Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent (1 August 1936 – 1 June 2008), better known as Yves Saint Laurent (, , ; ), was a French fashion designer who founded his eponymous fashion label in 1962. He was the last of the grand couturiers and is regarded as one of the foremost designers of the 20th century.
Saint Laurent received numerous distinctions for his work, including the International Fashion Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1982. In 1983, he became the first living fashion designer to be honored with a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2007, he was elevated to the rank of Grand officier de la Légion d'honneur.
Early life and education Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent was born on 1 August 1936, in Oran, Algeria, the eldest of three children of French (Pieds-Noirs) parents, Charles and Lucienne Andrée Mathieu-Saint-Laurent. His family was wealthy; Charles ran an insurance company and owned a chain of movie theatres. Yves grew up, with his sisters Michèle and Brigitte, in a villa in town, spending summers at the nearby resort of Trouville. He attended a strict Catholic school, where he was bullied and beaten by classmates for being effeminate. After seeing a play for which Christian Bérard had designed the sets and costumes, he began doing the same, creating miniature theaters and designing costumes for the local dance school. By age 13, he was transcribing and illustrating books; in 1949 and 1950, he wrote two children's books. He had always been preoccupied with fashion; as early as age three, he would become upset if he didn't like what his mother was wearing. In 1953 and 1954, inspired by fashion magazines and the models Bettina Graziani and Suzy Parker, he created 11 paper dolls and 500 garments and accessories for them.
In 1953, age 17, Saint Laurent submitted three sketches to a contest for young fashion designers organized by the International Wool Secretariat in Paris; he won third prize in the dress category. The following year, he competed again and won first prize. He met Vogue France editor Michel de Brunhoff, who encouraged him to enroll at École de la chambre syndicale de la couture parisienne. In 1955, he graduated at the top of his class. de Brunhoff looked at his sketches and saw that they were very similar to those of Christian Dior, but he knew that they were original. He arranged for Dior and Saint Laurent to meet on June 20, 1955; Dior hired him on the spot.
Career
The House of Dior 1955-1960 Saint Laurent spent his first year at the House of Dior designing accessories and submitting sketches, with Dior accepting an increasing number. "Dior fascinated me," Saint Laurent later recalled. "I couldn't speak in front of him. He taught me the basis of my art. Whatever was to happen next, I never forgot the years I spent at his side."
With the death of Dior in 1957, at age 21, Saint Laurent became the head designer of the House of Dior, the most influential and profitable fashion house in the world. The simple, flaring lines of his first collection for Dior, called the "Trapeze" line, introduced a wedge-shaped silhouette, which was a variation on Dior's A line. Dresses in the collection featured a narrow shoulder that flared gently to a hem, widening from a small head and shoulders to a full pleated or stiffened hem that just covered the knee. In his second collection for Dior, presented for fall 1958, Saint Laurent lowered hemlines by three to five inches, which some critics and buyers considered a major misstep. Soon after, Marc Bohan was hired to assist Saint Laurent, and the spring 1959 Dior collection brought lengths back to the knee in a well-received collection inspired by the 1930s, noted for its suits and sailor collars, and for making the common middy blouse high-fashion. Following the critical success of his debut "Trapeze" collection in 1958, Saint Laurent achieved widespread celebrity as a leading representative of a new post-war cultural generation. That same year, The New York Times designated him one of France's "Fabulous Five" young cultural icons alongside couturier peers and artists, grouping him with painter Bernard Buffet, novelist Françoise Sagan, actress Brigitte Bardot, and filmmaker Roger Vadim.
Saint Laurent's fall 1959 collection focused on a skirt shape that bloused, or "pouffed", over a narrow band to hit at mid-knee for day wear and flared below the knee to the floor for evening dresses. At least one skirt of similar shape had appeared at Dior for fall of 1955, and skirts of this form had been shown by Simonetta in 1957 and 1958, but Saint Laurent's versions were criticized for being too short and too restrictive, and were called "hobble" skirts. The silhouette fit trends of the time, also conveyed by Simonetta and Patrick de Barentzen, which included very high collars, jeweled chokers, India-inspired evening wear and 12-inch chignons. Saint Laurent's spring 1960 Dior collection was more sedate, with tailored suits of full smocks over narrow skirts. His fall 1960 collection was his most controversial; dresses were narrow waistless columns with balloon skirts that ended at the top of the knee, which was scandalously short for the time. The inspiration for this look was the bohemian dress of young intellectuals and artists; other garments were inspired by bikers' black leather jackets, remade in mink-trimmed glossy crocodile, with velvet palazzo pants. This Rive Gauche 'Beat Look' included black leather suits and coats, knitted caps and high turtleneck collars, all inappropriate for the mature haute couture client. Saint Laurent failed to court buyers and press and the collection was his last for Dior.
