SUSAN GUTFREUND There was a lot of bad sentiment about why Pierre didn’t do more for Loulou, but isn’t it funny that there’s a London nightclub named after her now? When you think of all those photos of her in gypsy outfits painting the town with Yves, I just think it’s ironic that now she’s on everyone’s lips: “Let’s meet at Loulou’s!”
A. A. GILL “Life Begins at 8:30,” Vanity Fair, August 2012 The opening of a new club is a red-letter moment… a real, old-fashioned, handmade club … Robin Birley is clubbable aristocracy … [His] new club is called Loulou’s, after his aunt [sic] Loulou de La Falaise, the fashion designer, who died last year … Birley spent £30 million on this club … a series of rooms of sublime, dazzling beauty. Light, bright, and glittering, they are elegant and debonair, collections of wit and exuberance like Diaghilev wrestling with Jackie Onassis in scented risotto … It’s like sitting in a fairy story or being swallowed by a dragon or perhaps being Mme. de Pompadour’s crystal dildo. Mick Jagger giggles in a corner and Kate Moss turns dreamy circles on the dance floor … For Robin, it’s not about profit … It’s about making something … an oasis, a chapel, a reserve against the terrible mediocrity and slovenliness outside.
AMIR FARMAN-FARMA Robin and India Jane are very much into their brother Rupert, but Robin didn’t call his club “Rupert’s.” He called it “Loulou’s,” very pointedly paying homage to that side of the family.
JOHN STEFANIDIS As you can see, Robin was very proud of Loulou, though he never would have done the club if his father were alive. Actually, I was slightly indignant about the name. After all, he and Loulou weren’t especially close. He wasn’t particularly attentive. I thought, It’s all very well, but has he asked anyone’s permission?
WILLY LANDELS Robin had the marvelous idea of hanging pictures by Oswald Birley at Loulou’s. There’s one of Maxime as a girl. I’m the link with the past, you see. I designed all the mise en place for Mark’s clubs, and I do the same for Robin. But I find Rifat Ozbek’s decoration of Loulou’s rather like a soup with too much flavor. Loulou is remembered at the bar with a quite good photograph by the African Queen, Michael Roberts.
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GEOFFROY GUERRY So many myths … I read on the Internet that Loulou’s ashes are with Saint Laurent’s in Marrakech—a double myth. She didn’t want to be cremated. She’s in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris with her father. The grave is pitiful, just a slab of cement. No plaque, not even their names. The tomb of beggars. Loulou had over thirty years to buy a headstone for her father. Daniel’s never done anything, either. It all comes back to money. They don’t have any.
Richard de La Falaise and his mother, Martine, had never visited the La Falaise grave, so when I told them I was going, we made a plan to meet. It was New Year’s Eve. I arrived late, they’d waited as long as they could in the cold wet, then left. Geoffroy Guerry had given me the plot’s coordinates, 61st division, 9/60-15/66. There was no marker, as he’d said, but the slab was stone, not concrete. To be certain I had the right grave, I went to the cemetery office. With the clock ticking toward the New Year, it seemed strange that it should be open. A clerk consulted a database and a huge antique handwritten ledger dating from Balzac: The plot contained only Alain de La Falaise.
STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Loulou wished to be cremated. Thadée went into a deep depression after she died. The next year, he said, “I think I might feel better if we—let’s go around and look for some things to build a monument at Montecalvello.” We found an ancient garden obelisk, a base and a massive old millstone that allowed us to dispense with any sort of modern cement. Loulou’s ashes were scattered around this elegant, suitable stupa-type structure, erected on a piece of land you can see from the castle and that she especially loved.
143 Yves Tanguy (1900–1955), Surrealist painter.
144 María Sol Escobar (1930–2016), Venezuelan-American artist who straddled Pop Art and folk art.
145 Nancy Cunard (1896–1965), estranged daughter of Emerald, put her chiseled personal style at the service of liberal politics.
146 Philippe Jullian (1919–1977), high-flying aesthete and author of Dictionnaire du snobisme, committed suicide by hanging.
Notes on the Contributors
Original interviews were edited and condensed. Vogue is the American edition, unless otherwise noted.
NADINE ALONSO was the companion of Robert Goossens, the artisan with whom Loulou did perhaps the greatest amount of jewelry.
