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PARIS: French fashion giant Yves Saint Laurent, one
of the great designers of the 20th century who revolutionized
women’s dress, has died at the age of 71 after a lengthy illness.
Saint Laurent, whose black
trouser suits and safari jackets became an icon of women’s
liberation in the 1960s, died late Sunday of a brain tumor, his
former lover and longtime business partner Pierre Berge said.
He had suffered poor mental and
physical health for much of his life and had been seriously ill
“for a year,” Berge
told French radio. The funeral will take
place Friday in Paris.
The reclusive designer retired
from haute couture in 2002 after four decades at the top, designing
for French actress Catherine Deneuve and using supermodels such as
Jerry Hall and Laetetia Casta to show off his clothes.
French leaders and fashion chiefs
hailed Saint Laurent as a fashion revolutionary.
“One of the greatest names of
fashion has disappeared, the first to elevate haute couture to the
rank of art,” said French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
“Yves Saint Laurent infused his
label with his creative genius, elegant and refined personality,
discreet and distinguished, during a half-century of work, in both
luxury and ready-to-wear, because he was convinced that beauty was a
necessary luxury for all men and all women,” Sarkozy said in a
statement.
Berge said Saint Laurent “knew
perfectly well that he had revolutionized haute couture, the
important place he occupied in the second half of the 20th
century.”
“Yves Saint Laurent invented
everything, revisited everything, transformed everything to the
service of a passion, to let woman shine and to free her beauty and
mystery,” said Francois Pinault, head of the PPR fashion empire in
a statement.
During his farewell in 2002,
Saint Laurent said he had “always given the highest importance of
all to respect for this craft, which is not exactly an art, but
which needs an artist to exist.”
Makings of a designer
One of a handful of designers who
dominated 20th-century fashion—with Christian Dior, Coco Chanel
and Paul Poiret—Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent was born in
Oran, Algeria, on August 1, 1936, when the North African country was
still a French territory.
A shy, lonely child, he was
taunted over his homosexuality and became fascinated by clothes.
When he first arrived in Paris in 1953, aged 17, he already had a
solid portfolio of sketches.
Vogue Editor Michel de Brunoff,
who became a key supporter, was quickly won over, and published the
images.
The following year Saint Laurent
won three of the four categories in a design competition in
Paris—the fourth went to his contemporary Karl Lagerfeld, now at
Chanel.
De Brunoff advised Christian Dior
to hire him and he rapidly became heir apparent to the great
couturier, taking over the house when Dior died suddenly three years
later.
However in 1960, Saint Laurent
was called up to fight in his native Algeria, where an independence
war was under way.
Less than three weeks later he
won an exemption on health grounds, but when he returned to Paris,
Dior had already found a replacement for him, Marc Bohan.
Success
With his associate Berge, Saint
Laurent resolved to strike out on his own, with Berge taking care of
the business side.
Saint Laurent’s success lay in
the harmony he achieved between body and garment—what he called
“the total silence of clothing.”
He was also in the right place at
the right time. He founded his own couture house at the start of the
1960s, at a time when the world was changing and there was a new
appetite for originality.
Saint Laurent rode his luck
through the rise of the youth market and pop culture fueled by the
economic boom of the 1960s, when women suddenly had more economic
freedom.
His name and the familiar YSL
logo became synonymous with all the latest trends, highlighted by
the creation of the Rive Gauche ready-to-wear label and perfume, as
well as astute licensing deals for accessories and perfumes.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s,
he set the pace for fashion around the world, opening up the
Japanese market and subsequently expanding to South Korea and
Taiwan.
Later years
But Saint Laurent’s career was
not without controversy. In 1971 a collection modeled on the styles
of World War II Paris was slammed by some American critics, and his
launch in the mid-1970s of a perfume called “Opium” brought
accusations that he was condoning drug use.
For fellow-designer Christian
Lacroix, the reason for Saint Laurent’s success was his
astonishing versatility. There had, Lacroix said, been other great
designers but none with the same range.
“Chanel, Schiaparelli,
Balenciaga and Dior all did extraordinary things. But they worked
within a particular style,” he explained. “Yves Saint Laurent is
much more versatile, like a combination of all of them.”
In his later years the depression
that had haunted him all his life became more oppressive, and at his
farewell bash in 2002 Saint Laurent admitted to having recourse to
“those false friends, which are tranquillizers and narcotics.”
--AFP
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