Loulou de la Falaise

The late Nan Kemper

Dear all,


Maybe you would be interested.
As everyone likes Loulou, I might as well introduce the late Mme Nan Kempner, who passed away this early July. She was the most important client of Yves Saint Laurent couture, who only missed 2 of the YSL couture shows ever since the 60s. I was informed two days after her death by no one but one of the staffs at Yves Saint Laurent Fondation in Paris when I was visiting the fondation.

After YSL retired, Nan automatically switched to Loulou's stable and claimed Loulou as one of her fave designers at US Vogue.


http://www.nysocialdiary.com/socialdiary/2005/07_06_05/socialdiary07_06_05.php
www.ysl-hautecouture.com
 
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the old good days:rolleyes:
 

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taz said:
no problem:blush: . that pic. was in london for the opening of 1st rive gauche boutique there during the 70's.

I can't recall but perhaps you might; who was the director of the London YSL boutique early on?

She was a titled woman I believe, and was extremely draconian, and liked to have the male employees parade before her in the YSL dresses for kicks & giggles.
 
Incroyable said:
I can't recall but perhaps you might; who was the director of the London YSL boutique early on?

She was a titled woman I believe, and was extremely draconian, and liked to have the male employees parade before her in the YSL dresses for kicks & giggles.
no sorry i don't know her, but this is funny:P
 
Incroyable said:
I can't recall but perhaps you might; who was the director of the London YSL boutique early on?

She was a titled woman I believe, and was extremely draconian, and liked to have the male employees parade before her in the YSL dresses for kicks & giggles.

You MUST read this :-


Rake's progress

[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]From humble beginnings in Kent, Duncan Roy conned his way into the more debauched echelons of high society, before ending up in jail. It's a life that reads like a film script. Ideal material, then, for his latest incarnation, as a director. By Caroline Roux [/font]

[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Saturday September 21, 2002
The Guardian

[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The trouble with Duncan Roy is all the time he has spent not being Duncan Roy. "The amount of time I just have to talk about myself!" he laments over fishcakes at Soho House, the fashionable London club of which he is a member. "I like questions about film-making. I'm so sick of talking about the me element all the time."


Roy - tall, dark and faultlessly chic in a Helmut Lang suit, bright Ozwald Boateng shirt and Prada shoes - has just completed his first full-length feature film, Aka (Lies Are Like Wishes). But it is his life story, on which the film is loosely based, that is truly compelling - a tale that has more twists and turns than many works of fiction. Indeed, much of his life has been a work of fiction. For several years, he pretended to be a member of the British aristocracy. He lived in sumptuous apartments in Paris, worked on fashion magazines, partied with princes. He even met the Queen, at a Smith's Lawn polo match ("You could see her suspenders through her bouclé wool skirt"). Then he went to prison. After that, he become a drug addict. And then a film director. Which, all things considered, isn't a bad run of "me" elements for a 40-year-old.

Rake's progress

[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]From humble beginnings in Kent, Duncan Roy conned his way into the more debauched echelons of high society, before ending up in jail. It's a life that reads like a film script. Ideal material, then, for his latest incarnation, as a director. By Caroline Roux [/font]

[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Saturday September 21, 2002
The Guardian

[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The trouble with Duncan Roy is all the time he has spent not being Duncan Roy. "The amount of time I just have to talk about myself!" he laments over fishcakes at Soho House, the fashionable London club of which he is a member. "I like questions about film-making. I'm so sick of talking about the me element all the time." Roy - tall, dark and faultlessly chic in a Helmut Lang suit, bright Ozwald Boateng shirt and Prada shoes - has just completed his first full-length feature film, Aka (Lies Are Like Wishes). But it is his life story, on which the film is loosely based, that is truly compelling - a tale that has more twists and turns than many works of fiction. Indeed, much of his life has been a work of fiction. For several years, he pretended to be a member of the British aristocracy. He lived in sumptuous apartments in Paris, worked on fashion magazines, partied with princes. He even met the Queen, at a Smith's Lawn polo match ("You could see her suspenders through her bouclé wool skirt"). Then he went to prison. After that, he become a drug addict. And then a film director. Which, all things considered, isn't a bad run of "me" elements for a 40-year-old.

