Suzy Menkes Remembers Yves Saint Laurent
T Magazine’s Features Director/Online Director Horacio Silva talks to Suzy Menkes, the International Herald Tribune fashion critic and T Magazine columnist, about Yves Saint Laurent’s ability to repeatedly challenge convention on and off the runway.
So after all the false reports over the years of Saint Laurent’s passing, it’s finally true.
Yes, the rumor had been going around Paris and I sort of knew it was imminent. But when Pierre Bergé went to Canada last week, I thought it wasn’t going to happen any time soon. But there you are. He’s certainly going to be missed.
It’s a testament to his genius that many of the ideas that he sewed in his youth have been so co-opted by the mainstream that they have become it.
I think it’s so hard for anybody to understand now how revolutionary his ideas were. The idea of wearing pants to the office! And the stories are legion. Nan Kempner wore one of the first Saint Laurent trouser suits to one of those fancy Madison Avenue restaurants and was denied access. She famously took off her pants and walked in wearing only the jacket. And it was that kind of revolution that was echoed in fashion and in life.
It’s easy to forget that the concepts of ready-to-wear clothing and men’s wear were practically unheard of before him — as were licensing deals and “out” gay designers.
Absolutely. The fact that the French have been celebrating this past month the May 1968 riots is sort of brought home by thinking of Saint Laurent in that era. I was very young and even though I wasn’t actually demonstrating, I just felt that Saint Laurent was so in tune with what I and my generation wanted to wear and do. It was that sense of freedom — breaking through the barriers of convention, of class, of all sorts of things. And the clothes just went with it.
A lot of people, especially those who were introduced to him as an aging designer, forget that in his prime he was so adept at reading the Zeitgeist. For over four decades he embraced and referenced everything from Beat culture to drag culture, street fashion to menopausal chic — often to be met with opprobrium from the public and fashion industry alike.
What seems strange about Saint Laurent is that I don’t think he referenced what was going on in the same was as, say, Marc Jacobs references things today. It was something that was inside of him, inside his well-spring of creativity. He famously did a Porgy and Bess collection never having been to America, let alone to the South. And when he did that Russian collection in 1976 — the one that was so amazing to me, the one that was full of Russian color taken to a luxury level — he had never been to Russia.
I have special memories of that collection because I was standing there, as everybody was, with my hands over my head clapping as these incredible clothes came down. It was hippy deluxe to the nth degree — the colors, the fabrics and the decorations. And, at the end of it all, beside me was a quite elderly woman with gray-rinsed hair. She turned and said in a bewildered way to the world, “No blazers! No blazers from Yves Saint Laurent!”
And that was the measure of the guy. You know, he could completely overturn his own inclinations and still be completely spot-on with what was going on in the world.
How well did you know him?
I knew him, but never felt that I got really close to Saint Laurent. But who really did? Betty Catroux, maybe. In the early days, I went to dinner with him and Bergé and I would occasionally lunch with him over the last 20 years. But he never gave off the whole aura of being involved in the world around him.
What was his home like?
It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. Incredible art on the wall and you had to resist the urge to gape. You realized immediately that these were all real. Apart from the sculptures by the Lalannes — he was friends with them — just about everything was high art. We’re not talking about Richard Prince, or Warhol for that matter, but Picasso. The whole apartment felt very Proustian; you could almost smell the calla lilies.
It’s interesting you say “Proustian,” as he was by all accounts very well read and smart. Bergé famously characterized him as “a man of exceptional intelligence practicing the trade of an imbecile.” His genius went beyond his mastery of cut and color, but was he really that smart?
I think there’s a sort of agony with all intelligent and very creative designers that it’s only fashion, that in the end it’s only the decorative arts. I had a feeling towards the end that Saint Laurent and Bergé were very keen to attain that immortality that a lot of designers long for. You know, those endless exhibitions.
I am not really sure that Diana Vreeland did Yves Saint Laurent a favor, as opposed to the world, by putting that exhibition at the Met in 1983. Because I’m sure that Saint Laurent started looking back at his own work.
