Loulou & Yves

  [Yves] has a phenomenal sense of color, but he needed me to jerk it out of his system. He always had it in him because he was brought up in color, but then there was all that sort of good education and Parisian conformity. Most people think that if they use color it won’t be comme il faut, and I think I showed him that color was not vulgar… For a couturier to say you can wear pistachio with orange and a yellow belt was a help. It put a stamp of “alrightness” on it … I think I opened the doors to [Yves]. That is what creativity is: You use people to open doors that are your own. You do not copy other people, but they make things accessible within you …

  Yves is surrounded by [women—Anne-Marie, Betty, me] who are the opposite of what he does. For example, I can’t bear to look too “done” … If there wasn’t bad taste, there wouldn’t be any creation, no imagination, nothing amusing … He needed us to connect with everyday life, to shake him up. There’s a side of Yves that’s very up-on-a-pedestal, whereas we, on the contrary, are out there in the world.

  AUDREY SECNAZI In fashion, you need “mistakes” to make the rest live. With Loulou, everything was a bit off. You know, the idea that there’s nothing more boring than good taste.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY Loulou and Betty were the bookends in the mythology of Saint Laurent’s muses. You could see Loulou’s influence in the late seventies bohemian romanticism, running across the Tuileries for Newton like a gypsy in a flou chiffon skirt, spencer jacket and bowler hat, whereas Betty had the rigeur of the discipline of le smoking and the grain de poudre and the barathea wool. Loulou ranks with all the great muses, Jeanne Toussaint, 123 the Marchesa Casati …

  HAMISH BOWLES They embodied the two sides of Yves’s brain, Betty the sleek, androgynous, existential side, and Loulou the whimsical, haute-bohè me, world-traveler, Christian Bérard side. Yin and yang.

  BETTY CATROUX She saw everything in pink, and I saw everything in black.

  GRACE CODDINGTON I don’t see muses as women who earn salaries. They’re paper dolls, someone to have dinner with. Loulou worked.

  LOULOU To me, a muse comes to have tea and cookies and a chat, and looks frightfully smart, then goes to a cocktail party. I didn’t see it as someone who worked as hard as I did.

  INÈS DE LA FRESSANGE Muses are usually women without families. Loulou had a balanced life—house, husband, a child. She wasn’t a shopaholic or a fashionista. One had the impression that fashion wasn’t all that important to her—and it was her life.

  MARIE-DOMINIQUE LELIèVRE Loulou started as Yves’s playmate, then the work took over. She was an aristo, she was English, she’d lived in New York… She brought him the outside world. Her influences and family interested him, he who was so franco-franç ais. In the same way that Kate Moss studied Brigitte Bardot, down to the tilt of her hat, Loulou studied the twenties, especially the Americans. She knew Zelda Fitzgerald, Sara Murphy124 and Millicent Rogers by heart. Loulou sought to revive an era she would’ve liked to live in. Yves also had Anne-Marie, so devoted, working till three in the morning in the early years, then sleeping at the house so she could start again at nine. As a workhorse, there was no one who could touch her. But she was ten years older than Loulou and, let’s face it, less fun.

  JANE PENDRY People would say, “Oh, you’d look chic in a black bin liner.” Loulou took great offense, as if dressing well required no effort.

  LOULOU Yes, I suppose [one should suffer to be beautiful]. It doesn’t mean that one should have to wear corsets, but if you have got a headache, it is not very attractive to complain about it. If you have decided to go out, you have to put your best foot forward and keep yourself up. Otherwise, one may as well wear a track suit… I disapprove of too much comfort.

  FRANÇOIS-MARIE BANIER To inspire a great artist, to be like clay in his hands, is a destiny. Loulou was for Yves exactly what Lou Andreas-Salomé was for Rainer Maria Rilke: a gold mine. Yves was timid, even vis-à-vis himself, frightened of his own fireworks. Through Loulou he could access himself. She was like the musical phrase that triggers the fugue, a spring, a motor, a mooring … the catalyst of an era.

  G. Y. DRYANSKY For Yves, Loulou was a way out of the huis clos or ivory tower of the couture and into a more democratic but still elite world where the old sclerotic standards didn’t pertain. She was emblematic of a new Dionysian, pre–People magazine smart set that wasn’t necessarily rich but had pizzazz and class and spent weekends in castles and summers in Ibiza and weren’t bothered about whether or not Chanel had actually accused Balenciaga of wiping his dog’s ass with his silk handkerchief.

