In 2009, Yves Saint Laurent became Forbes magazine’s “Top-Earning Dead Celebrity” of the year. From the eldest child of a French family to the most iconic fashion designer, from House of Dior to depression and drugs, the life of Yves Saint Laurent was definitely a complicated but colorful one.
Yves Henri-Donat Matthieu-Saint Laurent was born in 1936 in Oran, French Algeria. And while his family was sociable, Yves was often bullied at school, so he had to escape into his dreams about Paris – sketching dresses, reading his mother’s fashion magazines, and thinking about the spectacular future waiting for him.
And dreams didn’t wait long to come true. At the age of 17, Yves moved to Paris to study Fashion Design, where his talent was recognized and nurtured. After winning over Karl Lagerfelt in an International Wool Secretariat competition for the design of a cocktail dress, Yves brought the attention of French Vogue to his name. Shortly after the editor of Vogue noticed him, Saint Laurent became Dior’s design assistant. And when Christian Dior died, Yves was proudly named Dior’s successor and charged with safeguarding the future of the world’s famous fashion house.
And as everybody was joyous about Yves Saint Laurent, people started doubting him at some point. And two years later, when the 24-year old young man was conscripted into the French army, the House of Dior took advantage and replaced Yves with his former assistant Marc Bohan. Banished from his paradise, Saint Laurent fell apart, ending up with a mental breakdown.
Luckily for Yves, he wasn’t alone. Right after his Dior debut, he met Pierre Bergé, who leveled his personal and professional relationship. Bergé helped Saint Laurent to get out of the hospital, helping to set up his label, whose three entwined initials would make a whole revolution in the fashion world.
Their roles were pretty clear: Yves was a suffering and vulnerable artist who needed somebody to save him, and Pierre was a controlling protector who needed to be needed. The story of Yves and Pierre is a complex, passionate, drug-laced, and decadent love- story. “Yves depended enormously on Pierre, and he would never have been the success he was without him,” says Susan Train, a friend of both of them and Condé Nast’s Parisian bureau chief.
However, the success took some time: the very first Yves Saint Laurent Show in 1962 had an average response. But in the following years, his success soared with his timeless fashion icons: Le Smoking, the Saharienne safari jacket, and the Mondrian-print shift dress.
Within the next five years, YSL’s name appeared on over 150 products, including accessories and perfumes. In these two decades, Saint Laurent indeed created fashion history. In 1966, he became the first couture designer to bring up the prêt-à-porter (ready to wear) collections. And just like that, the young, shy Yves had gone, replaced by a confident, charming man who had become his brand’s incarnation.
What set Yves Saint Laurent aside from other fashion designers was his bold approach to his celebration of female sexuality and blurring the lines between women’s and men’s fashion. In 1983, a fashion empress Diana Vreeland referred to Yves as “a living genius.”
In 1993, in a multi-million-pound deal, YSL was sold to Elf Sanofi and then to Gucci in 1999. And while Yves remained its main figurehead and the paparazzi-friendly man, his public drug and alcohol addiction grew deeper, mixing with fierce and violent rows with Pierre. Eventually, Bergé had to move out, unable to cope with Yves’s behavior.
As the years passed, they continued to work as a symbiotic double act to the end, but they both had other passions, interests, and lovers.
Yves was exhausted by the fashion treadmill, and finally, he simply withdrew. On the 40th anniversary of the YSL’s founding, Yves presented his final collection at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Catherine Deneuve, a French model and actress, said, “For women, for fashion, it is the end of an era.”
And as the two films are trying to give us a glance at the life of Yves Saint Laurent, the man himself is still an enigma for us. And it’s not hard to understand the fascination with Yves’s story – the saga of a man who remains a mystery that mixes public success and private suffering.
Yves Saint Laurent was an absolute genius, and there’s no doubt that he’s left an enormously successful legacy that will continue to inspire designers for many following years. All his dreams did come true – from a nervous and shy little boy, he became one of the greatest names in fashion history.
