Yves Saint Laurent (designer)

Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent (French [iv sɛ̃ lɔʁɑ̃]; * 1 August 1936 in Oran, Algeria; † 1 June 2008 in Paris) was an internationally renowned French fashion designer who founded the fashion company Yves Saint Laurent in Paris in 1961.

Dubbed a "revolutionary" of fashion design during his lifetime, Saint Laurent had many style-defining effects in the fashion world and is still acknowledged as a luminary in the field of upscale, elegant women's fashion after his death. The couturier, who worked in Paris from 1953 to 2002 and began his career as an assistant to Christian Dior, embodied French haute couture fashion like few other designers. Saint Laurent's greatest influence came in 1967 with the creation of a trouser suit for women ("Le Tuxedo"), which emphasized the female form in an elegant and businesslike way that also had an emancipatory effect.

The company, and with it the Yves Saint Laurent brand, or YSL, continues to exist today and was owned by the Gucci Group from late 1999, which in turn was gradually bought out by the French PPR Group (Kering S.A. since 2013) from 1999 to 2004. The company offers high-priced prêt-à-porter apparel for men and women, as well as leather goods, footwear, watches, jewelry, eyewear, accessories, fragrances and cosmetics in the luxury goods segment through its own network of boutiques and upscale retailers worldwide. From March 2012 to March 2016, Hedi Slimane was the chief designer of all the fashion collections of the house. Under Slimane, the fashion division was renamed Saint Laurent Paris in 2012, with the company itself continuing to trade as Yves Saint Laurent S.A.S. A relaunch of the haute couture collection, which had been discontinued in 2002, was floated by Slimane in 2012, but has so far not materialized except for a few individual pieces. Belgian Anthony Vaccarello was appointed Slimane's successor in April 2016.

Life and work

Saint Laurent was the son of Charles Saint-Laurent, the owner of an insurance company and a cinema chain, and his wife Lucienne-Andrée, née Wilbaux (1914-2010). The grandparents of both families, in turn, came from Alsace-Lorraine and fled to North Africa during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. Yves was the eldest child and was born a year after his parents' marriage, followed by two daughters, Michèle and Brigitte. He grew up in the city of Oran in Algeria and attended high school there until he earned his baccalauréat. During a theatre performance of Molière's "Critique de l'École des femmes" (Critique of the School of Women) he discovered his passion for costumes. Thus, at the age of eleven, he was already making sketches and designs for the stage. The world of fashion was also a refuge for Saint Laurent from the bullying of his classmates. He was his mother's favorite child, who subscribed to French fashion magazines and enjoyed discussing her new clothes with her tailors.

In 1953, in response to an advertisement in Paris Match, Saint Laurent submitted three of his own designs to the annual fashion competition of the International Wool Secretariat (IWS) from Algeria while still seventeen years old, and achieved third place with an evening gown. After initial contacts at the awards ceremony in Paris, Saint Laurent began training as a fashion and stage designer at the fashion school of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture of the Paris Fashion Federation in 1954, which he did not finish. That same year, he again submitted three designs to the IWS fashion illustration competition, including that of a cocktail dress, with which he won first place. Karl Lagerfeld won first prize in the 'coat' category in the same competition. An initial friendship between Saint Laurent and Lagerfeld developed into rivalry over the years. Saint Laurent's fashion drawings were published in Vogue magazine and the cocktail dress went into production at Givenchy. Michel de Brunhoff, the director of French Vogue at the time, introduced the young designer to Christian Dior. Saint Laurent worked for him until the latter's death in 1957, and at the age of 21 was promoted to artistic director by Dior's owner, Marcel Boussac, after Boussac had actually wanted to close the company but had been urged to continue by licensees. In March 1958 Saint Laurent met his future partner and business partner Pierre Bergé at a dinner with the French fashion journalist Marie-Louise Bousquet (Harper's Bazaar).

In 1960, Saint Laurent was called up for military service in Algeria, where the Algerian war had been raging since 1955, and suffered a nervous breakdown before he left. He was transferred to a psychiatric institution at the Val-de-Grâce hospital, where he was treated with electric shocks and drugs (sedatives). A lifelong drug addiction was the result. His employer, the fashion house Dior, therefore released him from his employment contract. This circumstance was not inconvenient for Boussac, as he no longer agreed with Saint Laurent's creations for Dior. Bergé, on the other hand, believed in Saint Laurent's talent and did everything he could to get him released from the psychiatric ward. Then Saint Laurent and he sued Dior for breach of contract and received 680000 francs in compensation. With this start-up capital, the two were able to set up their own business in 1961. Through the investment of the US financier J. Mack Robinson (1923-2014) from Georgia, who held 80% of the shares, Saint Laurent and Bergé founded the fashion company Yves Saint Laurent Couture. Graphic designer A. M. Cassandre contributed the YSL logo in 1963. Saint Laurent and Bergé parted on friendly terms in 1976, but they remained business partners and confidants. Bergé continued to look after Saint Laurent and stood by him in his worst times. From the mid-1970s, Saint Laurent's health increasingly deteriorated; in 1977, a false press report even announced his demise. With short recovery periods, he was plagued by medication side effects, anxiety, nervous breakdowns and depression, and took refuge in alcohol and drug abuse. In the 1990s he wrote prose poems in the style of Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror.