HILTON ALS won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
KENNETH ANGER is the author of Hollywood Babylon and director of Scorpio Rising, the underground classic.
STEVEN M. L. ARONSON was a reluctant friend of Maxime, whose great work was meant to be a biography of the agent-producer Leland Hayward. Aronson is said to have gone through two publishers, but was never able to deliver, though he did later cowrite Avedon: Something Personal, about Richard Avedon.
REBECCA AYOKO’s dignity and sang-froid when recounting the horrors that bookended her career as a mannequin, as she does on several YouTube clips, make thrilling viewing.
BETTINA BALLARD (1905–1961) was the most literary of fashion editors, lampooning Cecil Beaton in The New Yorker and publishing the bellwether style memoir, In My Fashion.
FRANÇOIS-MARIE BANIER, a pivotal member of the original Saint Laurent clan, writes novels and takes pictures, but it’s the Opium perfume question that is still debated after all these years. Pierre disputed Banier’s claim that he named the YSL fragrance, at one point the bestselling perfume in the world, dismissing him as a “pseudo writer but a real arriviste”; Banier’s defenders say it all boiled down to Pierre not wanting to pay Banier for the name. In 2016, he emerged victorious from an eight-year legal battle with the daughter of his friend, L’Oréal’s Liliane Bettencourt, whose worth, combined with that of three family members, is $38 billion. Banier drew a four-year suspended prison sentence for elder abuse (Bettencourt confused francs with euros), and, with his boyfriend, mere fines of €525,000 against gifts from the nonagenarian of €210 million, give or take €10 million, because of the sliding value of the Braques, Picassos, etc.
PATRICK BAUCHAU knew Donald Cammell, the filmmaker Loulou deserted Desmond FitzGerald for, through their joint appearances in Éric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse.
CECIL BEATON (1904–1980) photographed Loulou and her family over many years. Among defunct tastemakers, he has few rivals as an ongoing commercial franchise.
DIANE DE BEAUVAU-CRAON had an affair, complete in every way, with Jacques de Bascher, who was also Yves and Karl Lagerfeld’s lover. Beauvau-Craon and Bascher’s relationship culminated in a called-off engagement. The quintessential Bad Girl aristo of the seventies, she is a French princess and granddaughter of the Bolivian tin king Antinor Patiño.
MARIE BELTRAMI, a thick-and-thin friend of Loulou from the seventies onward, designs surrealistic handbags affixed with bras and panties.
LAURENCE BENAÏM’s Yves Saint Laurent is a windy read, but full of puzzle pieces.
LOUIS BENECH, the esteemed landscape architect, became friends with Loulou through Christian Louboutin, before his relationship with the shoe designer fell apart.
MARISA BERENSON saw a lot of Loulou during Loulou’s New York years, 1968 to 1972. She made the rare transition from model to actress, but never fulfilled the promise of her first success, Cabaret.
PIERRE BERGÉ was the other half of the Maison Saint Laurent, the business half, and Yves’s lover of eighteen years.
MARC BERI, an architect, worked on the Loulou de La Falaise boutique that opened in Paris in 2003.
KATE BERNARD, a former Tatler editor, says she tried to pull a memoir out of Maxime, but failed.
INDIA JANE BIRLEY, Loulou’s painter cousin, is represented in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
LADY BIRLEY (1899-1981) was Loulou’s provoking, quizzical maternal grandmother.
MARK BIRLEY (1930–2007) was a club owner and, with dif
ficulty, Maxime’s brother. Professionally and as a private citizen, he advocated for all the starched appurtenances of a first-rate Edwardian country house.
MANOLO BLAHNIK, the shoe designer, says he owes his career to four women: Paloma Picasso, Bianca Jagger, Marisa Berenson and Loulou.
PETER BLOND went to Eton with Loulou’s uncle, Mark Birley. He works today in the realty department at Sotheby’s.
DETMAR BLOW wrote a memoir of his late wife, Isabella, a muse of the Loulou school, that is less good than Lauren Goldstein Crowe’s Isabella Blow: A Life in Fashion.
STELLA BLUM (1916–1985) was curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute when Diana Vreeland was special consultant.
