Stéphane Bern, edited by Alexis Patri 10:00 a.m., February 19, 2022
In an issue of "Historiquement Vôtre" devoted to loves that have lasted, within a week dedicated entirely to Valentine's Day, Stéphane Bern tells the story of the lives of two men who have loved each other all their lives, until until death separates them: designer Yves Saint-Laurent and businessman Pierre Bergé.
One has made his name a mark, the other has associated his with his destiny.
On the one hand, an outstanding fashion designer, perhaps the best of them all.
On the other, a man of culture turned businessman who had to manage many: Yves Saint-Laurent and Pierre Bergé.
Two men who have loved each other all their lives.
But let's go back a bit in time: we are on January 30, 1958 in the beautiful districts of Paris, at the headquarters of the prestigious fashion house Christian Dior.
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The master of the new-look style died a few months ago, but the succession is ensured by a young artistic director of barely 21 years old, who joined the house three years ago as an assistant: a certain Yves Mathieu-Saint -Laurent.
That day, by presenting his first collection, the young man went from shadow to dazzling light.
At the time, fashion was not yet the show we know today.
The emergence of the "little prince of fashion"
No music.
Only whispers and crackling camera flashes accompany the parade of models in the cozy little lounge where handpicked clients and guests have crowded.
Yves Mathieu-Saint-Laurent plays big and he knows it.
The Dior house alone represents half of French haute couture exports.
It is a myth and a national monument that must not only be brought to life, but obviously honored.
In the room, a certain Pierre Bergé is present.
He is 27 years old and is then the companion of the famous painter Bernard Buffet.
It's the first time he's been to a fashion show.
He has no idea that it will soon be a total banality for him.
The presentation of the new collection is not a success.
It's a triumph!
Saint-Laurent has kept the spirit of Dior while lightening the dresses and renewing their shape.
Everyone is won over by this "little prince of fashion", as the press now presents him.
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Pierre Bergé is introduced to the couturier, to whom he sends the usual congratulations.
But it was only a few days later, during a dinner with friends, that the two men really got to know each other.
One, Yves, is as reserved as the other is affable, as timid as Pierre is a charmer.
The union of two opposite characters
Pierre Bergé comes from a popular and provincial background which he quickly left for the brilliance of Paris, when the other grew up in the skirts of his mother and his sisters until he was 18, pampered in a family bourgeois French from Oran, Algeria.
If homosexuality has never been a problem for Pierre Bergé, who lives his love as he sees fit, for Yves Saint-Laurent, all of this is very different: he has always badly accepted his desires, lived his singularity as a weight, and tasted its emotions in the shadows and guilt.
After dinner, Pierre Bergé accompanies everyone in the car and hangs out with Yves Saint-Laurent, whose strength he detects behind the mask of fearful and silent shyness.
A few weeks later, the couturier was invited for a vacation to the Provençal house of the Bergé-Buffet couple.
This is where love is born.
They will live it clandestinely, until Bergé separates from the painter to live it fully.
The complicity of the two men is expressed in the romance first, then will quickly take on another dimension.
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In 1960, called up to serve in the midst of the Algerian war, but unable to integrate into the army and hospitalized in Paris for depression, Saint-Laurent was fired from Dior by a boss with far-right acquaintances. who hardly relishes this lack of enthusiasm of the couturier to fight for French Algeria.
It was in this hospital room, after the news of his dismissal, that Yves Saint-Laurent and Pierre Bergé decided to create their own fashion house.
One will draw, the other will take care of the rest.
Especially financial issues.
This is how Pierre Bergé, rather a man of culture, will become a businessman.
After having gathered the necessary funds and support, the history of the Yves Saint-Laurent house (the Mathieu of the original surname has been definitively forgotten) will be able to be written.
The co-creation of an artistic and economic empire
In January 1962, during the presentation of the first ladies' collection, the couturier was paralyzed.
He hides behind a screen to avoid facing the gaze of buyers or critics.
It is clearly a success!
