Yves Saint Laurent was one of the most important fashion designers of our time, a defining great and an icon of pop culture, a revolutionary who characterised his era and even posthumously continues to be a style-setting influence on media and society. His name has become a coveted brand, a luxury good, and a business model worth millions.
(...) Continue readingYves Saint Laurent found refuge in the fashion world
Yves Saint Laurent was born Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Lauren in Oran, Algeria on 1 August 1936 to the insurance director and cinema manager Charles Saint-Laurent and his wife Lucienne-Andrée Wilbaux. He was introduced to haute couture by his mother who subscribed to many French fashion magazines, and a performance of Molière’s play ‘Critique de l’École des femmes’ ignited his love of costumes. He was considered his mother’s favorite child in front of his two younger sisters, and was enthralled when she talked to her tailors about her dresses. The quiet and solitary boy had to deal with bullying at the school he attended until he graduated, which increasingly drove him to escape into the world of fashion. An advert in the French weekly magazine Paris Match prompted the 17-year-old Yves Saint Laurent from Algeria to submit three designs to the annual fashion competition of the International Wool Secretariat (IWS). An evening gown was awarded third place, and at the awards ceremony in Paris, Saint Laurent was able to make his first contacts with the fashion scene.
Rivalry with Karl Lagerfeld and work for Christian Dior
In 1954, Yes Saint Laurent started an apprenticeship as fashion and stage illustrator at the fashion school Chambre Syndicale de la Hate Couture, which, however, he prematurely terminated. That same year, he once again submitted three designs to the IWS competition, winning first place this time with a cocktail dress. With this, he moved into the focus of the German star designer Karl Lagerfeld, who had won first prize in the ‘Coat’ category in the same competition. The two winners met and came to appreciate one another, but the initial friendly bond gave way in the years that followed to an ever-increasing rivalry. Yves Saint Laurent was able to publish his fashion drawings in Vogue, and the prize-winning cocktail dress went into production at Hubert de Givenchy. Vogue’s editor-in-chief at the time, Michel de Brunhoff, introduced Saint Laurent to the design Christian Dior, who immediately gave the young talent a permanent position. After Dior’s death, Saint Laurent rose to company artistic director.
Rise to celebrated revolutionary of the fashion scene
In 1960, Yves Saint Laurent suffered a nervous breakdown when he was drafted into military service in Algeria. Treatment with electric shocks and sedatives led to a lifelong drug addiction. As a result of his illness, he lost his job at Dior, for which the fashion house was sued by Saint Laurent’s friend and life partner Pierre Bergé and had to pay 680,000 francs in compensation. With this strong capital and the investment of an American investor, Saint Laurent and Bergé founded their own fashion company, Yves Saint Laurent Couture, for which the graphic designer A.M. Cassandre designed the company logo. It became an unprecedented success story with many highlights, the greatest triumph being probably the trouser suit Le Smoking, which was celebrated as an emancipatory garment for the modern woman. Despite this, Saint Laurent continued to suffer from depression, escaping into alcohol and drugs, and was even mistakenly declared dead at one point in the 1970s. In the 1900s, he wrote prose poems in the style of Comte de Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror, and in 2002, withdrew completely from the public eye.
Yves Saint Laurent died in Paris on 1 June 2008.
Yves Saint Laurent - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
