Loulou & Yves

MARTINE DE LA FALAISE was married to Gabriel de La Falaise, Loulou’s cousin; Richard is their son.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE (1922–2009), Loulou’s crazy mother and thrower of questionable dinner parties, published Seven Centuries of English Cooking in 1973, and Food in Vogue in 1980.

  RICHARD DE LA FALAISE, Loulou’s first cousin once removed, heads the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  AMIR FARMAN-FARMA almost married Loulou’s cousin, India Jane Birley. An Iranian investment banker, he edited The Crimson while at Harvard.

  GARY FARMER was hired by John McKendry at the Met. He lives today in Miami Beach, working as the city’s cultural affairs program manager.

  CHRISTOPHER FARR is a pioneer in the contemporary rug market, having commissioned designs from Maxime, Andrée Putman and John Pawson.

  JUDY FAYARD is as a freelance journalist living in Paris.

  DESMOND FITZGERALD (1937–2011), Loulou’s first, fleeting husband, campaigned hammer and tongs for the architectural and decorative heritage of Ireland.

  OLDA FITZGERALD, whom Desmond FitzGerald married after divorcing Loulou, had her own brush with fashion. Via her great-great-grandfather, George Van Ness Lothrop, U.S. minister to Russia, she was the first cousin twice removed of the photographer George Hoyningen-Huene; the most spectacular portraits of Maxime were taken by Hoyningen-Huene’s lover, Horst. Like many a London deb in the sixties, Olda did time at Condé Nast, filling in between jobs there with a stint in Florence at Pucci, where Maxime had worked in 1952.

  TOM FORD’s first collection as creative director of YSL, after it was acquired by Gucci, was an homage to Betty Catroux (not Loulou).

  JOËL FOURNIER and Maxime’s friendship dissolved over money when he helped with the restoration of the mas her girlfriend, Sarah St. George, bought in Provence in the nineties. Joël was part of Michel Klein’s team, and living with him, when Klein took over Guy Laroche in the same period.

  CELESTIA FOX worked with Loulou in the fashion department of Queen magazine in the late sixties, later becoming a casting agent.

  MARGALIT FOX has written over twelve hundred obituaries for The New York Times.

  JEAN-LUC FRANÇOIS was more to Loulou than someone who made Saint Laurent jewelry; they were also nightbirds together. He now designs ready-to-wear under his own name.

  VINCENT FREMONT was one of the Warhol “kids” to whom Maxime played “den mother.” In 2016, he was named CEO of ARTnews Ltd.

  INÈS DE LA FRESSANGE had an uneasy relationship with Loulou, mostly because Inès married Luigi d’Urso, and Loulou and Luigi had a strong friendship that predated Inès, one with a serious drinking component. In 2013, Inès made a comeback as a designer with Uniqlo. She lives with Denis Olivennes, head of the French radio network Europe 1.

  ALEXANDER VON FURSTENBERG is a director of his mother Diane’s company.

  DIANE VON FURSTENBERG “invented” the wrap dress. Loulou did not let friendship get in the way when she stole Diane’s boyfriend, Alain Elkann.

  ÉMILE GARCIN, a property agent, became acquainted with Maxime when they both lived in St.-Rémy-de-Provence during her final years.

  HENRY GELDZAHLER (1935–1994), John McKendry’s colleague at the Met, was given a new department, contemporary arts, to run, then stepped down in 1977 to become New York City’s commissioner of cultural affairs.

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBS, “a leading proponent of that elusive brand of anti-decoration, high-bohemian taste favored by self-confident Englishmen,” furnished the sixties, you might say.

  PAMELA GIBSON and Maxime were inmates together at Bletchley Park, the center for code-breaking in England in World War II.

  A. A. GILL (1954–2016), a television and restaurant critic, called the host of an English program on cycling “a dyke on a bike,” and wondered if Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s dim sum were “incubated in [the] chef’s jockstrap.”

