Loulou & Yves

  MONIQUE VAN VOOREN I was in Marbella on my way to Mykonos. A Swiss friend with a big yacht was sailing to Casablanca, so she said, “Come with me, you can take a plane from there.” But when we got to Casablanca the airport was closed—there’d been a coup against Hassan II. I was like Sophia Loren in one of her tragedy films, waiting day after day in the airport. Finally, my friend with the yacht went to play backgammon with General Oufkir, the one who was accused of trying to kill the king, and right after the backgammon party Oufkir was murdered. The only flight leaving for anywhere was Rome, so that’s where we went. It was the middle of summer and we thought, What are we going to do in Rome? Let’s get a car and drive to Sardinia, Diane and Egon are there.

  They had one of the houses the Aga Khan, Karim, had given to people like Diane to attract the right kind of people to this unknown region he was developing. Loulou and Marisa were staying with Diane, also Bettina Graziani. Bettina and I wound up with houses in Sardinia, too. Bettina had been a model at Fath, then the girlfriend of Aly Khan, Karim’s father, after he divorced Rita Hayworth. Bettina and Aly were in a terrible car crash, he died and she lost the baby she was carrying, so the family gave Bettina her house. Which was fabulous.

  Loulou’d had a lot to contend with in her life. There was her mother, her self-esteem—she had none. She felt she was in Maxime’s shadow. Maxime and I were both Warhol actresses. I made Flesh for Frankenstein, and she did Blood for Dracula.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS Pierre and Yves were after Loulou for a long time. They wooed her and dressed her and eventually got her. She didn’t think it would be full-time. Her influence was felt overnight. The Saint Laurent catwalk was very evocative of what she’d been wearing in Patmos the summer before, which was whatever she could pull together, having lost her suitcase. A certain sophistication was attained thanks to Loulou that wasn’t in the making of a Paris couture house. However elegant and beautifully made the clothes were, they could be boring. Loulou did away with that. She was too modest to get her due. She never once in all the years said a word against Yves, being absolutely true-blue, and that very old-fashioned thing, a lady. In the fashion world, I’ve only known two real ladies: Loulou and Carolina Herrera.

  MIN HOGG I remember being at John’s in London, with Loulou waiting to hear if she’d got the job. Saint Laurent pursuing her doesn’t figure in my memory. I saw it much more as she had sent drawings and was hoping. But everybody’s memory is wrong, isn’t it? We’re all selective.

  LOULOU All I had done were a few prints for Halston. But Yves has an instinct for the people who can help him … He suddenly decided with the house getting bigger, that there was more work and that he needed someone to help him … No one in the studio, not even [studio director] Anne-Marie Muñoz, knew I’d been hired. They found out the day I started. As I was a bit panicked, I dressed super-classic, gray skirt etc., a bit like I was going to the Lycée Français! At the last minute Yves told his staff, “Get ready, I have this really wild friend coming in.” Instead of someone wild, they saw this sort of schoolgirl … He was vague about [my job], he didn’t specify what I was supposed to do … When I joined I was interviewed by Women’s Wear Daily. They asked me which colors I liked and which I didn’t, and I said I couldn’t stand black or navy blue, which shows the extent to which I didn’t know what I’d let myself in for … At first I just sort of walked around the design area a lot and said, “Oh, that’s pretty” … I used to dress up in the way that I thought fashion should go, and then while [Yves] was designing I would sit next to him and mainly I would talk. During the fittings I would say, “Oh, that’s a nice sleeve; why don’t you make it more like this?” … I drew like a dog. [But] I had spunk and ideas … I never thought it would be permanent … I suggest things. I sort of help him make things come alive. I do little scratches, mood things, very vague. I always think I’m perfectly useless …

  [Yves and I] got on as friends. I mean, if he found someone who was very talented but who he didn’t know at all, he couldn’t work. You know, he is very shy, very strange like that. He needs to have people he likes, who are friends, who he’s intimate with, with whom he can relax and carry on his usual work.

  INÈS DE LA FRESSANGE Karl is probably the last person today who can hire someone the way Yves hired Loulou, meeting the daughter of a friend, say, and bringing her to work at Chanel. Far better nowadays to have a degree from Saint Martins74 and a portfolio if you want to work in a fashion studio.