RICARDO BOFILL was Loulou’s boyfriend right up to the moment she married Thadée Klossowski. Bofill was known to the architecture world, but not to the entire Latin universe, until his son Ricardito dated the Mexican singer Paulina Rubio.
ERIC BOMAN is struggling today to fill Irving Penn’s shoes as Vogue’s food photographer.
RÉMI BONARGENT did the heavy lifting in the Saint Laurent studio. Nowadays, he’s an app developer.
MATTIA BONETTI knew Loulou two ways, through Madison Cox and her friend Marie Beltrami, with whom he was romantically involved. Bonetti’s furniture—bombastic to some, grotesque to others—draws on nature.
SUZANNE BOORSCH worked alongside Loulou’s stepfather, John McKendry, at the Met, later becoming curator of prints and drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery.
KATELL LE BOURHIS and Maxime’s friendship, having begun in New York in the seventies, continued to flourish when they both moved back to France. Katell was Diana Vreeland’s protégé at the Met’s Costume Institute, and was later drafted to polish the public profile of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault.
HAMISH BOWLES is Vogue’s international editor at large.
ARABELLA BOXER edited Maxime’s Seven Centuries of English Cooking.
BEN BRANTLEY worked at the Paris desk of Women’s Wear Daily in the eighties, later becoming chief theater critic of The New York Times.
MIZZA BRICARD (1900–1977) was Christian Dior’s Loulou.
ALYNE DE BROGLIE has no regrets about having vacated the Saint Laurent studio in 1985. These days, she has a decorating practice in Paris.
JOAN JULIET BUCK’s 2011 article in Vogue on Asma al-Assad, an assignment to write a glamorous profile of the Syrian president’s wife, was published when Bashar al-Assad began massacring the Syrian people. Joan was thrown under the bus by the magazine and “excoriated online for two years. I was a pariah,” as she wrote in a memoir that was at pains to present a kinder, gentler Joan.
STEPHEN BURROWS danced the early seventies away with Loulou in New York. His rippling lettuce hems and use of appliqués and nail heads made him a fashion sensation at the time.
DAVID CAMMELL, a screenwriter and film producer, and Donald Cammell, Loulou’s sex-maniac boyfriend, were brothers.
NINA CAMPBELL, a London decorator, had the great luck to work with Mark Birley, Loulou’s uncle.
OLIVIER CAMU, whose parents, Bernard and Ginette, gave Loulou and Thadée’s wedding luncheon, is co-head of the Impressionist and modern art department at Christie’s London.
BETTY CATROUX, Saint Laurent’s “other muse,” historically let Loulou do most of the talking, but since Loulou’s death has become a surprisingly vocal figure, giving interviews, holding forth.
FRANÇOIS CATROUX, sometimes known as the “decorator to the gay mafia” (Barry Diller, David Geffen), designed Yves’s bathroom on place Vauban, the first apartment he had with Pierre. But despite a friendship that went back to their early days in Oran, Catroux never did any significant work for his old friend.
CARSON CHAN co-curated the Marrakesh Biennale and writes on architecture.
BRUCE CHATWIN (1940–1989), the literary travel writer, collected society and fashion friends. In Patagonia is his defining work.
ELIZABETH CHATWIN enjoyed and endured a free-form marriage to the author Bruce Chatwin, suffering his relationship with the designer Jasper Conran, among others.
ALVA CHINN’s job as a front-line “Halstonette” combined working as a house model and appearing with the designer in public as part of his entourage.
GRACE CODDINGTON, the most famous fashion editor of our time, had an uncomfortable relationship with the House of Saint Laurent, despite her friendship with Clara Saint. The cold war between Yves and Anna Wintour, Grace’s boss at Vogue, could be traced to Yves refusing to court Anna, and Anna refusing to court Yves; the result was a standoff. Grace stepped down as Vogue’s creative director in 2016 for a part-time position that allows her to shill for Dove and her own perfume.
BOB COLACELLO lifted himself out of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to become one of Andy Warhol’s closest associates, and to cultivate a whispering friendship with Nancy Reagan.
YANOU COLLART’s big moment as a publicist came in 1985, when she announced that Rock Hudson had AIDS.
