The Flawless Surface of Yves Saint Laurent
Toward the end of “Celebration,” a documentary capturing Yves Saint Laurent’s final years as a working designer, we watch him arrive in New York with his business partner and onetime lover, Pierre Bergé, for the 1999 C.F.D.A. Fashion Awards. Bergé—still blustery and energetic at sixty-eight—flanks Saint Laurent protectively as the two leave their hotel for the ceremony, where the designer is set to receive a lifetime-achievement award. Saint Laurent was only sixty-two at the time, but he looks much older: frail and uncertain in his tuxedo, he totters down a hallway, anxiously licking his lips and smoothing back his too-thick cap of shoe-polish-brown hair. “It’ll be better in three hours,” Bergé tells him, as if reassuring a child.
Onstage, Saint Laurent gives a short thank-you speech in halting English. Designers like himself, he says, must behave like artists, “sacrificing everything, sometimes even our lives, to devote ourselves only to our work.” The audience gives him a standing ovation, and Bergé appears cautiously relieved. But as Saint Laurent begins to make his unsteady way out of the banquet hall, Bergé rushes to his side, to help him. “He’ll fall,” he frets.
“Celebration,” which was directed by the French filmmaker Olivier Meyrou, does a keen, subtle job of exploring the fissures between image and reality—between how things appear and how they, in fact, are. Saint Laurent, who died in 2008, was perhaps one of the twentieth century’s greatest designers. The creator of vivid, indelible fantasies for women to try on and to embody was also a fragile and anguished man, troubled throughout his life by alcohol, drug dependency, and bouts of debilitating depression. The documentary pays tribute to the designer’s genius: the seductive, unfussy flair of his designs is evident, for instance, in footage from the monumental 1998 fashion show that Yves Saint Laurent staged at the Stade de France, in order to commemorate the FIFA World Cup. But the film’s title is ultimately ironic. We watch as Saint Laurent is hustled, with some effort, from one task to the next by members of his team, who attempt, not always successfully, to put a brave face on things. He is still sketching his designs, still offering faint thoughts on the creations that the petites mains—the house’s master seamstresses and artisans—will execute, but he seems almost entirely lost in his own world. Rather than a celebration, the film plays more like a funeral procession, or perhaps a bedside vigil for a man who has, indeed, seemingly sacrificed his life in pursuit of his art. It’s a harrowing portrayal, and it’s not entirely surprising that after a single screening of the film, in 2007, Bergé sued over an unauthorized image, blocking the movie’s release for more than a decade.
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I first saw, and loved, “Celebration” when it screened at Film Forum in 2019, and I thought of it again recently when I visited “Yves Saint Laurent and Photography,” now on view at the International Center of Photography, on the Lower East Side. Whereas Meyrou’s documentary was interested in examining the human cost that went into Saint Laurent’s designs, the I.C.P. exhibition, curated by Simon Baker and organized in collaboration with the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris and the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent, focusses almost exclusively on the sleek outward-facing image that Saint Laurent and his design house presented to the world. There is something soothing about walking through the show—an objectively gorgeous survey of Saint Laurent’s greatest hits as seen through the lens of the pros who photographed them—but it also left me a bit unsatisfied. What is the price of flawlessness? What shadow narrative might it be hiding?
Saint Laurent was born in Oran, Algeria, in 1936, and began designing clothes when he was a teen-ager. Hired as an assistant by Christian Dior, in 1955, he stepped into the role of that house’s artistic director at only twenty-one, after Dior’s sudden death. Four years later, with the help of Bergé—whom he’d met and begun a relationship with in 1958—he established the house of Saint Laurent, leading the brand, first as a haute-couture operation, and then, starting in 1966, as a ready-to-wear business. (He retired in 2002.) The I.C.P. exhibition presents these bare facts in two ways: one section is archival, offering about three hundred Saint Laurent-related artifacts, including magazine covers, news articles, and family photos. The other, more significant section is composed of portraits of the designer, along with several dozen fashion images, arranged chronologically.
The tour is an enjoyable one, moving through some of the most iconic moments of Saint Laurent’s career: the soigné black-and-white column dress he made while still working under Christian Dior, shot by Richard Avedon in 1955 on the model Dovima, her arms outstretched among a huddle of elephants; the smartly cinched skirt suit from the first Yves Saint Laurent haute-couture collection, in 1962, captured in lit-up silhouette by William Klein; the ribbon-up safari dress worn by a sexy, rifle-toting Veruschka in a Franco Rubartelli picture from 1968; the classic 1975 Helmut Newton image of a boyish model on a darkened street, cigarette in hand in Le Smoking tux; the turbanned and kohl-eyed women wrapped in the sumptuous velvets and lamés of the famous 1976 Opéras-Ballets russes collection, captured by Guy Bourdin as if in an opium fever dream. The tenor of the images is diverse, as are the designs they capture, but what ties the whole thing together is the sense that in each period of his career, Saint Laurent was able to conjure a bold fantasy of modern womanhood that treated its boldness lightly. Whether career girl or sexpot, gender bender or grande dame, Saint Laurent’s women were always new, and for the designer, newness was the most natural and inevitable thing in the world. The role of the photographers he worked with was to help make that newness come alive, become palpable to the public.
The I.C.P. show also presents a number of portraits taken of Saint Laurent himself in the course of his career (some of which were used for commercial purposes, in various ads): a 1969 Helmut Newton image of a brooding Saint Laurent in tight and sexy all-black garb; the designer, long-haired, shaggy, and hippieish, in a 1970 David Bailey picture; him staring down the camera, a bracelet on his wrist, in another Bailey image, from 1984. Save for a large color photo by Juergen Teller from 2000—in which an older Saint Laurent grins in a closeup, perhaps the single aesthetic outlier in the entire exhibition—all the portraits of the designer project a strong and seductive image, and none more so than the most famous among them, taken by Jeanloup Sieff in 1971. Here, we encounter the lithe and sinewy Saint Laurent in the nude, posing against a stark halo of light, like a modern saint. A saint of beauty, and a saint of sex: most anyone who looked at the image likely wanted either to be Saint Laurent or to be with him. (Since the photograph was used to promote the fragrance Pour Homme, smelling like the designer would have had to suffice.) In a short series of interviews held by the fashion journalist Loïc Prigent and screened on a loop in the exhibition space, Sieff’s widow, the photographer Barbara Rix-Sieff, suggests that the nude portrait is “totally a Mona Lisa,” which I took as a nod to its ubiquity. But her words also made me consider something else: like Leonardo’s famously enigmatic subject, Saint Laurent’s outward-facing images concealed more than they revealed.
One of the most striking photographs in the exhibition is a well-known 1939 work by Horst P. Horst, which depicts not a Saint Laurent creation but a Mainbocher corset. In this black-and-white image—from Bergé and Saint Laurent’s personal collection, per the wall text—a young woman sits with her back to the camera, the laces of her exposed girdle drawing her waist into an hourglass shape, her arms half-raised. There is a deliberateness to this portrait, almost as if it were a still-life, and it struck me as emblematic of the exhibition as a whole: like the rest of the images presented in “Yves Saint Laurent and Photography,” there’s no fissure to be found in its perfection. For all the wealth of material the show offers, we don’t see labor, we don’t see pain, we don’t see process. Like the beautiful woman in the corset, it all feels a little faceless, a little airless.