  MONIQUE VAN VOOREN Loulou was in awe and unsure and thought the job would restrict her freedom, that she’d be unable to live up to what was demanded of her and what could she possibly contribute. But she quickly realized that she was everything they expected of her, and more. She thought it would be a nine-to-five job, but it turned out to be her life. When you have a mother like Maxime, it’s very hard to supersede her, but Loulou did. She became Loulou de La Falaise, not just a pretty young girl around Paris. She became an icon.

  STEPHEN BURROWS It was a big, quick jump. When you thought of Saint Laurent, the next name you thought of was Pierre Bergé, and the name after that, Loulou. She went straight to the top.

  In fact, though Loulou never once mentioned it in the dozens of interviews she gave about her beginnings at Saint Laurent, she had already been employed by the company for at least eight months before the September start date she never wavered in giving, for reasons that died with her. In January 1972, WWD carried an item saying she worked on accessories and the show makeup in two-month blocks, followed by a month off. The arrangement suited her, she told a reporter while trying on wigs at Halston’s, because “I get bored very easily.”

  ————————

  ALYNE DE BROGLIE I worked in the design studio from 1968 to 1985. When Loulou arrived, there was le maî tre, Yves, who had come from Dior, and that was the atmosphere: old-school haute couture. I sharpened le maî tre’s pencils every morning, dusted his felt-covered desk, tidied his papers. Loulou was like a tonic, a blast of cold air, ignorant of the context she’d parachuted into, shaking everything up, imposing her relaxed style—who and what she was. At first, she wore her clothes from London and New York, but bit by bit adopted the house style, but still keeping a note of fantasy. You could put anything on her—any hat, any necklace—and she was chic. She was chic with nothing. None of this escaped Saint Laurent. Loulou was the opposite of bourgeoise; Saint Laurent detested anything bourgeoise.

  INÈS DE LA FRESSANGE Loulou incarnated the youth of the seventies, sparkling and gay. Plus, she exuded a certain indifference.

  JACQUES GRANGE The social strata Loulou came from, her Anglo-Saxon upbringing—these appealed to Yves. It’s like Marie-Laure de Noailles. She and Loulou were hothouse flowers. People think being an aristocrat and having a sense of fashion, of nobility and imagination is trivial. But it’s incredible fertilizer.

  ROBERT COUTURIER Loulou and Maxime’s disregard for accepted elegance had all to do with their birthright. They wouldn’t have been nearly so bohemian if they hadn’t been aristocrats. Saint Laurent knew nothing of that world; Loulou brought it to him. He learned from her. Of course Maxime was jealous of her. She didn’t wish anyone well—at least not as well as she wished herself. Mother and daughter were both decadent, unhealthily so, but with a poetic quality, unlike that terrible woman, the other muse, Loulou’s friend—what’s her name? I can’t bear her—Betty Catroux. She is truly decadent. Repugnant.

  LOULOU Maybe one world was ending and another world was starting which Yves knew less about. I mean, the fashion business is a lot about small boys fantasizing about either their mothers or a couple of generations before them and therefore fantasizing about a way of life which is already more or less extinct by the time they get to be twenty-one. They are always a little bit in a time warp …

  This was the time when there was the biggest change in fashion ever and the greatest change in attitude. It was the first time there was a break away from looking like a lady into looking like something
else … I think Yves was very struck by my London attitude when he saw me and he wanted to get his finger into that pie too … I was closer to this very creative thing of youth and international atmosphere rather than the very grand scene and I remember that sort of worried the proper couturiers who were more installed in the Comtesse de Paris …

