A toast to Yves for 'le smoking'
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2005
'I feel pleased - and proud," said Yves Saint Laurent, looking at the tuxedo suits arranged on plinths like pieces on a chess board, with a vast image of the designer with Catherine Deneuve on the lacquered black wall.
As if by magic, the coal black pantsuits seemed to move around. They were not mannequins coming to life, but the guests invited to the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent to celebrate "Smoking Forever."
It is not, as the title suggests, permission to light up. Although, this being France, cigarettes were being puffed between elegantly manicured fingers by the time the couturier's close friends had moved from the rigorous exhibition, with its checkerboard floor, modernist white columns and shiny black grand piano, to the gilded dining room.
There, with the curvaceous and vivacious Deneuve between Saint Laurent and the culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, le tout Paris raised glasses of vodka to "Yves," as caviar arrived in individual dishes molded out of ice from Prunier - Bergé's restaurant.
"I don't remember my first tuxedo - but I know I have always worn one with nothing underneath," said Betty Catroux, after eyeing the opening exhibit: a 1966 tux with a froth of white blouse underneath and a delicate sketch of the outfit from the master's hand.
"I like le smoking because that was the moment when Yves empowered women," said Bergé, who was sitting between Monique Lang, wife of the former culture minister Jack Lang and June Newton, whose late husband
Helmut gave a sexual charge to the tux with his iconic nude/dressed images in a dark alley in 1975. .......
A toast to Yves for 'le smoking'
