Yves Saint Laurent

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In Charge of Dior at Twenty-One

Saint Laurent's start has no parallel in fashion for sheer precocity. Born in Oran, Algeria, to an insurance company manager and his socialite wife, he left home at 17 to work for Christian Dior. Four years later Dior was dead, and in 1957 the house faced financial ruin. The choice of successor was the 21-year-old Saint Laurent, and the choice worked: his designs, together with his lover Pierre Berge's financial acumen, helped save the firm. That partnership — the designer's invention and Berge's business discipline — became the operating system of Saint Laurent's whole career. Left home at 17, head of the greatest house in Paris at 21: the speed explains both the triumphs and the fragility that followed, because a young man carrying a house's survival has no ordinary apprenticeship in which to grow up.

Conscription, Breakdown and a House of His Own

Shortly after the Dior success he was conscripted into the French army during the Algerian war of independence. After 20 days, the stress of being hazed by fellow soldiers led to his being institutionalised in a military mental hospital, where he underwent psychiatric treatment including electroshock therapy for a nervous breakdown. In the wake of the breakdown he was released from Dior — the house he had saved discarding its saviour while he was ill — and started his own label together with Pierre Berge, under the now famous initials YSL. The injustice of the sequence became the founding myth of the house, and the house repaid it: through the 1960s and 1970s YSL popularised the beatnik look, tweed suits, tight pants and tall thigh-high boots, drawing the clothes of the street and the young up into couture rather than handing styles down to them. His muses — Loulou de La Falaise, Betty Catroux and Catherine Deneuve — embodied the house's world of aristocratic bohemia and French cinema. The couple split romantically in 1976 but remained business partners, the Berge discipline continuing to hold the structure the designer's health could not always hold itself.

Sold, Split and Closed

The later history is the founder era ending in corporate form. In 1993 the Saint Laurent fashion house was sold to the pharmaceuticals company Sanofi for approximately 600 million dollars — a fashion house valued like an industrial asset. In 1999 Gucci bought the YSL brand, and the work was divided: Tom Ford designed the ready-to-wear collection while Saint Laurent designed the haute couture. Saint Laurent had retired in 1998 and spent much of his time increasingly reclusive at his house in Marrakech, Morocco. In 2002, dogged by years of poor health, depression and criticism, Saint Laurent and Gucci closed the couture house of YSL — the atelier he had founded four decades earlier — while the pret-a-porter line continued under Stefano Pilati after Tom Ford's departure in 2004. The closing of the couture house was treated worldwide as the end of an era, because Saint Laurent was the last of the generation that had personally defined post-war Paris fashion. The initials survived him as a brand; the couture, which had been the man himself, did not.