  After a while I said, “Well, okay, I’m going to do the jewelry.” The person who had been doing it was on holiday, I think, and no one said no … The same person was also in charge of bags and belts, which she didn’t really care about. After that I said, “I’ll happily do the knitwear too” … Before I met Yves, I couldn’t concentrate for more than five minutes. He has taught me how to work … We grew up together. I acquired my experience on the job … playing with stones, colors, materials … I’ve never been to art school. I’ve never learned fashion … It’s like being at a super, super school. I’ve learned how to make clothes. I’ve learned how to do fittings … I’ve learned everything! … I loved how welcoming and open to participation [Yves] was. He invited artists who were down on their luck to paint fabrics for collections, and there were always friends popping into the studio. It was the only couture house at the time to encourage a bohemian, gypsy life … Back then, we were all friends. Fashion wasn’t run by businessmen who kick a designer out and put in a robot instead. It wasn’t traumatic then. One just did one’s thing … [Yves and I] had a sort of shy relationship filled with hysterical giggles. We saw eye to eye on a lot of aesthetic things and we went out to the same places. He is one of the people that for thirty years I saw the most of—day and evening—and yet we managed to maintain a mystery, he on his side and me on mine … It was a very creative association—an association of opposites. He started off quite strict. When you look at portraits of him as a young man, he was quite austere, then later he loosened up a bit, whereas I’ve always been very loose and relaxed.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA [Loulou] was the opposite of a Parisienne. We made fun of the Air France [stewardess] side of Yves, because he liked navy blue suits … [Loulou] was very pretty and very everything, but she was a bit shocking too and exciting in the way that she belonged to a very proper world, she was from a good family and all that, which was reassuring, but at the same time she was wild and she thought the French were incredibly square.

  BRUNO MÉNAGER Loulou and I had the same bank. Being in the sixteenth, the women who worked there wore proper little suits and were accustomed to a certain clientele. Every time Loulou went in, she was in a different outrageous outfit. One day a teller asked me, “You don’t know that lady, do you?” For her, Loulou was an extraterrestrial. It was the first time I realized how she looked to the outside world.

  YVES It is important to have Loulou beside me when I work on a collection … Her presence at my side is a dream … It has to do with her manner, her straightforwardness … I can’t explain her job … My working methods are lighter and less anxious now that Loulou is here … I trust her reactions. Sometimes they are violent but always positive. And there is a lot of humor. We laugh a lot, especially when the going gets rough and we are tired. She’s the sounding board. I bounce ideas off her and they come back clearer and things begin to happen. She’s never wrong. She has a sense of fashion—like her mother and her grandmother … She is charm, poetry, excess, extravagance and elegance all in one blow … We make a stewing pot. Things bubble and brew. There’s a lot of ESP and trust in the stew—among us, we get the collection done. It took me a long while to realize this is the only way to work. Collaboration is everything; a team of people who respect each other and are good at what they do, each pulling for the team with confidence in themselves and each other. No jealousy, no competitiveness. I’m lucky, but I’m severe with myself as well. I’m incredibly lucid about what I do.

  LOULOU We breathe with him. If [Yves is] happy, we’re happy; if he scowls, no one budges. We’re a team, living and breathing in unison … Yves is the perfectionist, the genius. I’m his fall guy … He is the romantic, I am the Romany … It’s total collaboration. Either we work together, or even if I do things completely separately, it’s a collaboration with him, because it’s for him, it’s for his name. I use some of his ideas and transform them into my ideas, and it makes another thing. Then he sees it and uses my transformation, it’s like a circle; we use each other, we feed each other … In the end we never know where an idea starts. He may do something, and then I may re-interpret it. Then he looks at the re-interpretation and can’t even remember that it’s a re-interpretation of his! He says, “Oh, how divine!” and then he re-interprets and it becomes something else again. That’s the only way to create …

  A lot of people are afraid to have talented workers around them—they get jealous and as a result treat them badly. Yves treats us wonderfully … On the creative side there is no authority from one person, nobody is anybody’s assistant—it’s real teamwork … It’s more of an exchange, and that’s what keeps it alive …

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE Yves and Pierre just fell in love with [Loulou], this mad little bohemian creature, full of ideas, full of jokes, hopping around. In a way it was Loulou’s first holiday from family, from marriage, and she was finally living in the sort of milieu she loved.

  NICOLE DORIER It was Mme. Muñoz’s idea for Loulou to oversee the show makeup—in those days there were no makeup artists, the mannequins did their own. Loulou also directed Alexandre, the hairdresser, explaining the kind of coiffure M. Saint Laurent wanted. She was his magician. With a wave of her wand, a scarf or a ring, she created magic fashion moments.

