Yves Saint Lauren was born in Algeria & raised in France. He was bullied at school, but found solace at home in his drawing & painting & designing of dresses for his mother & sisters.
When he was 17 & studying in Paris, Saint Lauren won 1st prize in a dress design competition sponsored by the International Wool Secretariat.
When Christian Dior saw Saint Laurent's designs, he was so impressed that he offered the young man a job as an assistant & & referred to Saint Laurent as the 'dauphin'. When Dior died in 1957, Saint Laurent took over the house of Dior. His first collection for Dior in 1958 was greeted enthusiastically & his 1960 collection for Dior appropriated the Left Bank style, with black leather jackets, knitted turtlenecks, & crocodile jackets. The fashion world watched with fascination as street fashion was redesigned at the hands of a couturier.
In the same year Saint Laurent was called up to fight in the Algerian war. When he was discharged several months later, he discovered that he had been replaced as head designer at Dior. He then simply created his own company.
Under his own name, Saint Laurent continued to produce elegant wearable clothes that drew on a huge range of influences & he successfully tapped into the vogue for androgynous dressing that spread throughout Europe & the USA in the mid-1960s.
In 1993, Yves Saint Laurent , which was by now also a major perfume house, was sold to a major company & has changed hands a number of times since, becoming part of Gucci in 1999 with Tom Ford as designer & creative director.
In 1958, Saint Laurent met Pierre Bergé, who was at the time the manager & lover of the Parisian painter Bernard Buffet. In a scene out of A Little Night Music, at a weekend party Buffet met his future wife, & Saint Laurent & Bergé roused a romance that lasted until 1976. After their breakup Bergé continued to serve as Saint Laurent's business manager & remained living in their home until 1986.
Although his sexuality was hardly a secret in the fashion world, Saint Laurent did not publicly acknowledge his homosexuality until 1991, in an interview in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro.
As his depression deepened Saint Laurent was joyful only twice a year, on the days a new collection was shown, usually to wild acclaim & within 24 hours that joy would evaporated. Saint Laurent was so attached to his favorite designs, that to part with even one of them would leave a black hole in his life, according to Bergé.
Almost any other leading designer will cite him as their idol. Marc Jacobs refers to him as god. Tom Ford & Jean-Paul Gaultier name him as their mentor.
In 2002, with years of poor health, drug abuse, depression, alcoholism, criticisms of YSL designs, Saint Laurent was forced to face the indignity of having Gucci close the illustrious couture house of YSL.
After his retirement, Saint Laurent became increasingly reclusive & spent the last years of his life at his house in Marrakech, Morocco. He died in June 2008 after a long illness. He was 71 years old.
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