Loulou & Yves

  AUDREY SECNAZI Elbaz was a disaster, but Loulou couldn’t help notice how he and Merloz had so much more freedom than she’d ever had. The fashion business was less serious when Loulou began. As it became more disciplined and structured, she saw how well-paid people who did her work had become. She received a very respectable salary, but not the paycheck of a star. It didn’t even compare favorably with people’s who came to the house at the end, when the system and pay scale had evolved. She was worth more. She was never recognized. She was always M. Saint Laurent’s assistant. It was his name we served, in the silence and anxiety of the studio. Loulou oxygenated the place. She should have been paid extra just for that.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS I don’t think she had a very good deal. The company was very old-fashioned. Familial. Imagine in the eighties in New York how much money she would have been paid. She would’ve had a chauffeur, a budget for her hair, and of course a lawyer would have negotiated everything. There were no lawyers in Loulou’s dealings with Saint Laurent.

  SUZY MENKES Yves wasn’t very nice to her toward the end. I remember going to rue de Babylone for lunch, just him and me, in about 1998, and he said something quite nasty about how he couldn’t understand why she didn’t get a lifting because her face was so …

  AUDREY SECNAZI M. Saint Laurent pushed her to have a face-lift, like Betty, but she didn’t want to. Instead, she had a skin-peeling treatment with carbolic acid. The masque didn’t harden completely, but she still had to eat through a straw and couldn’t go out for two weeks. It was adorable how she didn’t want her assistant, Elie Top, to know. “Don’t tell him because he sees me as a goddess, and I don’t want to tarnish his image of me.”

  LOULOU I haven’t had any cosmetic surgery yet because I haven’t had the time, but I’m not at all against it, because it’s progress. I’m only against Botox. I’m waiting a little, until everything is perfected, ready for me … The only thing I’ve had done is the lion’s wrinkle on my forehead, because for me it’s the worry wrinkle, or else the idiot’s wrinkle. As matter of fact, it’s never come back.

  SUZY MENKES I didn’t have lunch with Yves to interview him, it was just a kind of royal visit, and I found the remark about Loulou gratuitous. I’d thought they’d had a row and fallen out, but people told me their relationship had been like that from the start.

  ————————

  The 1999 sale of YSL to Gucci was triggered by Sanofi, not Pierre and Yves. Sanofi wanted out of the beauty business. In one breath, François Pinault of the luxury giant PPR, now Kering, announced that he’d purchased YSL, acquired a 40 percent stake in Gucci and was immediately selling YSL to Gucci to create a new group run by Tom Ford and Dominique de Sole, Gucci’s designer and CEO.

  Pinault paid $974.5 million for YSL in a package that included whopping debt and a few non–Saint Laurent fragrances. Of course, the purse wasn’t all Yves and Pierre’s, far from it. When they sold the company six years earlier, they received $636 million in Sanofi stock, representing their 43.7 percent stake in YSL on the French bourse, an additional $65 million in stock, and annual salaries of $2 million each. Still, Pierre slyly liked to give the impression that the full amount Pinault paid for the company went to him and Yves, as if Sanofi didn’t exist, as if the hundreds of millions it reaped weren’t part of the deal.

  Given that Pinault had spent $2.9 billion at the same time for less than half of Gucci, YSL’s price was trifling, even embarrassing, illustrating just how far Yves and Pierre had let the company fall. The handover to Gucci stalled when Pinault suddenly “remembered” that his agreement with Pierre and Yves gave them complete creative and managerial authority over YSL fashion. Funny, he’d promised Ford and Sole the same thing—and that Pierre would be phased out. Pierre was practically stopping people on the street, thumping them on the shoulder and bellowing, “It’s still my house!” Of course, Pinault hadn’t “forgotten” anything. He knew all along he’d have to write a second check, for seventy million dollars, for Pierre and Yves to go away. As a further “concession,” he also removed the couture unit from the Gucci deal, buying and financing it himself for the house’s founders to run. Everyone was happy.

