Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  PAQUITA PAQUIN Crazy things happened with the old Saint Laurent clients, because of what they had been accustomed to. Micheline Maus was used to stripping down to nothing in front of her vendeuse and fitters, so she did the same at Loulou’s. One day, she stepped out of the dressing room without realizing she was buck naked in full view of everyone on the street. Loulou told me this screaming with laughter.

  MICHAEL SPECTER “Fashion Cafeteria,” The New Yorker, September 27, 2004 The restaurant Davé, in Paris, functions as a sort of high-school cafeteria for the nomadic denizens of the fashion world. And, just as in high school, the food at Davé never matters nearly as much as the seating arrangements. People go there to assure themselves of their stature in a world where little else matters. Although Davé Cheung, the owner, can be unctuous when it is required, he also enjoys the power that comes with saying no.

  Late one evening, Davé faced a complicated seating problem: a grand and difficult woman. The room looked up. Loulou de La Falaise, now in her late fifties, still makes a regal entrance wherever she goes, and she goes everywhere. As we all watched, Davé led her to an inferior table. The crowd seemed pleased. “Loulou is always like a little girl,” he told me later. “She is very, very childish and very grand. Nobody can look at anybody else when she is in the room or she begins to pout.” He waved his arm in the air dismissively. “They say she is chic.”

  There could be few greater humiliations than to be exiled behind the wall separating the front room and the back room, past the fish tank and nearly into the kitchen. Some of the most powerful people in the fashion business treat Davé with a deference that they withhold from nearly everyone except those who can provide them with a good table. “There are some bitchy people in the fashion world,” the designer Marc Jacobs told me one night. “But nobody is stupid enough to offend Davé.”

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY Éric and Beatrice de Rothschild gave a dinner in my honor in Paris, Loulou on my left and Miuccia Prada on my right, and Loulou was pretending she didn’t know who Mrs. Prada was. “Are you an artist? A writer? Do you work in fashion?” We didn’t know whether she was pulling the pranking or … I was sitting on eggshells. Miuccia handled it with deft nuance. She did not take the bait and say, “Well, don’t you know who I am?”, just, “Yes, I work in fashion.” Loulou wouldn’t let up: “And what do you do in fashion?” I thought it was her English way of trying to put Mrs. Prada down.

  I met a man who’d done some work for Loulou. He didn’t want to be tarred by the telling, hence the pseudonym. Loulou had hurt Richard Biais badly: On some level, he’d fallen in love with her. On their first day of work, they met at 8:30 in the morning at a café. Loulou arrived directly from a night out with John Galliano. She and Richard are standing at the bar. “Deux caf é s, s’il vous plait,” Richard tells the barman. Loulou looks at him like—Are you mad?—and switches the order. “Deux demis.” Two beers.

  When they’d finished for the day, Loulou took Richard’s head in her hands, kissed him on the lips and said, “I’m so glad we’re working together.” From then on, a clear effort was made to make him feel like part of the family. He was included in all of her lunches and dinners, often at Lipp, where she was always given the best table, on the right when you entered. Loulou told Richard she was seeing a Polish acupuncturist. Whenever she had a treatment, he said, she returned really pepped up. Once, when they were working late and Loulou was flagging, she left the room and came back newly energized, but had forgotten to wipe the traces of white from her nose.

  Richard was neither young nor new to the fashion world, but he admitted to getting sucked in by Loulou. They spent two dense months together. Then he stopped being invited. “In fashion, you become very close to people, and then just like that you’re over. The moment the job is done, you’re gone, you don’t exist anymore, you’ve served your purpose and you’re discarded. A few days after the project with Loulou was finished, there was a gathering, but I had done my duty and was no longer part of the intimate circle. But that’s fashion—‘Au revoir and good luck.’ ”

  MARIE-DOMINIQUE LELIèVRE I was doing a piece on Loulou’s shop for Libé ration. She was waiting for me at the Flore—an American’s postcard image of la parisienne, heaps of necklaces, butt hanging out of her mouth, bracelets to the elbows. When as a journalist you do interviews, each party starts out in assault position, but then a tie forms. Loulou, no. Cool and prickly, she didn’t smile or attempt to charm, even though she had something to sell.

