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Yves Saint Laurent, 1936-2008
As this year draws to a close, a remembrance of a "couturier français."
By David Livingstone
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An old photocopy of a page from somewhere with three drawings and a statement by Yves Saint Laurent: "What we imagine may be very beautiful, but nothing replaces reality."
Coming from Saint Laurent, who was famous for his fondness for altered states, it has always struck me as an odd remark. He never seemed to be, in any way, bound to the ordinary.
It started like a storybook. In 1958, at the age of 21, Saint Laurent made his debut at Christian Dior. His trapeze dress rocked. His career skipped the mundane and went straight to fabulous.
Saint Laurent arrived in fashion's forest as a fawn, all eyes and jumpy. But besides bad nerves, he had bold talent and something that his partner, Pierre Bergé, once described as "the great will of the weak."
In 1961, Saint Laurent launched his own couture house; in 1966, he made ready-to-wear clothing with the opening of the first of many Rive Gauche boutiques. The 1970s were even headier: He created a perfume called Opium. Life was lush; the crowd was fast.
In the 1980s, magnificence slowly reverted to poignancy. His clothes were being shown in museums, and the man gave himself to remembrance. The figure on the runway was a sorrowful hulk. In Yves Saint Laurent: His Life and Times, a documentary film released in 2002 - the year he retired - he recalls the serenity of his childhood in Algeria and cites Marcel Proust, who believed that true paradise is the one you lost, as a favourite author.
Drugs, drink, nostalgia, reverie, melancholy, quietude: Saint Laurent found many ways to lose himself, but these were never replacements for reality - just aspects of it. And when the designer died - June 1, 2008 - nothing could have been more real than the sense of loss his death occasioned. Nothing, that is, except the true, hard fact of all that he had accomplished.
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, wife of the president of France, wore pants to his funeral in Paris - evidence that Saint Laurent made not only beautiful garments but also important ones: pants, pantsuits, pea jackets, Le Smoking jackets and Le Smoking dresses that wound their way into the lives of modern women.
Yves Saint Laurent's modern woman on the next page
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