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Roy's colourful story begins in 1960, on the Kent coast. He was born out of wedlock, and his father went on to marry three times and produce seven more children. His mother stayed in Whitstable, married a mechanic called Mr Roy, and had more children. For her eldest child, it was not a happy home. "My [step]father was a difficult man, and he was jealous of my relationship with my mother," says Roy. "But most creative people I know do not come from warm and loving families. They are not nurtured, and they need from an early age to start working things out on their own. Maybe that's the price you have to pay." He maintains that he was 13 when he discovered that his so-called father was unrelated to him: "They said they thought I knew."

His mother, says Roy, "seemed incapable of rescuing any of her sons" from the daily hardships of the family home. But the way she spoke of life at the local lord's house, where she worked as cleaner, fired her eldest son's imagination: it gave him a secondhand taste of class, status, glamour and the power of the aristocracy. A spell at a boarding school, paid for, he says, by the local education authority, which was finding it hard to educate such a bright child at a comprehensive, filled him in on a few more handy tips on how to play as to the manor born. "It was a posh school in a beautiful country house. I learned what the back stairs were for. How a house operated. How the kitchen garden worked. How to fire an Aga."

Seventeen, gay and back living in Whitstable, after a final row with his stepfather he left the family home. Young Duncan went to London, and trading on his youth and good looks he nailed a job at the Yves Saint Laurent boutique, one of very few high fashion shops in the city at the time. Of whatever else he got up to after arriving in the capital, Roy says elliptically, "When you're a young man and you haven't got any money, you throw yourself on the mercy of anyone who will help."

For Roy, Lady Clare Rendlesham, who owned Yves Saint Laurent's London franchise, was an added lure. Rendlesham, who doted more on her three pugs than on her three children, was as well known to London's fashion and high society as she was disliked. She had been fashion editor at Harpers & Queen, and was a woman of influence. "But she was a monster," recalls the fashion journalist Brenda Polan. "Most people were too scared even to talk to her. She took me to lunch at Langan's, and they made her wait at the bar for hours. She was so utterly rude. But she never realised they were foul to her." Polan remembers, too, how Rendlesham loved to humiliate the boys in the shop, making them try on the clothes and then handling them in an intimate way. She was also controlling after hours: when Roy behaved badly at a party, he was sent on his way. But by then he had made his connections, discovered how to exploit what he calls "the social mobility you found around meeting gay people", and edged a little closer to the titled few.

Nineteen-seventy-eight doesn't sound so very far ago: the year after punk, the year before Thatcher. But things were very different then. Communication was slower (no mobile phones, no email). The upper classes' hermetic world was yet to be truly invaded by people merely with money. When Roy headed for Paris (no tunnel) with a credit card (no electronic card scanners) secured at YSL, he put Duncan Roy from Whitstable behind him and reinvented himself as Rendlesham's son, Anthony, without Clare's knowledge or consent. "I'd never met Anthony in real life, though he is still alive," says Roy today. "Her husband was Anthony Rendlesham, too. He ran an antique shop on the King's Road. My version was a weird hybrid that came out of my relationship with her.

"As Anthony Rendlesham, I didn't have to clutter my head with all the stories of my family, the terrible times. I could be clean, simple, grand. I was everything I wanted to be. Don't you see how gorgeous it was? It was so much better than the life I'd had before."

Rendlesham's lineage opened doors. In Paris, Roy mixed with Georgiana Boothby, Jane Wellesley, Sabrina Guinness (all of whom were linked to Prince Charles at one time or another); Euro princelets; English lords. How much is fact is hard to tell. It's strange to be taking the word of a man who has played so liberally with the truth. Why did his new friends accept him without question? "They wanted to believe. I was young and charismatic, and put those skills to good use. I probably could have gone a lot further. It wasn't until much later that I realised how far charisma and charm can get you. And, anyway, everyone hated Clare so much, they instantly felt sorry for me."

The late Marquess of Bristol, whom Roy calls Johnny Jermyn, had recently arrived in Paris, fantastically rich and about to embark on a life that would, in time, slither from decadence to depravity. Roy effortlessly joined Bristol's gay court, which ran on infinite lines of cocaine and bottomless glasses of whisky and champagne. He picked up styling work at French Vogue. He says he became the lover of Fred Hughes, who as Andy Warhol's business manager was largely responsible for the pop artist's success and amassed a huge fortune of his own. "He was a weirdo - he used to wank off in front of me. [Roy likes to throw down the challenge of sexual references.] He was self-made. He told people he was Howard Hughes's son."