  HAMISH BOWLES Loulou brought the madcap spirit of bohemian Anglo-Irish aristocracy to Yves Saint Laurent’s elegant Parisian world and inspired him to capture the hippie spirit of the times, channel the color and drama of his beloved Morocco, and transform his own aesthetic realm, and by extension to literally change the way women wanted to look …

  PATRICK GOOSSENS Loulou was the exact reflection of whatever M. Saint Laurent was thinking—and maybe even sparked what he was thinking. A locomotive. If you saw her in turquoise, yellow and pink, you had every reason to suppose he was on a trip to the Sahara for the next collection. People on the street turned around to look at Loulou. They couldn’t help themselves. There are fewer and fewer women like her with fashion daring… Françoise Leroy Beaulieu, who did the costume jewelry at Dior … Camille Micelli, who followed after …

  With Yves and his other muse, Betty Catroux, chez Yves, 55, rue de Babylone, Paris, 1979. Pierre had moved out three years earlier. © Guy Marineau.

  HAROLD KODA A muse is an attractive, news-generating, mediagenic woman who is not fat and middle-aged and working in the back room. Think of Amanda Harlech and Karl, Carine Roitfeld and Tom Ford, Dior and the dowdy-chic Mizza Bricard …

  PIERRE BERGÉ The relationship between Yves and Loulou was the relationship between two professionals … Loulou was to Yves Saint Laurent what Mizza Bricard was to Christian Dior: a muse and collaborator … Yves was up and down all the time … and often he was completely down. Loulou was fantastic about that. She’d say, “Hello? Don’t be like that. Wake up, come on, we have to work.”

  CHRISTIAN DIOR I felt that Mme. Bricard’s … inimitable extravagances of taste would have an excellent effect on [my own] far less extravagant temperament … I knew that her very presence in my house would bring the atmosphere necessary for duration, as much as by her reactions—and even her revolts—against my ideas, as by her support of them … [She] seemed the best possible stimulants for a nature like mine, so inclined to be discouraged by the indifference of our era … In her personal tradition of elegance, Mme. Bricard seemed to me to bring to life that motto which I most prefer: Je maintiendrai, I will uphold. Mme. Bricard emerges from her hatboxes … gives one definitely adverse comment, condemns an unfortunate fabric with a look, or suddenly plumps for a daring color … [She] and I now pore over the choice of a hat. Before us is a huge pile of assorted straw shapes which are to the hats what the toiles are to the dresses … Twenty unsuccessful attempts are made; sometimes in desperation we abandon the fruitless search and invent a new shape … Her high standards are inflexible; in fashion she aims directly at that indefinable and perhaps slightly neglected element called “chic.”

  Mizza cultivated mystery. Had she really danced nude in a London revue? Been the first person to have a nose job? Her childhood was spent on the Black Sea—or was it among the Dorset hedgerows? We do know that she was born in Paris to an English mother and a Viennese father, and was as old as the century when she died, in 1978, having married, successively, Prince Narishkine of Russia; Alexandro Biano, a Romanian diplomat related to the social-literary sensation Marthe Bibesco; and a Frenchman, Hubert Bricard. To say nothing of her lovers: Aga Khan III, King Farouk, Mouton Rothschild’s Philippe de Rothschild, Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany. She was one of the last of the grandes horizontales, memorialized by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Beaton and Avedon. Mizza worked for two houses, Molyneux and Jacques Doucet, before Dior of
fered her the position of milliner.

  BETTINA BALLARD She was … one of the great fashion disciples of the world. Her reactions to Dior’s toiles and models as he worked told him far more than all the laudatory remarks of fashion editors for the finished model. Mizza’s criticism came from instinctive fashion knowledge No one was more deeply Parisian … [She] answer[ed] to Dior alone. She brought a purely personal female point of view to the studio—slightly feline—that gave him a flashlight view of how customers might react to his clothes. It was she who interpreted his ideas for hats to complete each costume and who had a great feeling for the colored stone jewels that came to be part of the Dior look.

