and I must think about retirement.” I was saddened to think that this brilliant man would soon leave the arena that he had helped define.
Two weeks after announcing his retirement, as a kind of last hurrah and to close the spring ’02 couture collections, Saint Laurent threw open his phenomenally rich archives and staged a forty-year retrospective. It was drizzling in Paris on the night of January 22, 2002, as two thousand ardent fashion fans made their way to the Pompidou Centre to honour the man whose name had been synonymous with style for more than four decades. The three-hundred-piece gala presentation, which was watched by the public on giant screens outside the Pompidou Centre, was aimed at showing us all why Saint Laurent so rightly deserved the title of king.
It was the hottest ticket in recent Paris memory, and I was both thrilled and honoured to be among the recipients. Unfortunately, the invitation was solely for me—I wasn’t allowed to bring my cameraman, since podium space for TV crews was limited. Fashion Television would have to make do with a house tape of the show. Any quotes I got from the invited guests would have to be used for my newspaper reportage alone. And so, notebook in hand and wearing a little black dress, I took a taxi to Beaubourg, knowing that the coming fashion show would be one of the most poignant and moving I would ever see.
Outside the Pompidou Centre, scalpers were charging up to 350 euros for the chance to see the master’s last runway presentation and gawk at the bevy of international designers who had assembled to pay tribute, including Jean-Paul Gaultier, Yohji Yamamoto, Kenzo, Oscar de la Renta, Vivienne Westwood, Fernando Sanchez, Sonia Rykiel, Paul Smith, Alber Elbaz, and the retired Hubert de Givenchy. Saint Laurent’s devoted clients—from Bianca Jagger and Paloma Picasso to Nan Kempner, Diane Wolfe, and the biggest collector of them all, Mouna Ayoub—also came out in droves.
As I took my seat, watching the glitterati assemble and waiting for the show to start, I thought back to the first time I met Saint Laurent, in the mid-1980s, shortly after the launch of Fashion Television. In those days, his presentations were held in the posh mirrored ballroom of the Paris Intercontinental Hotel, with its ornate ceilings, luxe chandeliers, and small, elegant gilt chairs. The intimate atmosphere was a far cry from the media circus that high-profile fashion presentations have evolved into today. There may have been a couple of local TV news crews backstage, along with Elsa Klensch’s CNN crew, but that was about it. The media’s appetite for fashion had barely been whetted then. In retrospect, it was a peaceful time, the likes of which we’ll never see again. Nonetheless, it was wildly exciting for me to be in the midst of such grandeur, and to witness the kind of refined artistry that today has become more rare.
Saint Laurent’s vision for spring that season was particularly upbeat, with a dramatic and joyful rose motif. As we filed backstage to voice our praise, I was delighted to run into the designer’s mother, Lucienne, a thin, bird-like woman dressed to the nines in YSL couture. Madame Saint Laurent’s staunch support of her son’s work was well known, and we briefly chatted about the pride she took in his success. Backstage in the crush of well-wishers, my cameraman and I found the tired but smiling designer. Saint Laurent was known for his fragile nerves, but on that morning, he was the portrait of calm. Eyes twinkling, he generously allowed me to engage him for a few moments.
“You seem very happy today, Mr. Saint Laurent,” I said. “What makes you so happy?”
He closed his eyes briefly, basking in contentment, drinking in the moment. After a few beats, he looked into my eyes and, grinning, shrugged his huge shoulders and answered, in a great, deep voice, “I don’t know,” as if he too was surprised by his own fleeting happiness.
“Est-que c’est dur d’être un artiste?” I asked him.
“Oui,” he said, and laughed, evidently charmed by the question. “Très, très dur.”
“He is completely consumed by his work. He doesn’t conceive of the creative process without a sense of gravity, of urgency,” explained David Teboul, a filmmaker I interviewed just before the premiere of 5 avenue Marceau, his 2002 documentary about YSL. “There is an air of good feeling,” Teboul told me, speaking of the master’s work, “but the good feeling only comes when it’s over.” Teboul, who had the privilege of shadowing Saint Laurent for the three months leading up to the designer’s final fall/winter couture collection, shared some touching insights with me. He said that while Saint Laurent approached his work like a suffering artist, he was very strong mentally. “Suffering doesn’t accompany those who are mentally fragile
,” Teboul told me.
The night of the grand YSL retrospective, I was jarred by the contrast between the modern design of the industrial Pompidou Centre and the romantic, old-world splendour of the Intercontinental’s ballroom, where Saint Laurent traditionally held his shows. It struck me as emblematic of the way the fashion industry had changed. But the moment the first models came down the runway, sporting 1962-era navy pea jackets and wide, white pants, walking to the beat of the Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” we were all transported to the time when we first fell in love with fashion. For the next hour, Saint Laurent reminded us of the cupid’s role he had played in our style-conscious lives. From a dramatically simple black jumpsuit to the safari jacket worn by Claudia Schiffer, relaxed pantsuits, sheer blouses, Mondrian dresses, pop-art frocks (sent out to the tune of the Beatles’ “It’s Getting Better”), and the wild green fox jacket strutted by Naomi Campbell, the fashion dreams of my youth came rushing back. Then the exoticism crept in with a vivid rainbow of 1970s “Ballets Russes” fantasies—lavishly embroidered peasant blouses teamed with fur-trimmed vests and sumptuous ball skirts, all followed by a tribute to modern Chinoiserie. It was the stuff of which fairy tales are made.
The luxe vision continued with a larger-than-life canary-yellow evening cape worn over a sleek black velvet gown; a silver matador suit and senorita clad in black lace; gold lamé East Indian saris draped to perfection; a beautiful bride in black; jungle prints; Naomi again, this time wrapped in cream feathers and strutting to the tune of Marilyn Monroe’s “Bye Bye Baby”; and the incomparable Jerry Hall, a vision in a white satin halter gown, her feather-trimmed chiffon duster blowing in the runway breeze as speakers blared “La Vie En Rose.” It was a kaleidoscope of sensual elegance, and the essence of what Saint Laurent always stood for. The grand finale was a stream of tuxedoed models— there had been so many variations over the years. YSL’s signature “Le Smoking” tux is still a hot evening wear trend to this day.