After Saint Laurent retired from the fashion business in 2002, he lived largely in isolation at the Villa Majorelle in Marrakech, at his art-decorated Paris apartment on Rue de Babylone, and at the Norman Château Gabriel in Deauville, whose rooms were named after characters from Marcel Proust's novel cycle "A la recherche du temps perdu."

In 2007, Saint Laurent was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor (glioblastoma). Shortly before his death on June 1, 2008 in Paris, he and Bergé sealed their lifelong bond with a formal marriage. The Catholic funeral service at St-Roch Parish Church (Paris) was attended by 800 invited mourners, including President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni, Bernadette Chirac, Bertrand Delanoë, Farah Diba, Catherine Deneuve, Loulou de la Falaise, Betty Cartoux and numerous fashion designer friends including Sonia Rykiel, Christian Lacroix, Jean Paul Gaultier, Valentino Garavani, John Galliano and Marc Jacobs. Saint Laurent's ashes were scattered in the rose garden of the Jardin Majorelle of his villa in Marrakech, which he and Bergé had purchased in 1980.

Memorial plaque for Yves Saint Laurent in the Jardin Majorelle

Company History

Yves Saint Laurent

Saint Laurent's first collection for the Dior company in January 1958, the "Ligne Trapèze", was an overwhelming worldwide success. The "Trapeze Line" freed women from the constraint of the wasp waist and presented them in a less stiff form in a nevertheless elegant way. He liberated the costumes once again, this time from padding and stiffening at the waist, bust and shoulders, but without sacrificing the grandeur and fullness of the costumes à la Dior. Saint Laurent dramatically rejuvenated and modernized the collections at Dior in the style of "op art fashion" over six seasons, making him unpopular with older female clients and the owner of the Dior company. Saint Laurent's tenure at Dior ended in 1960.

Saint Laurent's collections under his own name were sometimes considered scandalous in the 1960s. He was one of the first fashion designers to use transparent fabrics (nude look). His first, conservative couture presentation in 1962 met with a mixed response. His consistent use of black fabrics and the use of jersey as a material found little favour in the early 1960s until this too became a trend. In 1965, colourful, geometrically patterned costumes and Mondrian dresses in the style of Piet Mondrian followed, to the delight of the international fashion press. In 1966 the "Zhivago look" was created with the first transparent tops, which provoked a scandal: the transparent, black chiffon blouses with bow collars were to be worn without underwear. Subsequently, the transparent look became established in advertising photography in the Western world.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the company popularized fashion trends such as the beatnik look, tweed suits, tight trousers and tight, thigh-high boots and, in 1966, the classic trouser suit for women (ladies' tuxedo). As early as 1962, French actress Catherine Deneuve was the first woman to wear a haute couture tuxedo by Yves Saint-Laurent, modified for women, to great public effect. Saint-Laurent included the tuxedo, which he called Le Smoking, in his newly created luxury prêt-à-porter collection Rive Gauche in 1965 for the 1966 season and from then on offered it in numerous variations for women. Saint-Laurent's tuxedo for women was a fashion symbol of the second wave of the women's movement and thus the emancipation of women in the 1960s. To this day, the house of Yves Saint-Laurent offers versions of Le Smoking for women in its collections that have been adapted to modern times.