  She was [Dior’s] trial balloon—difficult, temperamental, egotistical … obsessed with her jewels, with which she covered herself even in the morning … I remember once when she came to lunch in Connecticut wearing what she termed her “country jewels” (sapphires) … a bois de rose shantung dress—the latest Dior model—her high-heeled shoes in pale alligator, “for the country.” She looked at the flagstone of my terrace and visibly drew her toe back on the familiar parquet of the living-room floor …

  MARIE-FRANCE POCHNA Mizza was Proust’s Odette, the grande cocotte Lantelme, and the daring soubrette Gabi Deslys all rolled into one … She was unfailingly, spontaneously creative, conjuring up a hat … or finding exactly the right accessory for an outfit, a … [choker] perhaps or a little bit of chiffon tied causally around the neck just to soften the look … There was no need for words between Dior and his muse…

  HAMISH BOWLES Saint Laurent clearly sought a continuum from his days at Dior. Raymonde Zehnacker ran the Dior studio, Mizza was his muse and Suzanne Luling was directrice of the couture salon. In precisely the same roles, Saint Laurent had Anne-Marie, Loulou and Hélène de Ludinghausen.

  HUGO VICKERS Hélène de Ludinghausen used to come to lunch at the Hôtel Lambert when I was working with Alexis de Redé on his memoirs. She married Robin Smyth-Ryland, who has a massive estate, thousands of acres, and one of the great hunts, in Warwickshire, and was quite a bit younger than she was. It didn’t last. The baroness’s voice was deeper than any man’s, like sandpaper, like barnacles. Toads and vipers leapt from her mouth.

  HéLèNE DE LUDINGHAUSEN I started to work at Balmain in 1963 as an assistant in the studio … [then] at Maison Jansen … the biggest maison de décoration in the world … It was 1968 … when I was told that Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé were coming in … M. Saint Laurent said to me at one point, he said, “May I ask you something? Is this your real voice, your normal voice, or do you have a cold?” … Two days later, he sent someone to tell me that he had found a woman to manage his maison: [me] … I started working as inspector of the Rive Gauche boutiques … and two years later as directrice du salon de haute couture … I worked with Yves Saint Laurent for thirty-three years, thirty-one of which I was directrice … Everyone was there to tell Saint Laurent he was a genius, and Loulou was there to perturb him … She had the courage of being tactless …

  When Dior died, the house announced that Mizza would “continue to exercise her good taste over the collections.” She and Yves spoke the same language, of aigrettes and point d’esprit and ostrich feathers. Mizza topped off his designs with headpieces fit for a doge, a pasha, a Goya grandee. When it came to dressing herself, she was from the Vreeland school of narrow and deep, her palette of personal signifiers culminating in a hard, brittle chic: fourteen strands of pearls worn in a single go, lip-length veils, snoods, guêpières and mousseline blouses from the Dior workrooms in that smoky, velvety gray known as gorge de pigeon: pigeon’s throat. Like everyone in the studio, Mizza wore a white lab coat over her street clothes. From the right sleeve emerged a wrist tied with a curious length of chiffon, printed with her signature motif, leopard spots. All agreed the fabric hid a scar, but not on what had caused it. Some said a suicide attempt, others that she’d been shot by a lover. Mizza was still designing hats into the seventies, now on her own.

  MIZZA BRICARD Letter to Cecil Beaton, May 3, 1972 I made a hat looking like a real camellia tree, green shiny branches of leaves and white buds. Just as if you were in a Cintra April garden! I am so old-fashioned I like gardenias, camellias, magnolias, white fat begonias and black irises—Parma violets have disappeared from our flower shops! How dull. I suppose I’ll find 4 women for this hat, and 2 or 3 Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas dept. stores. It will end up on an old senator’s widow’s head for 3$.

  VALERIE STEELE Nowadays it’s a cliché, designers with imputed muses. Either it’s a commercial deal or an ad hoc dress worn by someone who had nothing to do with it. Loulou had real purpose. Her personal style propelled Saint Laurent toward a living youth culture and kept him evolving, as Picasso’s women did him. But when you say “bohemian,” obviously we’re not talking about real Gypsies, or even artist bohemians, but the style as it applies to upper-class European women: luxurious, impeccable, expensive. Nothing to do with the Goodwill drop. True muses aren’t ephemeral creatures lounging around smoking a hookah. They interact, whether they’re artists’ models or design assistants suggesting accessories. Daphne Guinness was a muse to Alexander McQueen. Isabella Blow was a great facilitator for John Galliano and McQueen, though she became a liability, she was so troubled.

  JANE ORMSBY GORE Amanda Harlech married my brother, so she’s a lady. Karl likes the “lady” part. He’s German and feels that with Lady Harlech on his arm … Amanda’s from the same mold as Loulou, beautiful, clever and slightly unreachable. Even if I could hug Loulou to bits, there was something elusive and tragic about her.