  DAVID SULZBERGER Loulou had gotten her company off the ground, and then in 2004, Alexis died, the saddest event in her life. She was a deep griever. When my mother died, she was far more weepy and clingy toward me than anyone.

  MATTIA BONETTI Alexis was adorable but hopeless. He and Loulou were like children on a boat who’d been deserted by the captain, at the mercy of waves tossing them left and right. She was fortunate, she fell headlong into la soupe Saint Laurent. He was not so lucky.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY The funeral mass was at Saint-Sulpice. Marianne Faithfull sang. The family stood around the coffin, each member painting some wonderful thing on it. I think it’s very Irish to do that. Or traditionally something. Loulou was losing all the people she loved most, Alexis, Fernando … Fernando was bit by something in Morocco.

  DAVID SULZBERGER Considering the number of Moroccans that could have bitten him … And to be attacked by a beach fly rather than a rabid dog … Well, I guess a beach fly you don’t notice until it’s too late.

  JANO HERBOSCH Fernando died in 2006. He was seventy. He was bitten by a sand fly carrying a parasitic disease, leishmaniasis. Troops in Afghanistan are exposed it all the time, a well-kept secret. One of the last conversations Fernando had—he tried to speak but couldn’t—was on the telephone with Saint Laurent. Fernando had bought Saint Laurent and Bergé’s first house in Marrakech, Dar el Hanch, when they moved to Dar es Saada. Fernando left Dar el Hanch to me. Bergé wants it, and because he wants it, he assumes I’m going to sell it to him. Which I am not. He’d always been jealous of Saint Laurent and Fernando’s closeness. As reported in The Times, everywhere, Fernando died of the fly bite. But as a last dig, Bergé couldn’t resist writing in one of the Saint Laurent books that Fernando died of AIDS.

  PIERRE BERGé [Fernando] was the greatest admirer of Saint Laurent. I was very touched by that attitude, because it can be difficult from time to time to accept that your greatest friend, the one you knew when you were very young, became the more famous designer.

  There was one other casualty that year: Luigi d’Urso. He and Inès had been separated for six months. Before the funeral, she made the implausible gesture of giving an interview to Paris Match. She wanted everyone to know that Luigi’s drinking had been the problem, that they’d planned to be living together again as soon as he conquered it. His concierge had called the fire department when he didn’t answer the door. The firemen broke the lock and found him dead of a heart attack. He was fifty-five.

  ————————

  MARIE BELTRAMI Loulou had difficulty making the transition from Saint Laurent, as if she was still inhabiting that universe. “You know, Marie,” she told me, “for thirty years I was spoiled. Everything on a silver platter.” Now she was in the trenches. “I never imagined this is what it would be like to do my own collection.” She did everything herself—the Porte de Versailles trade shows—everything.

  The numerous scrapbooks Fernando Sanchez made during his years in Morocco include many of his own drawings of Loulou, including these from 1975. © Jano Herbosch. Courtesy of the holder.

  MICHEL VIVIEN Now that I think of it, Loulou asked me about doing shoes for her. Small quantities are a nightmare. I must have declined, lout that I am.

  FLORENCE TOUZAIN Loulou without the structure of YSL was bedlam, pardon the expression.

  HAMISH BOWLES Loulou wasn’t a hard-boiled femme d’affaires, clearly. That was the problem, but also the charm. Her business model is not what I would’ve chosen for
her. Certainly it’s not what the paradigm has become, with a vast luxury group behind you. The kids in fashion school today graduate with a pragmatic approach to brand building. Loulou’s world had such a different archetype for voicing creativity. She seconded a couturier who actually pinned chiffon on a mannequin, rather than running a stable of 150 designers and holding roundtable trend meetings.

  DIDIER GRUMBACH It was a little late, and a fragile model, introducing a new brand around someone who herself is not new, who’d been associated with Yves Saint Laurent for decades. Plus, Loulou opened a boutique. A boutique is not a fashion house.