In 1966 Saint Laurent opened its first store in Paris for the somewhat less expensive prêt-à-porter fashion line Rive Gauche, thus tapping into new groups of buyers. Yves Saint Laurent thus became the first haute couture house to establish a ready-to-wear line. In 1968, a Rive Gauche boutique was opened in New York City. In 1969, four years after womenswear, Rive Gauche menswear followed for the 1970 season. As early as 1963, Bergé had made licensing agreements with the U.S. perfume manufacturer Charles of the Ritz for a YSL perfume; in 1964, the cosmetics division YSL Beauté was created and the women's fragrance Y was launched. Charles of the Ritz, by then merged with Lanvin, bought its 80% stake in the fashion company YSL from the American investor Robinson for $1 million in 1965, and sold both its shares in the fashion and perfume divisions to the American company Squibb Beech-Nut in 1969. In 1972, Bergé and Saint Laurent acquired all the shares in the fashion division and in return gave Squibb Beech-Nut the perfume division YSL Beauté with low royalties. In 1971, in addition to the women's perfume Rive Gauche, the men's fragrance, YSL pour Homme, appeared, for the advertising of which Saint Laurent had himself photographed naked in an artistic pose to great publicity. From the mid-1970s onwards, the YSL range was massively expanded through licenses for women's stockings, sunglasses, writing implements, home articles and even cigarettes etc., for example.

1977 saw the release of the hugely successful women's perfume Opium, which was however seen by critics as a 'call to drug abuse'. In 1986, Saint Laurent and Bergé, backed by a 25% investment in the fashion house YSL by Carlo de Benedetti, bought back the perfume division YSL Beauté from Squibb for $630 million. Over the years, countless fragrances and their variations have been released by YSL, including Kouros (men, 1981), Paris (women, 1983), Jazz (men, 1988), Champagne (women, 1993, renamed Yvresse), Opium pour Homme (men, 1995), Baby Doll (women, 1999), M7 (men, 2002), Rive Gauche pour Homme (men, 2002), L'Homme (men, numerous variations, from 2006), Elle (women, 2007), Parisienne (women, 2009), Manifesto (women, 2012), Le Vestiaire des Parfums (series of particularly high-priced fragrances, from 2015), Black Opium (women, 2015), Y (men, 2017), Mon Paris Couture (women, 2017) and others.

Saint Laurent created the androgynous type at a time when the femininity of women was still the prevailing doctrine. In 1968 he invented the safari look, in the seventies he was inspired by Russian folklore. Other designs that became popular were a new kind of "nostalgia look" in the late 1960s and the "noble peasant look" in pop colors in the mid-1970s. From the late 1970s, Saint Laurent withdrew from the Rive Gauche fashion line, leaving the design to others, such as his muse since 1972, Loulou de la Falaise, and concentrated on haute couture. In the early 1980s, he designed bolero jackets and liftboy jackets.

The rather public shy couturier and his brand YSL gained more and more international attention. Well-known muses of Saint Laurent were Loulou de la Falaise, Betty Catroux and Catherine Deneuve. Saint Laurent was among the first fashion designers to book black models. In 1988, because the fashion magazine Vogue refused to put Naomi Campbell on the cover of the French edition, he threatened the editors with the cancellation of advertisements. He remained faithful to the world of the stage since his childhood days, making costumes for Zizi Jeanmaire, Roland Petit, Rudolf Nureyev and Catherine Deneuve, among others. Saint Laurent was also inspired by the style of painters Delacroix, Goya, Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso, van Gogh and Velázquez. In 1983, works by Yves Saint Laurent were exhibited at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was the first living fashion designer to receive this honor.

In 1989, the Yves Saint Laurent company went public on the Paris stock exchange. In 1991, Saint Laurent and Bergé personally paid off investor de Benedetti at a time of global recession. A takeover of YSL by L'Oréal failed because of Saint Laurent's and Bergé's unwillingness to sell to L'Oréal's shareholder, Nestlé. A buyout by LVMH failed because Saint Laurent and Bergé not only wanted to retain control of YSL's fashion division, but also demanded control of LVMH subsidiary Dior's fashion division. In 1993, YSL was sold by Saint Laurent and Bergé to pharmaceutical company Sanofi for nearly $600 million when sales figures plummeted during a recession. Saint Laurent and Bergé, however, retained control of the fashion division. In 1997, future Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz was hired for womenswear and future Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane for menswear by Yves Saint-Laurent Rive Gauche. Elbaz and Slimane both remained at YSL until 2000.

Through his holding company Artémis, PPR CEO François Pinault bought Sanofi in early 1999. At the same time, PPR bought a 40% stake in Gucci. At the end of 1999, Gucci in turn bought the Yves Saint Laurent brand from Sanofi, including the YSL fashion division and the YSL Beauté cosmetics division, for six billion francs (about 917 million euros). American fashion designer Tom Ford, then Gucci's chief designer, took over responsibility for the Rive Gauche collections from 2000, while Yves Saint Laurent himself continued to design the haute couture collections.