When I inquire of the Warhol Foundation if it can verify the relationship, I receive the most ardent reply: "Deception might have been a perfect glue for such a relationship," says the man from Warhol. "Fred Hughes was a consummate liar, social climber, and a bespoke SOB who grew to total ghoulishness because of his connection to... Andy Warhol. Why is it, I wonder, that great people seem to love the presence of reptiles like these creatures?" There are similar responses to inquiries about Roy. He is described variously as a snob, a bully, psychotic, psychopathic, dangerous, a liar, tenacious, paranoid and isolated. Everyone, however, agrees on one thing. He is a talented man. He is ambivalent, too. Of his experience as Anthony, he says that becoming someone else "was a relief. I wanted an uncluttered history." Later he says that, "When I think about that time, I felt like I was swimming around in porridge. It was in my lungs, in my ears, in my eyes, and I couldn't move for it."

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The article continues :-



He seems magnetically drawn to the aristocracy, and yet reviles them, too. "They all believe in the Divine Right!" he exclaims in disgust. "John Jermyn used to say, 'I am the Law!' Getting rid of the Upper House is crucial. These people are becoming disenfranchised. Before, they had the land and the power. At least the power will be taken away." Roy is with Blair now. "He's absolute f*cking genius," he declares. "Amazing man, manipulative. He knows you won't get anywhere by rattling your sabre."

Roy willingly tells me his story, but seems hurt, distraught even, if I question details or appear to doubt his word. He phones me frequently, asking, "Do you think I'm lying?" as if lying is the last thing he'd do. Most of all, it seems, he wants me to like him. And trust him. He strokes my arm and says how soft my skin is. He hopes we will be friends when this is over.

Roy is a big, a bold man - "Not queenie at all," one friend says. And he seems indefatigable. Yet exhaustion caught up with him in Paris. His aristo mates were asking him to be godfather to their children. "I was getting so close to being their friend," he says, and it sounds perversely sweet. "Once, Jermyn said, 'You're one of us', and it struck a sword into my heart. I felt I could only let them down. I wasn't one of them. I ended up feeling profoundly guilty." He shopped himself to David Hallam, a gold-digging American rent boy and consort of Bristol's, and in 1981, the game up, he left Rendlesham behind in Paris and slunk back to Britain as plain Duncan Roy.

But old habits die hard. Now armed with a credit card in the name of Anthony Rendlesham, Roy couldn't help himself and continued the deceit. "It was like, 'Oh my God, it's all happening again. But I can't stop it.' At least they were all calling me Duncan. They thought I was Anthony Rendlesham pretending to be Duncan Roy."

With his keen instinct for being with the right people in the right place at the right time, he attached himself to the fast set that centred on London's most fashionable clothing store, Crolla. The Dover Street store was run by husband-and-wife team, Scott Crolla and Georgina Godley. "Duncan certainly hung around," says Godley. "He served people, but I don't think we paid him. Maybe in clothes. We used to go to Brown's Hotel for tea. Or he'd get the tea brought over on a silver tray and then pay for it with the Anthony Rendlesham credit card." Godley remembers Roy as arrogant, and dangerous. "The men got engulfed by it all and eaten alive," she says of his ability to ensnare them in complex relationships. One highly regarded art director, now married, "fell completely in love with him", she adds. "He knew the Rendlesham thing was fantasy, but he didn't mind at all. We were young, we liked anything that was good entertainment."

And so they adored Roy, who remembers his 21st birthday party in 1981 being featured in Harpers & Queen. "Scott threw me a fabulous party," says Roy. "Tom Dixon [now creative director of Habitat] did the door. Everyone was there: even WilliamBurroughs came. It was the party of the year. And in the magazine, under my picture, they put, 'Duncan Roy aka Anthony Rendlesham'."

But Roy was a little too flamboyant and fearless. His credit card fraud caught up with him in 1983. This might have been the heady days of Thatcher's Britain - "We were all able to claim our right, use our entrepreneurial abilities to nurture ourselves," says Roy - but he took the idea of entrepreneurialism a touch too far. Found guilty of obtaining property and services by deception, he served 10 months of a 15-month sentence in Brixton prison. His real crime, of course, was to have exploited the all-pervasive snobbery in British and Parisian society and its unconditional regard for the aristocracy, made a career of it and lived off it for several years.

Prison suited Roy, however. "I had a nice job in there. I was a bit of a celebrity. It wasn't so funny when I came out and realised that everyone thought I was bonkers. Someone said to me, 'You're just mad', and I really lost my temper." Plenty of people still believe Roy to be a bit mad, unpredictable and difficult to deal with. One acquaintance - who often courts the press, but doesn't want to be named on this occasion - says he'd give up his table at the Ivy if Roy was at the next one. "I still think he's proud of what he did in Paris. And I'm scared of him," he says.