Saint-Laurent brings a simplicity that liberates women's bodies, hitherto confined in very structuring clothes.
The collections followed one another in the 1960s. The Saint-Laurent style was very much appreciated, although perceived, at the beginning in any case, as a little wise, almost too cautious for such a young designer.
As if he insisted on dressing bourgeois ladies, while in this decade society, women and the whole world are changing.
It was precisely because he was to understand this change and transcribe it into fashion that Saint-Laurent became the greatest couturier of his time.
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The daring collections are linked, always creating the event, sometimes the scandal.
Half of the actresses in the world now only wear Saint-Laurent.
Business is going well, especially thanks to the talents of Pierre Bergé who knows how to surround himself with the right investors to launch a ready-to-wear brand, and decline the label on increasingly varied objects, from perfume to cigarettes, thus generating very comfortable income.
A fortune that allows them to embark on the collection of works of art to furnish their different homes, a common passion that, like love, will unite them all their lives.
But the couple should not be reduced to the artist on one side and the steward on the other.
Admittedly, they founded the house by each tackling their mission.
But it is an overall balance that they find together.
The dangerous parenthesis Jacques de Bascher
Yves Saint-Laurent, eternal child, can't do anything on his own.
The contingencies of life, whatever they are, do not affect him.
He lives only for himself, his drawings and the pleasure of seeing his friends when Pierre Bergé takes care of the rest.
Everything else.
Assuming thereby an indispensable, necessary, vital role.
For some, Pierre Bergé deploys his influence.
For others, it is a saving base.
Love was built and seems to last even if it will also sometimes waver.
The balance of their relationship, in their daily and intimate life, is played out in the roles they have assigned themselves: one childish, the other authoritarian.
The pleasures of the flesh are not considered in exclusivity.
The two live their adventures, in their own way.
Pierre Bergé, a socialite, seduced in society when Yves likes to "do stupid things", in his words, and live his desires as he has often done: stealthily with a reassuring and sometimes anonymous transience.
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These occasional shifts sometimes annoy Pierre Bergé, more than they worry him.
Until the nights of Yves Saint-Laurent stretched out in the 1970s towards an endless party.
Yves spends his evenings in a nightclub.
More than dancing, he spends most of his time drinking and taking drugs, for the best first, the joy of laughing and living, then for the worst: unhealthy addiction.
His intoxicated nights, he also spends them with his famous lover Jacques de Bascher, yet the companion of a longtime friend, Karl Lagerfeld.
De Bascher, a magnetic dandy who pours out into a theatrical decadence, deliberately extreme and destructive, in which Saint-Laurent follows him for a time, until Bergé, worried, perhaps also jealous, decides to end.
A love that resists the excesses of Saint-Laurent
De Bascher obeys and moves away from Yves who, he, in love like a teenager, comes to beg him right in front of his door.
As if he couldn't do without the devastating intensity he feels around her, and that he will probably never feel again.
Pierre Bergé him, does not drink, does not take drugs, and does not support any more the escapades of his companion.
Feeling unable to help her, he left their Parisian home in 1976. He did not go far and settled in the hotel, 50 meters away.
The two men have lunch almost every day together.
They live apart, but are still extremely dependent on each other.
Some have described Pierre Bergé as a dominator who controls the life of Yves Saint-Laurent.
Perhaps also the designer, ruined by his excesses, relies on him, giving up part of his freedom so as not to have to live his life.
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In any case, it was often sick and unhappy, in his apartment saturated with works of art, that the couturier spent the last 20 years of his life, connected to Pierre Bergé by a direct telephone line, a joint fortune, and a indefinable love.
A distance between bodies, a closeness of minds, a sharing of the glory and wealth generated by a brand, a name, which no longer really belongs to Yves Saint-Laurent as he was mythologized during his lifetime.
A myth that Pierre Bergé maintains, even after the couturier's death in 2008, as if to better keep for himself, for them, the reality of the feelings and the tenor of a love that they managed to make last, in their own way, until the end.