YSL: Still the King of Haute Couture? : Designer: After a no-show in March, Yves Saint Laurent is back at work, reportedly recovered from ‘exhaustion.’
The fragile, emotional king of high fashion has returned to work, his hair cut short and dyed cherry red.
Renowned designer Yves Saint Laurent took his traditional runway bow Wednesday--the final day of the parades of handmade couture clothing for winter--after what a salon official described as seven-week recuperation from exhaustion.
At last spring’s ready-to-wear shows, store buyers and fashion journalists were stunned when Saint Laurent, for the first time in 32 years, failed to make his shy appearance with his models at the end of his collection.
At the time, his business partner, Pierre Berge, announced that Saint Laurent was recuperating from exhaustion.
The fashion world swirled with rumors. A salon official, Gabrielle Buchaert, now emphasizes he was suffering only from “overwork.”
“His health is fine now, he overcame his exhaustion, he rested and he designed the collection himself,” she says.
The only difference in the YSL operation is that the fur designs have been taken over by Robert Merloz, who has worked in Saint Laurent’s studio for several years.
Insiders say that YSL’s longtime team of assistants, including his muse, Loulou Klosowski, are closely involved in designing the collections. But that has been true for some time.
“Saint Laurent has never said he could do everything on earth,” an official said. “He does four collections in one year and this is enormous work, so it is natural for someone else to do the furs.” Others speculate that Merloz is being groomed for Saint Laurent’s role. (See related story on E4.)
In the past, Saint Laurent has suffered from spells of nervous exhaustion. He began his career by working as an assistant to the late Christian Dior. Just out of the Chambre Syndicale fashion designing school in Paris, he was named at age 21 to succeed Dior after the latter’s death in 1957.
Saint Laurent’s first show, his “trapeze” line, was a huge success in 1958. But in 1960, after six highly praised collections, he was drafted into the army.
He did not stay long, discharged into a hospital because of a nervous condition. As Marc Bohan already had taken over the Dior post, Saint Laurent in 1962 opened his own house on Rue Spontino in partnership with Berge.
Last March a tired Saint Laurent secretly entered a private hospital near Paris, five days before his show, which traditionally ends the French ready-to-wear fashion parade.
He left the clinic after seven weeks to return to work May 11 to design the July couture collection, a company official said.
Despite his history of fluctuating health, Saint Laurent, 53, prepares about 180 designs four times a year and supervises the fittings, fabrics and accessories.
The audience at his shows watches closely when he walks out on the runway. Often times, his clothes have breathtaking style and beauty but “he looks terrible,” as the Wall Street Journal commented in 1989.
His weight bounces from cigarette slimness to puffy bulk, a condition that Berge once said was caused by a faulty thyroid. Sometimes, Saint Laurent walks with difficulty on the runway, as if his balance were impaired; sometimes he smiles shyly; other times he twists his tongue upside down when he is nervous. His posture often is poor, his shoulders hunched over. He trembles at times before the buyers and press storming around him backstage.
Berge in 1984 remarked, “It’s difficult for Yves to have fun. He never goes to the theater or movies. Does not watch television. Reads not a lot. Always the same book, Marcel Proust’s ‘Remembrances of Things Past.’ ”
To quiet persistent rumors, Berge added, “He has had nervous breakdowns, yes, but he has never had a problem with drugs.”
The YSL firm has been organized so that shareholders give management control to Saint Laurent and Berge, but also to Jean Francis Bretelle, director-general of the firm, and Alain Minc, head of the holding company of Italian financier Carlo de Beneditti, the chief shareholder.
When Saint Laurent retires, the company can continue its perfume and fashion business, which takes in about $1.9 billion in yearly sales of Saint Laurent products, employs roughly 15,000 people and has 160 retail shops.
It takes two months to prepare an haute couture show. Saint Laurent works at a trestle table on the second floor of the YSL salon on Avenue Marceau. The room is stuffed with fabric samples and piles of handbags, jewelry and shoes. Working at another table are his half-dozen assistants.
On the floor above, dozens of sewers work on the hand-made couture, doing the stitches by hand except for the main seams.
Saint Laurent once said, “I am like an engine. Sometimes the engine works and sometimes it breaks down, but I always manage to start again. I consider it my duty--to myself, and to everyone who works with me.”