  CATHERINE SCHWAAB She’d never have done it if her entourage hadn’t pushed her. She was a dilettante, spending left and right, but the squandering, happy-go-lucky era in fashion, when the trips could never be too luxurious, the gifts too extravagant—it was the tail end of all that. Dior sent me a coat. I sent it back, and the press woman called me in hysterics. “You can’t refuse it, I’ll get in trouble, you’ve got to take it!” On top of everything else, the coat was hideous, with big D buttons.

  By the time Loulou launched, the fashion business had tightened its laces and become a science. At ICM, the French fashion school, they study questions like the threshold for pulling a style that’s not moving. They teach the Armani model, where 20 percent of the products earn 80 percent of the turnover. Loulou couldn’t stand that kind of talk.

  INÈS DE LA FRESSANGE We had similar experiences. When I started my line in 1991, I wanted to order a prototype for the same handbag in every color, because that’s how we did it at Chanel. A drawing was done and a mold made for the least button. Karl and I bought cashmere scarves from Bianchini and cut them up to make jackets! But the way we worked at Chanel couldn’t be adapted to my own brand. Loulou was up against the same thing. Plus, she wasn’t a businesswoman. I’m not sure Ariel de Ravenel is, either—and she was president of the company. When the money ran out, Thadée asked if I knew anyone to buy the business or invest.

  Too many years with Yves had given Loulou an exaggerated sense of quality and luxe. Her cut and proportions were too Saint Laurent and at the same time a distortion. People expected something cooler, less dame. But dame is what Loulou had known her entire life. They were clothes for a woman with a house in Tangier and the means to dress in couture. Sophisticated but hip. Rich but unconventional. That’s a small market. Hé las, either you’re rich or unconventional, but rarely both!

  COLOMBE PRINGLE Loulou had gone to only one school. Fashion moves on. We didn’t need a second Yves.

  AUDREY SECNAZI What it came down to—people were paying for Saint Laurent, but without the label.

  STEVEN M. L. ARONSON One of the summers that Maxime was in residence in Anne Cox Chambers’s guesthouse in Provence, we all made a little excursion to Lacoste. Maxime pointed out the modest house where she had lived with Pfriem. This was presumably the scene of the crime: the putative rape of Loulou by Pfriem. By this time, the ignominies of age had won and Maxime was being held together with Scotch tape, but she still, heroically, managed to look ornamental. She was working assiduously on her memoir, which she had me read. I was struck by the passage where, as a very young girl, she follows a woman on a fog-shrouded beach who reminds her of her mother—a ghostly encounter, but one with ineluctable erotic overtones. I thought, Aha! A sexual transgressor from the cradle!

  At the end of that stifling August, Loulou sent Maxime a jersey from her shop that she said she felt had Anne’s name on it, so to speak, and Maxime staggered up to the main house to make a gravely formal sales pitch—she pointed out the ineffable material, the exquisite execution … Later, Anne said to me, “The price was out of sight.” She declined to name it. Suffice it to say that it was enough to give a woman with a seventeen-billion-dollar fortune pause. People of unlimited means invariably turn out to have their limits, and it was Loulou’s jersey of inestimable cost that Anne Cox Chambers drew the line at. I remember her saying, somewhat strangely, “Why, I could have a new tractor for that!”

  Anne asked me to go with her the next time she visited Loulou’s shop. The proprietress was out, but Anne proceeded to shop away, acquiring ten or fifteen items. That afternoon, off the historic place du Palais Bourbon, she did at least a couple of tractors’ worth of damage.

  MICHEL KLEIN The problem with Loulou’s clothes—often even Yves’s were bourgeois. A white mousseline blouse on the average woman is deathly boring; on Loulou, it was sublime. Her way of mixing the tweed jackets and velvet pants she designed … The trouble is, not everyone is Loulou. The customer needed a manual to show her how to wear them.

  MIN HOGG Polished beach stones make a wonderful objet d’art, but they’re not a necklace. Yves brought more out of Loulou than she could bring out on her own. She needed the dome, the cloak, the auspices of Saint Laurent to be outrageous.

  JEAN-LUC FRANÇOIS Just because you collaborate with a designer doesn’t make you one. Gilles Dufour, Karl’s number two at Chanel, is another example. He and Loulou suffered from not being in the shadows, but not being fully in the spotlight, either.

