Yves Saint Laurent, romantic, tormented and fragile

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In the typology of exceptionality, the saint, the hero and the genius stand out.

was not gifted for either of the first two categories;

but

the former editor of Vogue, coined her diagnosis: "Chanel and Dior were giants, but Saint Laurent is a genius."

A

who built the image of icons such as

and tutti quanti.

He was born in Oran in the summer of 1936. His

a very classy woman, was her son's great love, his muse, his confidante and his guide.

She protected his sunny childhood in a

(he had two other daughters, Michelle and Brigitte) and protected him from bullying, which Yves suffered from because of a sensitivity given more to reading fashion magazines than to kicking a ball.

Infant prodigy

Vocation comes from a Latin word that means "call" and at the age of 11 he had already heard his call.

which she was proud to wear.

He was what we now call a nerd, one of those child prodigies, a Wunderkind, a gifted, unorthodox, obsessive, shy and pedantic geek.

In other words, more solitary than gregarious and more mental than stallion.

In 1951 she won a competition with a sketch for a cocktail dress, beating a young

.

the star around which the other couturiers orbited, made him his right arm.

Dior soon died and the dauphin was soon crowned.

He was 21 years old.

His first collection was presented in 1958, it was the

a silhouette with narrow shoulders and a high waist that caused the delirium of the press.

The lanky and shy debutante had to go out to greet a crowd from the balcony of Dior's house on Avenue Montaigne.

In his following collections, he confirmed himself with

such as the

or the

Already in his third collection for Dior he scandalized with a beatnik complicity that dyed the Rive Gauche in black.

Down with the Ritz, long live the street

He adored black, hated the snobbery of the bourgeoisie, and introduced the

that

into the presumptuous haute couture salons.

"Down with the Ritz, long live the street" was his motto.

He liked to make allusions, suggestions, winks:

or

.

It was not, of course, just a quote or an interpretation;

it was a recreation, an author's hallmark, a style that changed without betraying itself, as in a programmed evolution in which it always saved the essential.

For Yves, fashion did not presuppose amnesia or blank slate, not everything was possible, not everything was wearable.

Elegance

has its

its taboos, its sinuous grammar, its subtle rules.

His most successful provocations, the ones that left the most persistent trace, were the transgressions that subverted a border to confirm it.

Like

he created endless variations that sometimes produced a quantum leap, a singularity, a miracle of elegance.

Farah Diba

chose it in 1959 to design her

the Shah of Iran.

The following year, he was called up to serve in the military when France was fighting in Algeria.

He lacked warrior ardor and was not gifted for warlike deeds;

he suffered a

and was admitted to a

nothing but love

He lost his job at Dior and sank into

.

He was given

,

, and other drugs.

That traumatic episode was the origin of his

and his addictions.

Two people visited him daily:

and

whom he had met at Dior's funeral.

Since then they have been

in business, in love and in art, Siamese twins united by desire and fanaticism for beauty.

(Whoever thinks I'm exaggerating, should visit the

the oasis where the couple created a corner as beautiful as a psalm).

Bergé sold his apartment and looked for money for Yves to open his own workshop.

"It was nothing but love," he wrote many years later.

On January 19, 1962, the fledgling house of Yves - on rue La Boétie, next to the Champs-Élysées - presented the first collection with the

Yves Saint Laurent

It was the beginning of a

that ended up being listed on the Paris stock exchange and revolutionized fashion by first launching the tuxedo, buccaneers and Bermuda shorts;

later, the blazer and the back in the air;

finally ushered in the era of

The boy from Oran was a cosmopolitan who was inspired by China, Peru or Africa.

From the continent in which he was born and raised he imported materials (raffia or linen), mythology and an expansion of the canon of beauty incorporating black models.

Nobody had done it before.

fetish designs

Fashion is a story without history, without a past.

Whoever says fashion says fever for change, madness of novelty that four times a year forces a dressmaker to make a clean slate of the immediate past and propose something different.

In that nervous compulsion Saint Laurent preserved the most remarkable finds, his fetish designs, the

that reflected fidelity to

the signs of his own identity.

He was not the first to

but his blazer was not a blazer, his tuxedo was not a tuxedo, but a transfiguration into something else, into something absolutely new that gave more direct access to sexuality and subverted the traditional dominance roles.

They said that art was the engine of their creativity, but Pierre Bergé denied that hypothesis: "If all those people knew that

and not art! That it was their discovery -in which I immersed you- the cause of our love, of our sewing house, of our collection. Of our life! It was sexuality that reconciled us when necessary and it was his memory that united us until the end".

Liters of Coca-Cola

Already a living myth, he gave himself over to self-

.

In the 1970s, he would go

in nightclubs where he would run cocaine like a promising joy.

He attributed his dependency to the drugs he was given in the psychiatric hospital and although he almost always recovered in time for the ritual parade on the catwalk, he was seen faltering at the end of his shows.

Designing was still, despite everything, the greatest of his addictions;

but the king of elegance had slipped into the depths of pathos.

He changed drugs for another more innocuous addiction: he drank

daily.

He spent his 90s sober, but bloated from a soda overdose.

The visionary had become a

in his homes in Paris and Marrakech, pampered by an entourage that protected him like a sick and capricious child.

He kept

even

;

but he pierced his own glory with the cool detachment of a Proustian dandy.

He had known success early and all too soon he had known the dark side of it.

Pierre Bergé, eternal partner, revealed the passion that united the two men for half a century.

He did it in a documentary, 'L'amour fou', and in a book that collects his epistolary relationship, 'Letters to Yves'.

"You took refuge in bulimia," he writes to her.

"You, who had been so proud of your body, began to hate it to the point of deforming it. The masochism with which you had played so beautifully had taken its revenge."

old lovers song

He said

in 2002 and Bergé gave himself to a new mission: to ensure his transcendence and to watch over his legacy.

The salons on Avenue Marceau ceased their activity and became a mausoleum with more than

preserved as

, only touched with gloves.

The artist was

but not yet the man.

He did it on June 1, 2008. Lucienne, escorted by her daughters, attended the funeral in the church of Saint Roch, the devotees collapsed around the Louvre Museum.

Bergé said: "Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, Chanel and Balenciaga were the sun around which everything else orbited. Before there was more than one at a time, and it could even be too dazzling. Now it's hard to find the sun. Darkness".

The funeral service ended with "The Song of Old Lovers" by

Obituaries noted the poisoned gift he received: a sensibility that is as genetic for art as it is harmful for life.

In his existence marked by excess there was nothing so

as his

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