In 2002, Yves Saint Laurent withdrew from the business with a much-celebrated and mourned fashion filée. Celebrities from the fashion world and cultural life bid farewell to Saint Laurent. His favorite models Naomi Campbell, Jerry Hall and Laetitia Casta performed for him one last time and Catherine Deneuve sang a love song. Vogue's verdict on his life's work was, "Coco Chanel and Christian Dior were first-rate, but Yves Saint Laurent is a genius." With Saint Laurent's retirement, the house's haute couture line was discontinued on July 31, 2002. Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé have not held any shares in the company since.

Original dresses and accessories designed by Saint Laurent himself are kept in a private museum in the La Villette district of Paris. The "Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent", created in 2004, preserves 5,000 dresses, 15,000 accessories and drawings by Saint Laurent at a constant temperature of 18°C and a humidity of 50%. In 2017, the Yves Saint Laurent Museum was opened in Marrakech on the initiative of the "Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent". The museum exhibits around 50 original Saint Laurent dresses, which are periodically replaced by other Saint Laurent dresses.

Succession

Tom Ford left YSL at the end of 2003 to concentrate on his own fashion line. In 2004, PPR increased its stake in the Gucci Group to 99.4%, to which YSL had belonged since 1999 following the purchase of Sanofi. Italian Stefano Pilati - a former designer for Giorgio Armani and Prada who had been working for YSL as a designer since 2000 at Ford's suggestion - was appointed Ford's successor in the same year. In 2005, the company employed over 900 people and had a turnover of 162 million euros.

At the beginning of 2008, PPR sold the cosmetics and perfume group YSL Beauté, which in the meantime also included the brands Roger & Gallet, Boucheron Parfums, Stella McCartney Parfums and, under license, the perfume divisions of Ermenegildo Zegna and Oscar de la Renta, to the French cosmetics manufacturer L'Oréal for 1.15 billion euros. In the same year, after 10 years of continuous losses, YSL returned to the black with sales of 263 million euros and an operating profit of 300,000 euros. Sales in fiscal 2009 were €238 million with another operating loss of €10 million, and in 2010 sales were €269 million with an operating profit of €12 million, accounting for 12% of Gucci Group's annual sales. In 2010, there were 78 boutiques directly maintained by YSL worldwide. In 2011, PPR dissolved the Gucci Group within the group, so that since then all group brands, including Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci, have operated as equal subsidiaries. Head designer Pilati was replaced in 2012 by former Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane, who had previously worked for YSL from 1997 to 2000, and subsequently moved to Ermenegildo Zegna.

In the summer of 2012, it was announced that the prêt-à-porter line for men and women launched by Yves Saint Laurent in 1965 under the name Saint Laurent - Rive Gauche and later established as Yves Saint Laurent - Rive Gauche, which has been the house's only fashion line since the end of the haute couture line in 2004, would be renamed Saint Laurent and officially Saint Laurent Paris, respectively, and designed by Hedi Slimane in his Los Angeles studio. The company itself, and particularly the cosmetics division of the house, will continue to operate under the name YSL Yves Saint Laurent. Slimane's first presentation of Saint Laurent womenswear was shown at Paris Fashion Week in early October 2012 in a side wing of the Grand Palais and received mixed reviews. In his first Saint Laurent menswear presentation on January 20, 2013, Slimane showed an "ultra-slim silhouette" in a "grunge homage with ripped skinny jeans and long knit scarves" through an "almost terrifying army of scrawny rock musicians with long hair" embodied by androgynous models, as he had once presented at Dior Homme, prompting critics to question the timeliness of this style. Despite the moderate reviews of the trade press, the change initiated by Slimane brought the company high sales figures from consumers in the retail sector. According to Kering CEO François-Henri Pinault (PPR until 2013), Slimane, who was publicly praised by Pierre Bergé for his restructuring efforts at YSL, "successfully rejuvenated and repositioned" the YSL brand. In 2015, Slimane launched the Reform Project, which set up ateliers in Paris and saw Slimane design selected haute couture models as so-called couture privé, intended for friends of the house and not presented at the official haute couture shows in Paris.

Slimane's contract was not renewed by Kering in March 2016. Under Slimane's creative leadership, sales had increased from €353 million in 2011 to €974 million in 2015. On April 4, 2016, Kering appointed Belgian and former Versus designer Anthony Vaccarello as creative director of Saint Laurent Paris. For fiscal 2017, Kering reported sales growth of 27.3% at Saint Laurent.

The Saint Laurent Paris ateliers and studios are located on rue de l'Université in Paris, not far from the School of Fine Arts in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district. A former abbey on Rue de Bellechasse near the Solferino metro station is where YSL's corporate headquarters will be built for 2018. On Avenue Marceau, between Avenue Montaigne and Musée Galliera, is the Yves Saint Laurent Museum (until 2017: Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation).

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