The occasion calls for couture tears, but I’m a splotchy-faced snot bubble of contorted emotion. Yves Saint Laurent, French fashion prodigy and one of the greatest designers of the 20th century, has passed away. He died of brain cancer at the age of seventy-one. Mr. Saint Laurent does not need my ugly uncontrolled emotion—he’ll be seen off in an elegant sea of chic sniffling silhouettes no doubt—but still I cry. Here’s why I cry:
1. He never finished that dress for me.—He never even started.
2. He had balls.—I know this because he posed nude—wearing only his thick black rimmed glasses—for the advertising campaign for the first YSL men’s fragrance, Pour Homme. This campaign caused great controversy, but YSL questioned why it was more acceptable for a woman to pose nude for an advertisement than a man.
3. He took his balls out of his handbag.—In 1994, Saint Laurent sued U.S. designer Ralph Lauren for copying a tuxedo dress from his 1992–1993 couture collection. A French court found Ralph Lauren guilty of imitating the dress and fined the U.S. designer 2.2 million francs.
4. His father was an insurance man.—My friend’s husband is an insurance man. YSL arrived (with his sketches) in Paris at the age of seventeen—I arrived (looking sketchy) in Paris at the age of seventeen. Sigh, we had so much in common.
5. I get respect in pants.—In the 1960s and 1970s, when women were joining the workforce in millions for the first time, Saint Laurent designed more gender-neutral looks based on pants and jackets. YSL challenged what women were “expected” to wear (blouses and skirts), and dressed women to challenge other socially accepted norms.
6. He was Dior’s head designer at twenty-one.—When Dior died of a stroke in 1957, the then-unknown twenty-one-year-old Saint Laurent was appointed head designer. His first collection for Dior, known as the Trapeze collection, won rave reviews. I cry for that brave young man’s success (and because I feel like a slacker).
7. We had similar taste.—The first dress Saint Laurent designed for Dior was a black silk velvet column tied with a white satin bow called “Soiree de Paris.” The first dress I designed for myself was a black sequin and net contraption called “Soiree de Prom.” I cry for the photographic evidence still circulating in my family.
8. He said,—“I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity—all I hope for in my clothes.” I wish I’d said that.
9. He also said,—“To be beautiful, all a woman needs is a black pullover and a black skirt and to be arm in arm with a man she loves.” Bless his soul.
