YSL: The King of Fashion

When Yves Saint Laurent told the world this week he
was bowing out, it was truly the end of a fashion
era, writes SUSANNAH FRANKEL.

Hidden away in the suburbs of Paris is the Yves Saint Laurent Museum. With its polished wood floors, acreage of windows and floor-to-ceiling gold-leaf doors, this temple houses 5000 outfits, 2000 pairs of shoes and more than 10,000 pieces of jewellery.

The curator calls the clothes "the sleeping bee-oo-tee-fuls". They hang in air-conditioned vaults, or lie, covered carefully with blankets of white tissue-paper, in huge flat drawers. No one is allowed to touch them unless they're wearing pristine white gloves.

Here's the Iris cardigan, inspired by Van Gogh's painting, made entirely by hand and said to feature 250,000 sequins in 22 colours, 200,000 individually threaded pearls and 250 metres of ribbon. There's le smoking, a man's tuxedo, reinterpreted by Saint Laurent in 1966 to suit a woman's form. It caused a scandal when it came out, but went on to become a 20th-century classic.

The museum is the only one of its kind in the world and the first given over entirely to the work of a single fashion designer. But then, Yves Saint Laurent, more than anyone else, is responsible for informing the way modern women and men dress. There isn't a day in the life of any modern woman reaching into her wardrobe that isn't somehow affected by Yves Saint Laurent.

Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent was born in 1936 in Oran, Algeria, to well-off parents. His father, Charles, owned a chain of cinemas. His mother, Lucienne, was a beauty who loved to entertain and doted on her son.

"I can still see my mother," Yves Saint Laurent once wrote, "about to leave for a ball, coming to kiss me goodnight, wearing a long dress of white tulle with pear-shaped sequins."

An overly sensitive, neurotic child, he suffered badly at school. He has since maintained that the cause of any bullying was his homosexuality, but it's safe to say that rather more than that set him apart.

"I was born with a nervous depression," he told the French daily Le Figaro in 1991 after a stint in rehabilitation. On Monday, when announcing his retirement, he attributed his success at least in part to that same frailty.

The mental breakdowns and lapses into drug and alcohol abuse that have plagued him throughout his life also furnished him with an unswerving ambition to prove his persecutors wrong. He has said: "I told myself, 'One day you will be famous.' My name will be written in fiery letters on the Champs-Elysees."

Fame was not long in coming to Saint Laurent. At 17 he won a prize in a competition for the Wool Secretariat for a little black cocktail dress and, not long afterwards, the then editor of French Vogue introduced him to Christian Dior. Saint Laurent went to work with Dior at the height of his fame and his first collection for the couturier, featuring "trapeze line" dresses - fitted to the waist then short and flared - earned him headlines that were hysterical even by fashion standards. "Saint Laurent has saved France," they bellowed.

When, less than two years later, Dior died suddenly of a heart attack, Saint Laurent found himself, at only 21, presiding over France's most high-profile fashion house. He was, and remains, the world's youngest couturier.

In 1960, Saint Laurent was drafted into the army and promptly had a nervous breakdown. Pierre Berge, whom the designer had met just before being called up, visited him in hospital every day. It was the beginning of the most romantic personal and creative business relationship in fashion history.

By 1961, Saint Laurent was living with Berge, who took on the managerial side of the business. Berge sued Dior for breach of contract when the house failed to reinstate the designer after his illness, and with the proceeds set up Saint Laurent in his own business.

The partners rented a two-room workshop, with a skeleton staff poached from Dior. By 1989 the YSL Group was valued at £347 million ($1.158 billion) after going public on the Paris stockmarket in a heavily over-subscribed issue. Four year later the French conglomerate Elf-Sanofi acquired the group.

Despite the sale of the company bearing his name, Saint Laurent carried on designing the twice-yearly women's ready-to-wear show up until 1999. In November 1999 Gucci acquired Sanofi and two months later Tom Ford, the designer responsible for the regeneration of Gucci, was installed as creative director at Yves Saint Laurent men's and women's ready-to-wear, leaving Saint Laurent in charge only of haute couture, in which every garment is hand-crafted and sells for tens of thousands of dollars.

Saint Laurent is an icon in France. His portrait graces the last 5, 10 and 50-franc pieces minted before the introduction of the euro. On St Valentine's Day 2000, French lovers received mail stamped with designs based on his Pop Art heart images from the 1970s.

At 1.9m tall, the designer is imposing. Yet he remains painfully shy and reclusive, rarely subjecting himself to the glare of the spotlight. So it was with much dignity, and considerable courage, that he appeared in person in front of a roomful of journalists at his Paris headquarters to announce his retirement.

Reading from a piece of paper, head bowed, dressed in black and visibly moved, he said he would be bidding "adieu" to fashion, ending a stellar career of more than 40 years.

"I tell myself that I created the wardrobe of the contemporary woman, that I participated in the transformation of my times," Saint Laurent said. "For a long time now, I have believed that fashion was not only supposed to make women beautiful, but to reassure them, to give them confidence, to allow them to come to terms with themselves. However, I have chosen today to bid adieu to the profession that I have loved so much. My next fashion show, held on January 22, will be my last."

Finally he thanked Francois Pinault, whose Artemis holding company presides over Yves Saint Laurent Haute Couture, for "allowing him to harmoniously put a full-stop to this marvellous adventure and for believing, as I do, that the haute couture of this house should stop with my departure".

He departed immediately after reading the statement, leaving Berge, no longer his lover but still his business partner, to answer any questions. It was, of course, Berge who memorably once said when his friend was at his lowest ebb: "When the time comes, I will decide without hesitation to close down the couture house.

"I must do that for Yves. It would be a nonsense to carry on without him. Look at Chanel without Mademoiselle Chanel, and Dior without Christian Dior. It is more than nonsense. It has no integrity, it is a sham." He appears to have been true to his word.

But, according to Berge, Saint Laurent is retiring in part because he is uncomfortable with the direction the fashion world is taking. "He no longer feels at ease in a world where people use women instead of serving them," Berge said. Alluding to Saint Laurent's status at the top of the fashion industry tree, he added: "We have entered the era of marketing at the expense of creativity. It's not much fun playing a tennis match when you are all alone."

It's no secret that all has not been well at the house of Yves Saint Laurent for some time. Despite critical acclaim for every recent collection, speculation that he would retire because of ill health has persisted for the past 10 years.

In 1998, when Saint Laurent gave up designing the ready-to-wear arm of his label, Berge said that the designer did not feel part of "the circus" fashion had become.

The battle lines were drawn last year when Gucci's creative director, Ford, announced that he would no longer require the services of one of Saint Laurent's appointees, Hedi Slimane, as designer of YSL Rive Gauche menswear, and that he would henceforth be designing the collection himself.

Slimane wasted no time moving across to the arch-rival house Christian Dior, and Saint Laurent pointedly took pride of place at the unveiling of Slimane's Dior Homme collection but failed to attend Ford's debut YSL Rive Gauche menswear collection.

But despite the designer's own misgivings over the monster designer fashion has by now become, fashion responded this week only by paying him tribute.

The last word goes to Alexander McQueen, the young British designer who sold a 51 per cent stake in his business to Gucci just over a year ago and who is at the forefront of contemporary fashion . From his London office, McQueen said simply: "Long live the king."

- INDEPENDENT