As this year draws to a close, a remembrance of a "couturier français."
Pagination
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Then there were the modern women from the life of Saint Laurent: his mother, the elegant Lucienne, 95 - his first muse - as well as those who followed her, including the wild, bewitchingly androgynous Betty Catroux; the wonderful and willing Loulou de la Falaise; Mounia, a black supermodel (a concept Saint Laurent had pioneered); and Catherine Deneuve, incomparable and august in a black satin trench coat of a style so timeless that it, as much as the wheat she carried, somehow challenged the very idea of dying.
The Saint Laurent obsequies were triumphant in other ways: More than the sisterhood of the travelling pantsuit was represented; also to be felt was the liberation of a brotherhood, which was only fitting. Saint Laurent was the archetypal "Sister Boy" who was bullied in the schoolyard and came out the victor. Along the way, he designed costumes for Austrian actor Helmut Berger to wear in Conversation Piece, a movie directed by Berger's lover, Luchino Visconti, in 1974 that was a veritable apogee of gay chic. And the normally obstreperous Bergé - as close to Saint Laurent for 50 years as pages in a book - was brave: At the podium, he expressed his respect and love; then he returned to his seat as the church rang with the recorded voice of Jacques Brel singing "The Song of Old Lovers," addressed to a sweet amour.
In a profile of Bergé published in The New Yorker in 1994, Jane Kramer, writing about the relationship between him and Saint Laurent, spoke of "the furies of dependence and regret of two aging men who cannot untangle their destinies."
Another man of letters, Edmund White, in a 1994 profile of Saint Laurent written for The Sunday Times magazine, revealed that these were also themes in the designer's own thinking. Talking about Bergé, Saint Laurent told White, "We like each other so much, but we don't live together anymore. The business is an eagle with two heads." Maybe that's just the way it is with all last emperors.
To be sure, to be French was another point to be made by Bergé in bidding his final adieu. He compared Saint Laurent to other French cultural icons, including poet Pierre de Ronsard, landscape architect André Le Nôtre, composer Maurice Ravel and painter Henri Matisse, and said that Saint Laurent's gravestone would bear nothing but his name and the words "couturier français."
At the time of Saint Laurent's ascendancy, even French fashion had assumed an atmosphere of airless contrivance. He shifted attention from shapes to attitudes, which is perhaps his ultimate contribution to the world history of fashion. In a 1959 television interview, he was already boasting, "My collection has no lines - that's very important. Fashion locked itself into geometric shapes or highly constructed designs, whereas now it's more casual, more flexible, more natural." Proud, he was also prescient, already predicting "The lines are becoming blurred."
And with his great help, did they ever! Male and female. Bohemian and bourgeois. The runway and the street. Yesterday and tomorrow. City and town. Home and abroad. Fuchsia and orange. Joy and pain. He brought them all together with all the strength and magic that is sometimes required to bridge the beautiful and the real.
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