  Except for the cash, Pinault’s “compromise” in allowing Pierre and Yves to retain the couture wasn’t very meaningful. What did Saint Laurent couture really amount to? There didn’t seem to be any advertising or marketing. Pierre just had to pay the embroidery bills from Lesage, make sure Nan Kempner had a good seat at the show, check that Yves made it to work and add up the losses: at least twelve million dollars in 1998 on sales of about half that. Pinault’s annual funding of the collection was fixed at $6.6 million. Pierre and Yves shouldered the rest, a huge amount even considering two further last-minute rounds of deal sweetening. Perhaps Pierre’s greatest coup was getting Pinault to pay for a foundation dedicated to Yves’s archive, capped at almost two million dollars a year. All the dresses were eventually moved from a repository in the nineteenth arrondissement to a state-of-the-art facility at avenue Marceau. But with no other products to justify it, Saint Laurent couture became a complete vanity operation.

  LOULOU The first time I met Tom was for lunch when he started as creative directive at YSL, and we were both consumed by shyness—completely paralyzed.

  FRANÇOISE PICOLI I was on the horse about staying with Saint Laurent or becoming Ford’s directrice du studio. I’d been bored for twenty years. I was fascinated by Yves le personnage, and I loved the fittings, but the daily grind—it would have been demeaning to stay. Ford’s excess was completely mad. He changed his mind every two minutes.

  JüRGEN DOERING Ford didn’t want anyone from the previous régime, not one seamstress. But he made believe he did. If I’d accepted his offer, he’d have dumped me, and I’d have lost my severance. No way, my dear. I took the money and bought a house. Bonsoir, see you next time, bye-bye.

  RéMI BONARGENT With just the couture left, there wasn’t enough to occupy the entire studio. I was the first to go, called into Christophe Girard’s office with Mme. Muñoz on a Wednesday, and with no explanation apart from “There’s nothing for you to do now, we can’t keep you,” Girard said, “We’ll come to an agreement and you’ll leave by the end of the week.” If Bergé had wanted to get rid of Loulou, he would have, without any formalities.

  I’d been hired to keep the fabrics in the studio in order. Loulou and Anne-Marie were really the only people M. Saint Lauren spoke to. When the fabrics were first delivered, on spec, I helped Loulou divide them up. Imagine fifty suppliers sending three hundred each … Of everyone, she was the most human and compassionate. A certain empathy. It wasn’t, “You do this, pick that up.” We had a real dialogue. If you made a mistake, the feeling was, No one’s perfect, and you learn from your mistakes.

  The computer revolution chez Saint Laurent, that was me, too. Do you know the story? One day, Monsieur says to Mme. Muñoz, “Anne-Marie, I don’t know if you remember, we once did a pink jacket …” A pink jacket in how many years of collections? Good luck finding it! There were still only paper files at that point. I said, “Why don’t I scan everything and create a database? In two seconds, you’ll have every pink jacket since 1962!”

  I have no regrets, only about the way it ended. I was disappointed. After all, the computer work I did is the basis of the foundation archive today. When I was fired, Loulou was the only senior member of the studio who told me she was sorry to see me go.

  PAULE MONORY I left the studio twice: first to work with Merloz, then as Hedi Slimane’s right hand. Hedi was hired in 1996 to design the menswear. When Ford arrived, he insisted that Hedi report to him—unacceptable to Hedi. So he began negotiating a top-secret new job and asked me to go with him. At the same time, Loulou was calling, saying she’d been made artistic director of a new Saint Laurent couture boutique. She was very aware of Hedi’s media success and how he’d modernized the Saint Laurent image. Officially, I was guaranteed a position back in the studio if it didn’t work out with
Hedi, but as the atelier heads reminded me, “You deserted, and that’s not done.” So meeting with Loulou, I was nervous. When I walked in, M. Saint Laurent greeted me—with a kiss!—the sign that I was forgiven. Now I had two job offers! Hedi begged me to hold on a few more days and the deal would be done. He went to Dior, and I went with Loulou.