  GILLES DUFOUR After Chanel, I took over at Balmain. In 2000, I was fired. I sued and won—€300,000. I then did my own collection the way Loulou did hers, without backers, with limited means, and it failed. Girls like Inès and Loulou have a fabulous image, but from there to being a designer …

  LAURENCE BENAÏM Loulou had expressed her folly within a framework: the avenue Marceau couture house. Alone, the madness was gone. Her designs were either sugary English or the very things she had rejected chez Saint Laurent, the big-shouldered jackets … She dressed madame du septiè me arrondissement. The Parisian exoticism everyone expected—the caftans, the harem pants—she didn’t do. Loulou was cornered, unable to be what she’d always been, her clothes dogged by a girlish quality that was her strength but also her weakness.

  YUTA POWELL By the third or fourth season, the collection was less cohesive. Thank God we never finalized the contract for a boutique. Loulou was surrounded by friends who adored her but were paid little and not seasoned. How can I say this politely? Ariel de Ravenel was Loulou’s pal. If she was also her manager, then she did an ugly job. If Loulou had had someone who knew how to run a fashion company, she would have succeeded. She had legs.

  JüRGEN DOERING Patricia Bellac was a problem, too. I’d heard you had to watch out with her. In fashion in Paris, there are the nice people, and then there are the leeches who live off the nice people.

  JEAN-JACQUES PICART I had a public relations firm before going to LVMH to start Christian Lacroix, and Bellac was my agent. It didn’t last long. She was cruelly lacking.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY Ariel is from a great name, too, like Loulou. Her brother, Jean-Charles, is the Marquis de Ravenel and married to Jackie, an English banking heiress. She’s filthy, filthy rich. They were very close to the Reagans, which is the worst thing I hated about them. But in the heyday to be invited to the Ravenels’ in Paris … Everything—the food, the paintings, the silver—was beyond beyond. Jackie’s first two husbands were Portuguese and she lived there, so she speaks like an English duchess, but with a Portuguese accent. Fabulous, no? Loulou knew Jean-Charles and Jackie. She stayed with them in Lyford Cay.

  FRANÇOISE PICOLI I hadn’t agreed with Ariel about Loulou’s post–Saint Laurent plan, and told her so. Frustration is the only explanation for why Loulou embarked on a three-story couture house with knitwear, leather, day wear, evening, warp and weft, shoes, bags, jewelry, a dozen employees. Frustration or insanity. It was suicide. She invested all her money and lost everything.

  Ariel’s a mystery. She advised Loulou and the guy who did Theory, Olivier Theyskens, but what are her qualifications? I advise young designers like Olympia Le-Tan and know what the job consists of. I know my way around factories. I can draw up a timetable. Ariel had done PR for Kenzo and YSL Beauté. Then after LVMH bought Kenzo, she helped him with his new company, Takada. They called me to do the shoes, but marketing, im
age, demographics—none of that work had been done. The company folded and Kenzo lost a lot of money.

  FALLON MULCAHY Such a shady lady! I did a telephone interview with Ravenel for a blog piece on Loulou. The conversation was nothing. All the old bromides, same as Bergé’s. She said he consulted on Loulou’s company, which was strange—he’s never said that—and that although she herself didn’t have a business background “per se,” she helped in that area. “It was more like we were friends. I see it more as me giving her advice.” When I asked about finances, Ravenel became hostile and tried to end the call. Then it was, “Look, I really must be going now. I’ve spent longer than I have.” Noblesse oblige, I guess. I didn’t even have enough for a piece. I was set to Skype with Thadée, but then he went AWOL, which apparently is typical.

  JEAN-NOëL LIAUT I was having lunch with Charlotte Mosley and Blanche Blackwell, the model for Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. Blanche wanted to go shopping. I told her not to go to Loulou’s—Debo Devonshire had recently walked out after being ignored by a bunch of ill-bred salesclerks. Blanche is 101 now, so Debo must have been—what?—eighty-seven? Charlotte leaned across the table. “Guess who’s right behind us?” Loulou came straight over and apologized.