You see that with artists, don’t you? Once they get their first retrospective, it’s really hard for them to push ahead. And that feeling just came to me the whole time over the last 20 years. He wanted to be more than a fashion designer, he wanted to have an imprint. And he had, which is what is so ironic. He had an imprint on the fashion world that can never be expunged.
Beyond the tie-neck blouses, the A-line skirts, the tuxedo looks and the ankle-strap sandals and prim knee-length hemlines etc., what do you think that imprint is?
He is one of the few designers who got the feeling in daywear of women’s lives, of the energy that goes into them. The idea of clothes that work as hard as you do. He could also go the other side — the incredibly glamorous evening wear. Those dresses looked like they had come down from the skies, like clouds had dropped from the heavens and onto the body. Heaven knows how he made them, but that’s where the skill came in. He was able to turn his dream into a reality on a woman’s body.
What was it like attending his fashion shows at the time?
There was always an element of surprise — you never knew what was coming. When those transparent blouses came down! Sure, today you could probably wear those on the red carpet and no one would notice, but it caused such a fantastic debate at the time. You could hear a sharp intake of breath when the models walked down the runway.
There was surprise but there was also the absolute perfection of the shows. I know that Alber Elbaz, when he tried his hand at designing Yves Saint Laurent in the late ’90s, said that what frightened him and put him off the most was that idea of perfection — the perfect red lips and makeup, the perfect chignon, the perfect accessory. It was a kind of perfection that, of course, went out of fashion. And, frankly, the later shows were by no means dull, but they were perfection to a fault. But you know, at least he stuck with his thing and believed in it. He believed in a certain kind of glamour.
Where did that glamour come from?
As it so often does with designers, especially the gay ones, it came from early recollections of his mother. I don’t know if people know how important his mother — who, you know, is still alive now — was to his aesthetic.
I once interviewed him and asked him about the 1940s-inspired collection that he created in the early 1970s. It caused such a ruckus in France at the time because no one wanted to think back to that period of the war.
He sent out 1940s shoulders, the little dresses, the famous furry coats, and, of course, the platform shoes, which are just right for now. About 20 years later, after Paloma Picasso had claimed that it had been inspired by a dress she bought in the flea market and Betty Catroux had said that Saint Laurent had created the collection for her, I asked him flat-out and he said it was inspired by his mother. When his father was away at war, his mother used to go down to the beach cafes in Oran and sit there in her favorite dress. And as he described this 1940s dress — the perfect shoulders, the narrow belt and the polka dot print — I could see through his mind’s eye the number of times that dress had appeared in his collections. So much of what he did was about the now and what fashion in the future was about, but it was also about looking back to the past — to his mother.
For someone so obsessed with perfection, his personal life was anything but. His frequent collapses and recoveries — didn’t Bergé once say that Yves was born with a nervous breakdown? — and his manifold addictions were sport for the press and the public.
True. And I wonder if there had been rehab, or if had been as fashionable in the late 1960s when he first started to go off the rails as it is today, whether he would have been a different person or a different designer. To me, the two things go together — his incredibly overstretched nervous energy and imagination. I should add that he went to sanitariums and on occasions to the American Hospital, but I don’t think sanitarium is rehab. And, of course, the myth of that era is so strong and adds to his glamour.
When people see the images of the YSL clan — Claira Saint, Loulou de la Falaise, Betty Cattroux — it appears to be such a decadent, enticing way of life.
Saint Laurent certainly was a part of that. How much he was really an energetic participant, I’m not so sure. Maybe, and what do I know, he took the drugs in order to feel that he was part of it? In any case, one person everyone should be grateful to is Pierre Bergé who really looked after him for so long. What’s interesting about them is not that they had a love affair or that it petered out, but that they stayed together in terms of the business. It set a template for fashion. Look at the Valentino/Giancarlo Giammetti relationship and many more. And you have to remember that in many countries homosexuality was still illegal. Saint Laurent said once, in a very revealing interview when he was about 65, that he never spoke to his father about the situation. He simply said to him once, “You know, père, I am not like other men.”
indeed.
