ROGER TREDRE discusses an explosive new biography of Yves Saint Laurent
YVES SAINT LAURENT, acknowledged as the greatest fashion designer of the century, was almost destroyed by the pressures of his job, according to a biography just published.
Design writer and journalist Alice Rawsthorn outlines Saint Laurent’s life as a round of drug and alcohol binges punctuated by stays in hospital and consultations with psychotherapists. The designer’s health was shattered by the stresses of producing four collections a year. That Saint Laurent, who turned 60 this year, is still working is little short of a miracle.
Rawsthorn said: “It does place an appalling strain on individuals, particularly if they are like Saint Laurent and take an intensely aesthetic approach to design. But artists can control the timing of their output; fashion designers are expected to reinvent themselves every three months.”
Saint Laurent has described the fashion system as “quite horrible – a system of meshing cogs, a cycle that one is caught up in”. In the mid-Seventies, he confessed: “I’ve made a rope to hang myself with. I’d love to be able to do fashion when I want, but I’m a prisoner of my own commercial empire.”
Now fears are growing within the fashion world that increasing demands placed on young designers – such as John Galliano, 35, who is taking over at Christian Dior and Alexander McQueen, 27, the new design chief of Givenchy – are unreasonable.
For Galliano and McQueen, the pressures are enormous. In addition to overseeing four collections a year for Dior and Givenchy respectively, they intend to keep their own- name labels going: adding another two collections a year. Only Karl Lagerfeld among modern designers has matched such a work rate.
Some reports suggest Galliano is already feeling the strain. Last month’s collection, his last for Givenchy before moving to Dior, was described by Suzy Menkes, influential fashion editor, as “a disaster, short on ideas, with no modern focus for women”.
Designers were quick last week to acknowledge the unrelenting demands of the fashion calendar. Bella Freud, daughter of artist Lucien Freud, said: “The need to produce something new twice a year can take the pleasure out of designing. The second you finish, you have to start all over again.”
Fabio Piras, a new young name, said: “Your health really suffers. I don’t eat properly, I smoke more, I stay up until two in the morning. Your brain gets affected, and your decisions get very irrational. For a time you become a total monster.”
Saint Laurent, like many designers, used drugs as an escape. He tried marijuana in Marrakesh, and binged on opiates, acid and cocaine in the Seventies and Eighties. And he was for much of his career obliged by the mores of the times to keep quiet about his homosexuality.
By the early Eighties, Saint Laurent spent most of his time at his home in Marrakesh, dreading the call from his partner Pierre Berg, to return to Paris to prepare the next collection. In 1990, he had a breakdown and the YSL share price plummeted by 20 francs in one day after Berge announced he was suffering from “overwhelming nervous exhaustion”.
More recently, Saint Laurent has been in improved health, swapping alcohol and drugs for Coca-Cola. Journalists who spoke to him at last month’s ready-to-wear show say he seemed happier.
But then the pressure is off these days: the designer’s place in the history books is already assured, and his company was sold off three years ago to Sanofi, the French pharmaceuticals giant.
For Galliano and McQueen, the pressures are enormous. In addition to overseeing four collections a year for Dior and Givenchy respectively, they intend to keep their own- name labels going: adding another two collections a year. Only Karl Lagerfeld among modern designers has matched such a work rate.
For Galliano and McQueen the pressure will be on from next January to make the headlines and sell clothes and fragrances for their Parisian fashion houses. Bernard Arnault, chairman of the group that owns both houses, wants his new charges to do for Dior and Givenchy what Karl Lagerfeld did for Chanel – keeping the brand names in the headlines season after season by playing the media game and producing a non-stop round of spectacular collections.
Friends of McQueen, the son of a London taxi driver, suggest he may be the better equipped to cope with these pressures. In an interview in the current issue of the Face magazine, he demonstrated that he had the right attitude to his work: “At the end of the day, fashion is a wind-up. I mean, clothes – don’t take them too seriously.”