  Suzy Menkes, in the International Herald Tribune, called the new boutique selling limited editions of Saint Laurent classics a case of “Cross[ed] Swords,” “a deliberatively provocative gesture” and “a swipe” at the Gucci Group, especially as the shop opened just prior to Ford’s first YSL show, not to mention its location a few doors down from the Rive Gauche Paris flagship he was busy redoing. “It is meant to be mischievous,” Loulou said. “It’s the flea on the back of the herd of corporate elephants.” According to Menkes, who was happy to fan the fire, Gucci really didn’t care, seeing it as “the old folk, holed up in the ancestral château, grousing that the next generation is ruining the family business.” Philip Treacy, Ford’s milliner, entered the fray by taking a shot at Loulou, declaring that “hats are part of the Saint Laurent legacy … but hats can be stuffy. You can rejuvenate a silhouette for the year 2000…”

  SUSAN GUTFREUND The shop did exact copies of Saint Laurent couture. I bought a smoking, and truly, even though it was demi-mesure, it felt like couture. But how they got away with it, I don’t know, because they’d sold the name.

  TOM FORD Being at Yves Saint Laurent was such a negative experience for me … Yves and his partner, Pierre Bergé, were so difficult and so evil and made my life such misery … They would call the fiscal police, and they would show up at our offices. You are not able to work an employee more than thirty-five hours a week. They’re like Nazis, those police. They’d come marching in, and you had to let them in and they’d interview my secretary. And they can fine you and shut you down. Pierre was the one calling them. I’ve never talked about this on the record before… Yves Saint Laurent doesn’t exist for me. I have letters from [him] that are so mean you cannot even believe such vitriol is possible. I don’t think he was high when he wrote them either … he just became so insanely jealous …

  Even though there was no love lost between Loulou and Tom Ford, he must have been a little starstruck—he was, after all, a gay man in fashion—and in an oblique way he turned out to be her ticket out of jail. Yves was living an apocalypse, disgusted to the point of revulsion by Ford the person and how he was grinding his name into the dirt. Cohabitation was never going to work, but with any other designer, Yves might have seen out more of his contract, which allowed him to design couture until 2016—thus adding to Loulou’s prison sentence.

  FRANÇOISE PICOLI After agreeing I’d go with Ford, Saint Laurent became worried: “Who’s going to look after my shoes now?” I suggested Christian Louboutin, “especially as he’s a close friend of Loulou’s.” Christian had always dreamed of working for the house. When he was young, Anne-Marie had bought his designs to help him. But Saint Laurent wasn’t interested. “No, not that one.” Michel Vivien was chosen instead.

  MICHEL VIVIEN My Saint Laurent connection—I’d worked with a man called Alexandre Narcy, who did some of the show shoes for Loulou. Narcy’s heels for the runway, different from his production heels, were in resin, reinforced with apricot pits. He was a minor genius.

  M. Saint Laurent was pretty zoned out. Remember his hair then? Blown out like a lion’s. I’m quite a snob myself, so I got on well at the house, with all those extraterrestrials, cultured people with a sense of fantasy, leading adventurous lives, working for this company that taught you how to live—arriving for meetings in Florence a day early, the right hotel in summer, the right hotel in winter—but that functioned like the military. It was all hands on deck, because after the sale to Gucci, Pierre had dismantled everything. I did the sourcing, searching for the last shoe virtuosos in Europe. The spending was pharaonic … blond ebony heels … Loulou has all my respect for eternity. To me, she was like a Giacometti sculpture. But it wasn’t her best period, when you think of the démodé hats stuck with partridge feathers … Saint Laurent, too. Four times a year, all of Paris applauded his fetish for cotton piqué: “Mais quel chic!” Privately, they wondered if there wasn’t a closet at avenue Marceau where the clothes lived between shows.

  “The last show” wasn’t “the last show” when we started working on it, it was a collection like any other. Then Pierre began talking about a grand retrospective, and the archives spilled open. It all seemed like his idea, M. Saint Laurent looked completely surprised. Then he announced his retirement. Only after it was all over did we find out the real reason Pierre wanted out: he wanted to buy Druout, the auction house. Which, by the way, he did not succeed in doing.

  Loulou had wanted to leave for a long time, but Pierre said, “No, you have to stay and help Yves.” Bergé was a dictator, Saint Laurent a god. This was the god’s wish, relayed by the dictator. Loulou obeyed.

  FLORENCE TOUZAIN Mme. Muñoz had reached retirement age in 1996. She wanted to leave then, but M. Saint Laurent asked her to stay. She did, until the end, and didn’t regret it. She’d already been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and says continuing to work kept her health up.

