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YVES
SAINT LAURENT will be called the greatest couturier of
the second half of the 20th century and few will quibble
with the assertion. His career, starting with winning
the 1954 International Wool Secretariat Competition and
ending with a dramatic farewell speech at his couture
salon on the Avenue Marceau in Paris, was for the most
part a breathtaking, eye-popping experience for those
who are dedicated followers of fashion.
If it
were not for this brilliant artist and craftsman, a
woman’s closet—or a man’s, for that matter—would be the
poorer today. It was he who saw the utter sexiness of
putting a woman in a tuxedo suit, the timelessness of
the safari and the versatility of camouflage (which then
shocked and awed a world riveted to the images of the
Vietnam War on television and printed materials). There
is also the ubiquitous peasant blouse, which keeps
coming back again and again to the runway, reinvented
and reworked by so many designers. But most important of
all was that if it were not for
Saint Laurent,
we mere mortals would not be clad in Gucci, Dior, Prada,
Louis Vuitton and whatever else our pocketbooks can
afford. It was
Saint Laurent,
after all, who brought fashion to the people by making
ready-to-wear as respectable and as important as
couture. Saint Laurent unveiled his Rive Gauche line to
a population of women that was hungry to get a little
piece of high fashion that, until then, was the
exclusive reserve of the utterly rich. Saint Laurent
even went as far as declaring couture as dead—a
statement that reverberated more widely than a similar
statement from Nietzsche about the demise of the other
thing. Never mind that he quietly reopened his couture
house two years later.
The
Fall/Winter 1976/77 Russian collection was hailed by the
International Herald Tribune as “the most dramatic and
expensive show ever seen in Paris” and “a revolution.”
Even
before Alexander McQueen was born,
Saint Laurent
was the fashion world’s enfant terrible. He was light
years ahead of his peers, showing giant cone-shaped bras
dozens of years before Gaultier and Madonna made them
iconic. Nothing was too much, too shocking or too
daring. His life had the glitz, glamor and scandal one
would expect from any celebrity. From his charmed rise
to the top of the house of Dior, saving it from
financial ruin, to his intense bouts of depression and
drug and alcohol abuse. There is always so much to say,
so much to mention when recounting the life of this
great couturier, a chunk of them unhappy and the ugly.
But all that, however sordid they may be, won’t be what
he will be remembered for. He who has so enriched
fashion will be remembered for the superstar that he was
and is, not the recluse that he became.
Speaking
to Ben Farrales about
Saint Laurent’s
passing, the dean of the Philippine fashion said, “It’s
such a tragedy to the entire fashion world. My
contemporaries and I acknowledge him as king of high
fashion. The man was creative, a genius!” Nonetheless,
Farrales is also clear about how muted Saint Laurent’s
influence was on the local fashion, at the very least in
his own work. “To create fashion as outlandish as Saint
Laurent’s here in the Philippines is to be greeted with
bad reviews and lose clients. Fashion here is very
tame...I have survived this long in the industry because
I am in a safe direction.” Farrales does admit to taking
in Saint Laurent’s startling innovations and dazzling
details, reworking them into something more attuned to
local tastes. Farrales hopes “that the new designers in
our country take what inspiration they can get from
Saint Laurent, but to also be true to themselves and our own roots.”
SAINT Laurent with Dior
house models wearing the groundbreaking Trapeze
collection of 1958
It is a
sentiment that
Saint Laurent
no doubt would have shared, having inserted more than
just a little bit of his own native roots into his
collections throughout his brilliant career. Having
grown up in Algeria and with a hideaway home in Morocco,
North African aesthetic fueled Saint Laurent’s
imagination. It is his interpretations of different
cultures broadened the world’s concept of high fashion.
The exciting and unusual array of materials he used for
his African collection in the late ’60s, for instance,
shows how far he tried to push the boundaries of high
fashion. Never before had there been a couture
collection that showed raffia, flax and wooden beads on
a runway.
It is a
daunting task to write about Saint Laurent’s legacy,
particularly because of the amazing number of
innovations and ideas he brought to the world of
fashion. So many of the things that we see on the runway
and in stores can be attributed to him, making it it is
difficult to pick which among his influences is the most
important or most pervasive.
In a
way, the fashion world lost him twice. The first time
was when he retired, the second when he passed away. To
be compared to Saint Laurent is something that designers
would rather avoid. “I would not want to be compared to
Saint Laurent because he could foresee the future of
fashion,” Farrales said. Sain Laurent created fashion
instead of merely regurgitating what’s out there. Even
Tom Ford, who took over the Yves Saint Laurent and Rive
Gauche line when Gucci bought the Saint Laurent empire
in 1999, could not hold a candle to the master. Tom
Ford’s first few collections for the Saint Laurent
brands, while rich with the glitz and glamour expected
of such a power match-up, was nonetheless found lacking
no matter that Ford revisited all of Saint Laurent’s
iconic works: the trouser suit, the chinoiseries such as
the Opium collection of 1977, and the incredible Carmen
collection of 1976. Ford was only able to grasp a few
tendrils of the dreamy excess that Saint Laurent created
with the originals.
“The
poor guy does what he can,”
Saint Laurent
once said of his successor’s work.
Again
and again, designers—in their ambition or, perhaps,
delusion—will want to recreate the magic that was
created by this genius. But there will never be another
Yves Saint Laurent. |