After prison, Roy worked for Nacro (the National Association for the Care and Rehabilitation of Offenders) and lived in a council flat in Woolwich (albeit with a girl called Pandora). But before long, he'd taken up theatre, first working with Neil Bartlett (now director of the Lyric in Hammersmith), later on his own. Then, at the age of 30, he went to study film at Bournemouth and Poole College, and a little later embarked on a peculiar relationship with a richer older man. "What we had in common was that we could drink three bottles of Pouilly Fumé at lunch and still go shopping in the afternoon," says Roy. "He was loaded. There is a difference between just money and serious money."

The benefactor offered Roy the means to indulge his lifestyle or to pay for his films. It seems strange that someone as determined as Roy would choose the former, but maybe even the most driven need the occasional rest. To say that Roy lived the high life is to undersell dramatically the cocaine habit he developed. The relationship with the rich benefactor lasted seven years - "My longest". Roy's rejection of cocaine and alcohol has now reached its five-year mark, and he speaks of his sobriety with all the ear-bashing enthusiasm of the reformed addict.

And today, 10 years after leaving film school, and for the extraordinary sum of £300,000, Roy has completed his first full-length feature by filming on video with a six-week shooting schedule. His script, based loosely on the earlier part of his life, is strong. The art direction bears testimony to Roy's exquisitely good taste. The interiors and costumes are period-perfect. "They do style so well, people like Duncan," says Godley. "They've really studied it." Ironically, Roy paid £1,000 a day to film in the sort of grand houses where once he'd been an invited guest.

Roy says Aka is not the film he wanted to make as his first feature, that he was persuaded into it by Film Four, which then chose not to put it into development. "When they withdrew the funding, I was furious. I said, 'If I'm not going to be nurtured, I'll f*cking well do it on my own.'" He sold a house in Whitstable, inherited from his benefactor, to raise the money (he kept the one next door, where he now lives). He flattered an exceptional cast into working on deferred payment, among them Lindsey Coulson (best known as EastEnders' Carol Jackson), who plays the victimised mother, and Matthew Leitch in the Roy role. Diana Quick plays the Clare Rendlesham character with flinty hauteur. Bill Nighy and Georgina Hale also appear. All describe Roy as an excellent director, and say they would work with him again.

The film is dark and tense, and has been well received in the US. At its most recent showing at Outfest in Los Angeles, it garnered both the award as the audience's favourite film and the HBO cash prize for best new feature. "They love it because reinvention is part of their culture," says Roy. " They see it as a make-over movie - so what if you get caught, as long as you have a blast doing it. People over there will do anything to be a star, a celebrity. Here, people still perceive me as psychotic."

His attraction to powermongers undimmed, Roy has exchanged aristocrats for today's more significant mediacrats. "Last week, Will Self, Janet Street-Porter, Jay Jopling and Deborah Orr were sitting here," he says gesturing around his kitchen with obvious pleasure. When contacted, Self speaks well of the film, but of Roy says, "It's a bit of an overstatement to call me a good friend. He wants to establish instant intimacy. But he has known a lot of movers and shakers in his time. He's not Walter Mittyish." Indeed, an impostor Roy may have been, but he is less of a fantasist than he once was. Quick says, "I think he's got more real as he's progressed. He's done a lot of work to get this to happen."

Another well-known, but reluctant, acquaintance says, " I truly admire him. His work is genius. He is frighteningly intelligent. He creates his own tomorrow. But he obsesses. He gets on people's cases. He dips from being charming to having a look on his face that you think means he's about to kill you." Jacquie Lawrence, a former independent film commissioner at Channel 4 who has worked with Roy, says that he is surprisingly open to criticism of his work, but will get furious if he gets your voicemail and not you. "He'd get so angry. And then he'd make contrition an art."

Soon, however, Roy will be seeking new, more powerful friends - in Hollywood. The US reaction to his work, coupled with his being taken on by Bobbi Thompson (a powerful former William Morris agent), perhaps explains why he's heading for Santa Monica. He has been offered scripts, and been invited to join the Directors' Guild of America. "You can be part of the establishment in the US," he says. "Here, if you say you're a film-maker, people are suspicious of you. And it's just posh people who are making films. Dreadful inchoate films. I've got to go there."