  HAROLD KODA While every designer claims to have a muse, actually, secretly, they don’t believe it. It’s a tidy conceit, except in the mind of the ostensible muse, though Halston could certainly convince women they inspired him. I did a Halston show at FIT, and I hate to tell you how many of his ladies would say, “He did that for me,” all claiming agency in the creation of the same model.

  LOULOU You can’t take the role of muse seriously, because then it’s not instantaneous or natural, and certainly not inspiring.

  SUZY MENKES Muses are such a tired old subject, aren’t they?

  123 Jeanne Toussaint (1887–1976), head of jewelry design at Cartier and mistress-muse of Louis Car-tier, grandson of the house’s founder.

  124 Sara Murphy (1883–1975) and her husband, Gerald, were models for the characters of Nicole and Dick Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

  21

  The Fiat Guy

  Clara’s post-Thadée regimen of asceticism didn’t last. In no time she entered into a tortuously byzantine relationship with the nephew of the French president. Beyond changing her name, he spared her nothing when he came to write about her.

  FRÉDÉRIC MITTERRAND In the 1980s … enveloped in Célia’s love for me … we clung to each other like two survivors, but unfortunately from two different shipwrecks … She still bore an incredible resemblance to her childhood portraits even as she approached forty … But she had never married, not having the mindset for the kind of grand social career that should have come naturally to someone like her. She was more Left Bank and Tuscany than avenue Foch and Palm Beach, unable to renounce her freedom or, ultimately, to sacrifice her privacy. Outside the comfortable cocoon of the fashion house—which, by the way, was not entirely immune to abrupt mood swings—she led a solitary life in a charming apartment on the Île de la Cité that she could not afford, her only company a little dog that sat quietly beside her on the banquette when she took her mother to lunch at Prunier’s every Sunday … Oddly, she’d never given up her nationality, though she’d never returned to her country of origin, where she might have found vestiges of her vanished fortune. She was bound to it by secret ties and memories of the childhood that was still so alive in her features; everywhere and always … she was an outsider … In the early days, I was in awe of her romantic lifestyle, but I soon came to love her deeply, with a love that endures even though we don’t see ea
ch other as often as we used to. But mine was a love without desire, whereas Célia wanted me all to herself. My inability to sleep with her didn’t discourage her; it offered her a kind of guarantee that I wouldn’t be drawn to other women, and in that sense she was right. I even considered marrying her, though I was wise enough not to ask—I think she would have said yes…

  In her passionate affection [Cé lia] was always willing to defer the question of what was to become of us. This forward-moving retreat even exacerbated her immoderate attachment to me, rooted in her perpetual fear of being abandoned: the anxiety of the poor little rich girl who, when she looked into her bright Parisian mirror, saw the penniless exile whose father had run off and who had been forced to play mother to her own mother. Available yet untouchable, without realizing it I had provided her with a kind of ideal brother, and the more I cared for her, without being able to give her what she also needed from me and pretended not to want, the closer we were drawn to each other, she by yearning and I by remorse …

  [Cé lia made] fun of everything … without being unduly hurtful, picking up on the incongruous or ridiculous detail in a situation or behavior that good manners might normally exempt from critique; she went at it with razor-sharp perspicacity and a light, buoyant touch devoid of malice and any propensity to humiliate … Free as a high-born dropout yet as conventional as an é migré never fully convinced of her permanent status, Cé lia cast an ironic eye over a world that she feared would be taken away one day for some obscure reason she hadn’t anticipated … Through her, I held an increasingly secure place in that magical little club [of the fashion house] whose every member was assuredly interesting and exceptional but which also felt like a gilded cage to me … She took my attempt to gain some perspective as personal betrayals, and her mounting panic only increased her demands on my time and attention. The fact is, she was right—by seeking to put some distance between us, I was calling her entire way of life into question … While I never seriously considered leaving her, none of my promises, vows, or proofs could lay to rest her increasingly agonizing doubts. We had come full circle, back to the lost child in her Buenos Aires palace; I suppose she had to relive the entire sequence of events, from the earliest need for love to its loss. The mechanism had been set in motion, from argument to reconciliation, indictment to breakup … On the day I caught her just as she was about to place herself in great danger—certainly without realizing it, although you never know—that day I finally understood that we had gone too far.