  CARLOS MUñOZ Some say it was her decision to stop working, because of her illness, that prompted Yves’s retirement in 2002: “If Anne-Marie leaves, I leave.” I should know for sure, but I don’t. My parents can be like the KGB.

  Late-period Loulou by Joe Eula for a New York Times Magazine story, “Au Revoir, Yves,” on his last collection, April 14, 2002. © The Estate of Joe Eula.

  NICOLE DORIER Saint Laurent didn’t want to stop the couture any more than he had wanted to sell the company: Bergé convinced him, twisting him around his little finger. Saint Laurent knew the house was his life. Even if it killed him to create, it killed him even quicker not to.

  JüRGEN DOERING Dresses were his medicine. Everything else bored him to death. He fixated on dresses so as not to collapse. Take them away and he crumbled. He said it himself. He saw himself very clearly. The sicker he was, the harder he worked. He was like a nuclear reactor, sending out waves we in the studio absorbed like sponges. We clung to him like ants. It could be oppressive. I’d well up with tears and not know why.

  AUDREY SECNAZI Women’s Wear first speculated on M. Saint Laurent’s retirement in early December. Loulou confirmed it to me just before Christmas. It was a state secret. On January 7, M. Saint Laurent gave a press conference at the house.

  NICOLE DORIER The retrospective was a seventy-five-minute show with 108 mannequins and an audience of two thousand, televised live from the Centre Pompidou and simulcast on two huge screens outside the museum. Of the 331 looks, sixty-two were smokings, plus twelve new mousseline evening dresses and a couple of new navy suits. A special commemorative label was sewn into each order, and everything in the show—not just the handful of new designs—was available, including the Mondrian dresses in the original Racine jersey, put back into production specially.

  MICHEL VIVIEN When M. Saint Laurent liked a style, you had to have it for him in every size in every color. Roger Vivier had done the famous pump with the square heel, snub toe and silver Pilgrim buckle shown with the Mondrian dresses in 1965. I ordered six hundred pairs. In his memoir, Bergé says that Saint Laurent had seen the buckle in Salzburg and accuses Roger of stealing credit for the shoe!

  With preparations for the retrospective under way, Louboutin smelled history in the making. He and I had the same factory, and I told the owner that working on M. Saint Laurent’s last collection was like receiving the Legion of Honor.

  I have the utmost regard for Christian’s work, but Bergé’s not the only one who rewrites history. Christian’s the king of lobbying. When Anne-Marie bought his designs, it was to stop this annoying kid from knocking on the door. Now Christian was lobbying Loulou. The telephone rings. “Ché rie, c’est moi, Christian. I want to do the retrospective.” She floats the idea to M. Saint Laurent and get
s a terse response: “Je n’aime pas l’homme, et je n’aime pas son esprit de chic.” Okay, case closed—except it’s not. Louboutin continues to lobby Loulou. A few days pass. Different story. Loulou: “Christian’s doing a few shoes for the show.” “What?! Loulou, you can’t!” I had to defend myself. “Okay then, I want shared billing: Michel Vivien pour Yves Saint Laurent.” “No, Michel, it’s not possible. We’ve never credited anyone.”

  CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN I’d told Loulou I was working on a shoe inspired by Yves retiring, a transparent vinyl evening sandal with Cassandre’s logo like a big tattoo on the instep. Except for the initials “YSL,” the shoe disappears on the foot. I knew I couldn’t put it into production, I was doing it for myself. “Send it,” she said. When she called back it was to announce, “Yves adores your sandal, we want your name on it and everything.” I was glued to the ceiling. The house created a new label for one shoe. It was like receiving the Legion of Honor!”

  ————————

  Needless to say, there was no place for Clara/Célia in Tom Ford’s vision of the brand she had helped found. At fifty-nine, she was out of a job. Not even her secrets were safe.

  FRéDéRIC MITTERRAND I think that if I’d managed to sleep with [Cé lia] we would still be living together to this day; it may not have been essential to her, but it was to me … At those times when she managed to do without me, I had appointments with boys who were not very savory in hotels that were even less so…