AMY FINE COLLINS was one of the young people in fashion and design who were drawn to Maxime when Maxime was living on lower Fifth Avenue in the eighties. A persistent, polarizing presence on the party scene, frozen out of Vogue for decades, Collins had her big moment posing for a freebie delivered to New York building lobbies.
DUFF COOPER (1890–1954), the British diplomat, enjoyed a vigorous ex-marital love life that may have included Maxime, and in which his wife, Lady Diana, played a facilitating role. The letters between him, her and just one of his mistresses, the novelist Louise de Vilmorin, fill a 679-page book, Correspondance à trois.
JOHN CORNFORTH (1937–2004) was a pillar of Country Life magazine. His championing of the English country house elevated the public awareness of that institution from a way of life to a way of thinking.
ANNE DE COURCY wrote Society’s Queen, a biography of Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry, the grandmother of Loulou’s aunt, Lady Annabel Goldsmith.
ROBERT COUTURIER’s La Falaise connection was Maxime (see Amy Fine Collins). He was thirty-two in 1987 when Jimmy Goldsmith awarded him the greatest private design commission of modern times, a twenty-thousand-acre “kingdom” in Mexico.
MADISON COX was the one-time boyfriend of Yves and longtime partner-then-husband of Pierre. Despite his discretion, Madison acknowledges designing gardens for Marella Agnelli and Michael Bloomberg.
DAVID CROLAND and Loulou’s friendship peaked in the early seventies, when he was a model dating Robert Mapplethorpe, and Mapplethorpe was nobody.
KENDRA DANIEL started collecting Saint Laurent jewelry in the early nineties, when there was hardly any interest. Her expertise surpasses that of the Bergé-YSL Foundation’s, and is matched by her knowledge of the children’s illustrations of Kay Nielsen.
CHRISTOPHE DECARPENTRIE, a character straight out of La Cage aux Folles, is a decorator with a Flintstones aesthetic unknown outside his native Belgium.
POLLY DEVLIN left British Vogue in 1968 to become a staff writer at American Vogue.
GIOIA DILIBERTO had the cooperation of Diane von Furstenberg for her biography of the designer, A Life Unwrapped.
BARRY DILLER is reviled for his corporate rapacity, but he’s also a philanthropist—and Diane von Furstenberg’s husband. Liz Smith outed Diller in 2015.
CHRISTIAN DIOR (1905–1957) hired Yves to join his studio in 1955.
JÜRGEN DOERING became a costumer after leaving the Saint Laurent studio. His films include Personal Shopper.
NICOLE DORIER was a member of the Saint Laurent cabine, and later ran it.
FRANCIS DORLÉANS has a particular fascination for Loulou’s aunt, Emmita de La Falaise, who lives on in his book Snob Society.
HEBE DORSEY (1925–1987) was a Tunisian-born fashion critic, her platform The International Herald Tribune.
VICTOIRE DOUTRELEAU remained in the Dior cabine after M. Dior died, becoming Yves’s favorite mannequin. She is the strongest link to the house’s founder—when she goes, goes the brain trust.
G. Y. DRYANSKY started at the Paris bureau of Women’s Wear Daily in the sixties, just as ready-to-wear was exploding.
GILLES DUFOUR was for many years Karl Lagerfeld’s number two at Chanel.
PETER DUNHAM watched Pierre and Madison Cox’s relationship unfold in Paris in the early eighties. As a young man, Peter despaired of becoming what he called “a lamp-shade queen,” though he did in fact become a decorator.
ALBER ELBAZ tried hard designing Rive Gauche before YSL was sold to Gucci, but his collections were a disaster. Elbaz is so well-liked, he seemed bulletproof as creative director of Lanvin—until he was barred from the company’s offices in 2015 and fired.
ALAIN ELKANN, following his relationships with DVF and Loulou, tried two more times with women in fashion: the late Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani, and heiress Rosi Greco.
MARIANNE FAITHFULL and Loulou’s paths crossed in London before Loulou went to work for Yves. Faithfull’s recording career was launched in 1964 with “As Tears Go By,” and resurrected in 1979 with Broken English.
EMMITA DE LA FALAISE (1911–1992) was the third and last wife of Loulou’s uncle, Henry.
GABRIEL DE LA FALAISE, Loulou’s cousin, is a retired journalist whose beat was horse racing.
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