At last, it seems, Roy might have found a place where he can just be himself Aka is released on October 11.



I knew LADY Clare Rendlesham , and still have the bruises to prove it .


I used to save to buy from the menswear collection every Autumn/Winter , as Saint Laurent Rive Gauche , as it was known at the beginning , was the main men's label , along with Cerruti 1881 and other exclusive imports from France , available at those meccas of style , PIERO DE MONZI on the Fulham Road and BROWNS of South Molton Street , when it was opened by Sir William Piggot Brown , and modelled on the St. Tropez boutique ' CHOSES ' .
( Later to be taken over by the Burstein family of the other ' French ' boutique , FEATHERS of Kensington , who introduced the ITALIAN ' must have ' labels , like MISSONI and WALTER ALBINI ) .

She bullied her customers , ( She admired the BALENCIAGA vendeuse who bullied HERSELF into being completely refitted for a model dress that she bought from the Balenciaga Atelier in Paris ) , insulted their choices and was generally ' une monstre sacree ' , but we went back because of the clothes which were and still are the best that have ever been made , compared to today's offerings , such as those of PRADA et al . My collection of Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche menswear classics is the pride of my life , unfortunately and I suppose in some people's eyes , rather trivially .:cry:

La Rendlesham also owned the original London licence for CHLOE when it was dasigned by Karl Lagerfeld , so she really had the London scene sewn up .
Often to be spotted driving a small Lambretta , or parking her nippy little Alfa Romeo , entirely illegally on the Brompton Road or on New Bond Street where her shops held sway , she died of a heart attack , queueing in Chelsae Library , no doudt dying from a habit of AT LEAST 60 a day !!!

She naturally had the nastiest and brownest teeth of any LADY that I have EVER encountered .

Ahh , the stories I could tell about my treatment at the hands of this woman . :cry:
 
I thought the thread was about Loulou de la Falaise's visionary, non?
 
dhclam said:
I thought the thread was about Loulou de la Falaise's visionary, non?

Awfully sorry if you think that I have gone off-topic , but I have taken the thread to refer to ALL the seminal Yves ' people ' who surrounded him in his heyday of the 60s.

Lady Clare Rendlesham was a great friend of Yves , as much so as Loulou , and she was one of the very few who defended Yves' ' Montmartre Poule ' collection , so much criticised in the early 70s , demanding that he send out the collection a second time to confound Yves' critics .

The next season resulted in a disaster for the RTW , as Yves took fright and sent out a collection as bourgeois and as staid as the British middle-class label , ' JAEGER ' . :angry:

Oh for the return of the days of days of Loulou , Clare , Betty Catroux and Rudolph Nureyev . Tom Ford avidly cultivated Betty Catroux , but I do not think that it got him any more kudos within the house , certainly NOT with Pierre Berge or Yves himself .

BTW , to go off topic again , did not Loulou have a very attractive interior designer brother called Alexis de la Falaise , who frequently modelled the YSL Rive Gauche Hommes collection in photographs for Vogue UK etc ?
In fact , I do have them in various back numbers of the magazine , and VERY effective and classy they are too . :flower:

My apologies for offending you , it's just that one gets such rare chances to relive the halcyon days of one's fashion youth , and this reference to Loulou and Clare brought it all back . :cry:
 
kit - shall i start a new thread on YSL's world where you can give us ALL your info/gossip......
 
oh Kit, no offending whatsoever... just that i see nth related to Loulou in the article that u posted, sure we love the whole of Yves inner circle, however, that piece is more abt that Duncan guy, nevermind... looking forward to read more abt Loulou, Maxim, Alexis, Lucie, Daniel or even that related Birley family. It's a huge family tree from the UK, as well as France.
 
i'll do it helena...

i've got a good idea for a title...
:wink:
 
:woot: an exclusive thread for YSL that make up my day:heart:
 

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dhclam said:
oh Kit, no offending whatsoever... just that i see nth related to Loulou in the article that u posted, sure we love the whole of Yves inner circle, however, that piece is more abt that Duncan guy, nevermind... looking forward to read more abt Loulou, Maxim, Alexis, Lucie, Daniel or even that related Birley family. It's a huge family tree from the UK, as well as France.

NO hard feelings , Helena and Softie have solved the problem of overlap .^_^

More power to your elbow , dhclam :flower: , we don't have enough French perspective on TFS , so it's great to get a new voice .B)
 

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Im a late comer on this one but thx a lot for the links Dhclam.:flower:
 

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