Scene from Yves Saint Laurent. Photo / Supplied.
As a rule, the lives of fashion designers don't make for good films. They may be surrounded by colour, glamour and drama, but their own back stories - a ready-to-wear mix of rags to riches and, in some cases, back to rags again - are mostly of minority interest.
Only Coco Chanel's scandalous life has ever translated well to the big screen, and then only because many of her lovers (the 2nd Duke of Westminster, Pierre Reverdy, the surrealist poet and, reportedly, Igor Stravinsky) were arguably as colourful as she.
There could be another exception. The first of two Yves Saint Laurent biopics to be released this year is playing to packed cinemas in France and Britain. It is an affectionate, possibly hagiographic portrait of the designer, who died in 2008, made in collaboration with Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent's partner, who guards the image and legacy of the greatest designer of the second half of the 20th century.
Ask a fashion expert which two designers shaped the modern woman's wardrobe, and most will nominate Chanel and YSL. Both applied the rationality of men's clothing, designed for an active life, to womenswear, while sacrificing nothing of seductiveness.
"Yves Saint Laurent revolutionised fashion," said Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, counting it a privilege to have modelled for him. "He created an inspired, vivid universe that overturned conventions and conformity. With Saint Laurent, art became fashion - and fashion an art."
Chanel had put women into trousers in their leisure time; Saint Laurent gave us trousers for day and evening, too. He gave women the trouser suit and Le Smoking (Ellen DeGeneres' Oscars night outfit was a descendant of this tuxedo). He adapted the khaki linens of the explorer to create the classic safari suit that has surfaced in some collection or other every summer since.
He took the sailor's pea coat, the Norman agricultural worker's cotton smock, the sportsman's blazer and his shorts, the military man's trench coat and the grouse-moor stalker's plus-fours or knickerbockers, and gave them to women, urging his models to thrust their hands into their pockets and swagger a bit. Catherine Deneuve summed it up when Saint Laurent designed the clothes for her 1967 film, Belle de Jour: "I am dressed by Saint Laurent. I like my clothes to be modern, enticing, with a little bit of a come-on."
The come-on was always there. Along with eveningwear of ornamented luxury and richness, St Laurent also sent the first transparent little black dress out on to the runway, and the closing scenes of countless collections would give photographers the most tender shots of almost-bare breasts. His clothes, Hamish Bowles, of US Vogue, reflected recently, "gave his pan-generational clients an unparalleled assurance and an insouciant panache - sex appeal without vulgarity".
Saint Laurent's life wasn't nearly as tasteful. There were breakdowns, promiscuity and industrial-scale drug and alcohol consumption. Surrounded by a protective-exploitative clique, he remained an outsider who, for many reasons, never bothered to elbow his way inside. "He is simply not interested in other people," said Berge before his death. But it was that outsider status that fuelled his subversive genius.
Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent was born in 1936 in Oran, Algeria, into a large and wealthy family. He grew up a misfit in the close, conservative, Catholic community; "no doubt," he later told Le Figaro newspaper, "because I was homosexual". It was a terrible secret, a preference expressed only in furtive encounters with Arab street boys.
Gentle, fragile and timid, he was doted upon by his mother and sisters, whose dolls he dressed. He did well at school but was bullied by his classmates, who sensed the puny, artistic, unathletic and bespectacled boy was different. "Maybe," he said much later, "I didn't have what it took to be a boy."
He had, however, all the vanity and arrogance of the outcast who knows himself to be better than his tormentors. He dreamed of escape, of Paris and his "name in fiery letters on the Champs-Elysees".
Theatre and costume design were his first ambition, but at 17 he entered a competition for young fashion designers run by Paris-Match magazine and the International Wool Secretariat (IWS). In Paris with his mother to receive third prize, he met Michel de Brunhoff, the editor of French Vogue, who advised him to take a design course at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture.
He enrolled in 1954, was soon bored and, having won that year's IWS competition, was sent by de Brunhoff to show his sketchbook to Christian Dior, who hired him immediately.
When the originator of the New Look died in 1957, he had already anointed his 21-year-old apprentice his successor.
Initially, YSL did well. In 1958 he introduced the Trapeze Line, which enabled a fitted dress to flare dramatically; the next day, the press announced that "Saint Laurent has saved France".
However, in 1960, he fatefully chose to pay homage to the Beat culture of the Paris Left Bank with a smoke-wreathed collection of black leather biker jackets, poetic black cashmere polo-necks and short bubble skirts. The middle-aged matrons who bought couture were outraged. Despairing, Marcel Boussac, the owner of Dior, withdrew his support and Saint Laurent was inducted into the army - then engaged in a savage struggle against Algerian nationalists.
Just 19 days later, he entered a psychiatric hospital with his first breakdown. His treatment involved strong and addictive sedatives. By the time Berge engineered his release, two months later, he was multi-drug-dependant and utterly debilitated.
Saint Laurent never really recovered from the brutal treatment he received. He was reclusive, often petulant and difficult, and needed Berge to manage all the aspects of life he found too tedious. He acknowledged he was "not as nice" as Berge believed.
Rumours abounded of illnesses, tantrums and more breakdowns. In the 60s, the eminent fashion editor Liz Smith never left the country without her Saint Laurent file, aware that an obituary could be required at short notice.
After Saint Laurent launched his eponymous label in 1962, he rapidly became fashion's greatest innovative force since Chanel who, in 1967, aged 84, declared him her "only inheritor". Like Chanel, he perfectly answered the mood and needs of his time. Both prefigured the emancipation of women, giving them clothes in which to grasp equality.
It became easy to forget, in the decades of Saint Laurent's pills-and-cocaine-addled decline, how dramatic and beautiful those collections were. His field of reference was wide: art, theatre, history, film and geography, and always the subversive practicality of menswear reinterpreted for women and the decorated sensuality of North Africa.
Of all his collections, the Mondrian (1965), with its bright blocks of colour, the Pop-Art (1966), inspired by Andy Warhol, and the Marlene Dietrich-inspired collection of 1969 were unforgettable. "A woman in a pant suit is not masculine at all," he told the documentary team who followed him in 2003. "A severe and implacable cut only emphasises her femininity, her seductiveness, all the more."
Whether this visionary designer can now make a fitting subject for a feature film, we shall see. - Sunday Telegraph
The release date of Yves Saint Laurent in New Zealand is yet to be confirmed.
- VIVA
The woman was shaken by the incident.