In August 1960, during the Algerian War, Saint Laurent was called for his compulsory military service. He was in the ranks for 19 days before the stress of hazing by fellow soldiers led to him being admitted to a military hospital. There he received news that he had been fired from Dior and replaced by Marc Bohan. This exacerbated Saint Laurent's nervous condition, and he was transferred to Val-de-Grâce military hospital, where he was given psychoactive drugs and subjected to electroshock therapy; he would later trace this as the beginning of his mental problems and addictions. His lover, the art dealer Pierre Bergé, arranged for his release and took him home to recover. Saint Laurent sued Dior for breach of contract and won the equivalent of $135,000. US. With that, and an investment from the American businessman J. Mack Robinson and the cosmetics company Charles of the Ritz, among others, the pair was able to establish Saint Laurent's own house, Yves Saint Laurent, or YSL.
The YSL years While Bergé, as YSL General Director, dealt with a law suit from Dior over the fact that 25 senior Dior staff had left to join YSL, Saint Laurent worked on his spring 1962 collection which was presented at the new atelier at 30 bis rue Spontini. This collection, of crisp, youthful garments, included pea coats, tweed suits in unusual color combinations, pear-shaped draped skirts, and the lingerie-inspired "brassière dress". Everything was wearable and elegant and the collection was snapped up by buyers. Saint Laurent's second collection, for fall 1962, was celebrated as his best to date. It featured India-inspired evening dress in rich, mink-trimmed satin and a mostly dark, rich color palette. Raja coats and pull-over tubular dresses or barrel skirts, and wide-sleeved satin fishermen's smocks, were paired with turbans and dark stockings and elaborate jewellery. Fashion writers ranked the collection with those of Givenchy and Balenciaga; Saint Laurent was now at the pinnacle of Paris couture.
In the 1960s, Saint Laurent introduced or contributed to fashion trends such as the beatnik look (1962), pea coats (1962), smock tops (1962-63), thigh-high boots (1963, via his chosen shoe designer Roger Vivier), the Le Smoking women's tuxedo suit (1966), platform shoes (1967, courtesy of Roger Vivier), and safari jackets for men and women (1967).
Throughout the 1960s, Saint Laurent followed the international youth culture taking shape, a tendency already evident in his fall 1960 Dior collection. Like designers and others of the period, he kept an eye on the pace-setting streets of London and also on the hippie movement emanating from the US.Multiple sources: He responded to the spare precision of André Courrèges's groundbreaking 1964 and '65 Space Age designs with the now-famous stark, geometric shift dresses of his 1965 Mondrian collection but faltered a bit with the slightly passé Pop Art dresses in his autumn 1966 line.
In September 1966, Saint Laurent presented a full prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) line; after Dior's massive success with ready-to-wear in the late 1940s, all fashion houses followed. This line was presented at YSL's first Rive Gauche boutique at 21 rue de Tournon. An early customer was Catherine Deneuve, for whom Saint Laurent later designed costumes in films including Belle de Jour (1967), Heartbeat (1968), and Mississippi Mermaid (1969).
The revolutionary societal movements of the time transformed Saint Laurent's thinking and he began to base his work more on what women were actually wearing than on abstract ideas in his head.Multiple sources: A number of his designs were inspired by women's lives in the sociopolitical climate of the time, particularly the trousers he showed in 1968 after witnessing the epochal French uprisings of that year. Saint Laurent is often said to have been the main designer responsible for making women wearing pants more widely acceptable,Multiple sources: after André Courrèges made the first strides in that direction in 1964.
Also more acceptable in the late 1960s was nudity. Saint Laurent had initially been appalled at Rudi Gernreich's topless swimsuits of 1964, but in 1966 he showed A-line minidresses of transparent fabric separated by strategically placed horizontal bands of Space Age silver sequins. By 1968, he was showing fully transparent tops as nudity became more common in high fashion and on stage and screen, and sheer blouses would remain a mainstay of his showings for the next ten years, diminishing to only one or two presented in each collection after the vogue for nudity waned by the mid-1970s.
The social transformations of the late 1960s also influenced how Saint Laurent himself dressed, as he wore more relaxed clothes reflecting the era's youth movements and let his hair grow. His new personal wardrobe led to him presenting his first men's ready-to-wear collection in 1969.
In September 1968, Saint Laurent opened the first Rive Gauche store in the United States on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. While in New York, he attended the exhibition of his costume sketches for ballet and theatrical productions at the Wright Hepburn Webster Gallery. During this trip Saint Laurent and his entourage were denied entry to Trader Vic's restaurant because the women were wearing pants.
In 1971, he posed for a natural-looking nude photograph as part of the advertising campaign for his Pour Homme men's fragrance.
During the 1970s, Saint Laurent came to be considered the most prominent designer in the world,Multiple sources; adapting his designs to modern women's needs.Multiple sources: Though Karl Lagerfeld and Jean Muir occasionally approached him in critical appraisal and popularity, Saint Laurent remained the strongest influence on fashion throughout the decade, an era when the societal advances of the 1960s required designers to defer to the public's demands for practicality and comfort. Even in his sometimes lavish Russian peasant collections of the middle of the decade,Multiple sources: the clothes themselves remained comfortable and wearable.