  AUDREY SECNAZI Loulou was on the inside, her job all mixed up with love and friendship. M. Saint Laurent always called her “ma ché rie.” It wasn’t a professional relationship.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS Loulou’s favorite materials were rock crystal and turquoise. When she gave birth to Anna, Saint Laurent gave her a big box of chocolates, except that in each of the little hollows, instead of a chocolate, there was a huge turquoise, the good ones from Afghanistan.

  LOULOU We have a tremendous intimacy, it’s very much like a family life. We laugh a lot, he asks the maximum, and we give even more … [Yves and I] both believe fantasy is such a vital element of fashion. We tend to think of ourselves as gypsies who have just returned with a marvelous caravan of incredible finds from the exotic reaches of the earth. But we have to make the caravan ourselves. Our Orient is our imagination … [He] is an intellectual who takes his inspiration from paintings, opera or literature. I find mine in a plant, an insect, the shape of a dune or a falling leaf. I do my homework while wandering in the countryside. In Ireland, where I lived, on roads so beautiful yet sad, you come upon so many gypsies with their caravans, musical instruments, multicolored clothes and jewels. I’ll always remember that contrast, the mingling of adventure and nature.

  YVES I think about Ingres, Delacroix when I accessorize. I’ve imagined the dress that Vermeer’s Young Lady Adorning Herself with a Pearl Necklace was wearing. It’s not copying; it’s transposing, picking and choosing …

  JEAN-LUC FRANÇOIS Loulou was a rebel in the same tradition as Colette. She brought craziness, a bubbliness to the studio. She made Saint Laurent less uptight.

  FARIDA KHELFA When M. Saint Laurent spoke of his depressions, you thought you were listening to Cocteau: His psychological torture was visible. Loulou, so light and buoyant, like a little bird, was the antidote, relieving the torment. Kwee-kwee is the sound you make in French for a bird. She signed her cards “Kwee-kwee, Loulou.”

  REBECCA AYOKO Loulou’s presence was necessary to Saint Laurent. If she wasn’t there, you felt he was looking for her, watching the door. He didn’t say much. You had to read his thoughts, because he was off on his own planet with his dresses. Loulou had this lovely way of approaching him and whispering in his ear.

  ALVA CHINN Loulou and M. Saint Laurent were symbiotic, like twins. A lot was unspoken between them. With Mme. Muñoz they formed a troika. Loulou—so open, free and effusive
—practically danced across the room.

  GILLES DUFOUR Loulou was lé gè re, light, and it was this lé gè reté Yves liked. Plus, she was funny. Humor saves a lot of situations in this business, don’t you think? Especially chez Saint Laurent, with Yves so depressed, the ambience so pompous and gloomy. On that score, it was better at Chanel with Karl.

  LOULOU I tend to be somebody who de-dramatizes … I never noticed that [the atmosphere] was heavy, but it probably was a little, like in a family. But my role, on the contrary, was lightness. I drew a veil over the heaviness.

  ————————

  ALYNE DE BROGLIE M. Saint Laurent would go to his house in Marrakech for three weeks, design the collection, then return to explain it to the atelier heads, Anne-Marie, Loulou and the assistants.

  ANNE-MARIE MUñOZ I started with the assumption that no one understood anything but me, that I was the only one who knew everything the sketches intended. He didn’t show us all of them.

  PAULE MONORY Saint Laurent would arrive with masses of drawings and assign them to the different chefs d’atelier, the premiè res, saying, “I think this evening dress would be good for you, Mme. Felisa,” who’d come from Balenciaga; “Jean-Pierre, I see this wonderful suit for you.” They’d discuss the sketches, and then M. Jean-Pierre and Mme. Felisa and the others would go back upstairs with the originals, or tracings. Sometimes Saint Laurent gave the same drawing to two people to see how they interpreted it differently.

  NICOLE DORIER When I started in the cabine, in 1973, he designed on you, creating effects with fabric unrolled directly from the bolt, draping, gathering, until suddenly everything stopped, he’d found the effect he was looking for, he’d spring into action, sitting down at his desk to draw what he saw, the four hands of the assistants holding the fabric in place, careful not to move or break the spontaneous mood. Mme. Muñoz would telephone for the premiè re in a low voice, almost whispering. As a mannequin, you flattered yourself that maybe you helped shape the collection.