  CHRISTOPHE GIRARD, who rose to chief executive at YSL, is mayor of Paris’s fourth arrondissement. His husband, Olivier Meyroux, was commissioned by Pierre to make a Saint Laurent documentary, Célébration, between 1998 and 2001. Pierre found the film lacking and, in a legal skirmish with Meyrou, blocked its release. Beyond Girard jumping ship for LVMH mid-production, Pierre had good reason to suppress the movie: In it, he treats Saint Laurent like a child, when he’s not treating him like an idiot. In this way, two more Saint Laurent documentaries were born: Pierre ordered up His Life and Times and 5 Avenue Marceau from the minimally gifted David Teboul, and got the films he wanted.

  HUBERT DE GIVENCHY and Maxime’s friendship was forged at Schiaparelli in the late forties. He sold his fashion house to LVMH in 1989, and was pushed out, humiliated, in 1995.

  LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH, Loulou’s aunt, played an important part in raising her. She has been at the center of London society all of her adult life.

  TONNE GOODMAN, as Vogue’s fashion director, holds the number three spot at the magazine. She met Maxime when they both worked on the “Glory of Russian Costume” exhibition at the Met’s Costume Institute in 1976. Tonne’s ruthless dedication to white jeans, black turtlenecks and blunt haircuts earned her the title of “Miss America” from Industrie magazine.

  PATRICK GOOSSENS heads the Paris jewelry house that was founded by his father, Robert, and that carries the family name.

  ROBERT GOOSSENS (1927–2016), maître bijoutier, was the through-line from Chanel and Balenciaga to Saint Laurent. (See Nadine Alonso.)

  JACQUES GRANGE, Yves’s longtime decorator, had to be reminded that it was he who faced Loulou’s Paris bathroom in turquoise mosaic tiles.

  DIDIER GRUMBACH owned 50 percent of Rive Gauche when it launched in 1966, later becoming president of YSL.

  GEOFFROY GUERRY is the author of an exhaustive history of Loulou’s family.

  SUSAN GUTFREUND knew Loulou both socially and as an enthusiastic client of her boutique in the aughts. A former Pan Am stewardess who became a protégée of Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, she was the model for Inez Bavardage in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.

  ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST has written behind-the-scenes books on Studio 54 and the art world.

  DREW HAMMOND had a small role in the 1995 film French Exit.

  NICKY HASLAM is as much a social chronicler as he is a decorator, having kept up with the La Falaises from Maxime’s early days as a mannequin mondain in Paris to her mature years with Sarah St. George in Provence.

  ASHTON HAWKINS retired from the Met in 2011 after thirty-two years, the last thirteen as executive vice president and counsel to the trustees.

  JANO HERBOSCH, Fernando Sanchez’s cousin, is president of the board of directors of the New York–based Drama League.

  MIN HOGG founded The World of Interiors in 1981 after working as fashion editor of Harpers & Queen, where one of her hires was a young Anna Wintour.

  VERONICA HORWELL is an obituary writer for The Guardian specializing in fashion figures.

  GEORGINA HOWELL (1942–2016) won British Vogue’s annual talent contest in 1960, which came with a job at House & Garden, and wrote a biography of Gertrude Bell, the British diplomat instrumental in founding the modern Iraqi state.

  ANNABELLE D’HUART, who followed Loulou as Ricardo Bofill’s girlfriend and had a child with him, is a designer of so-called art jewelry.

  MARION HUME is fashion editor of The Australian Fashion Review.

  MICK JAGGER stayed with Loulou over the years in the castle Balthus bought and then gave to his sons in Montecalvello, Italy.

  CHARLES JAMES (1906–1978) designed the extravagant gown Maxime wore in a 1950 Modess sanitary napkin ad.

  GRACE JONES, the singer, was familiar to Loulou as an habitué of the Sept, the Paris nightclub.

  JULIE KAVANAGH wrote the definitive biography of Rudolf Nureyev.

  FARIDA KHELFA, as the “face” of present-day Schiaparelli, is regarded as one of the women to whom Loulou passed the baton.

  JAMES KILLOUG
H met Maxime as teenager in New York in the eighties. His film Losing Her was shown at London’s Tate Britain museum in 2008.

  MICHEL KLEIN, a French fashion designer who never quite broke through, had a friendship with Loulou that spanned decades.

  ANNA KLOSSOWsKI de rola, Loulou’s daughter, is one-third of a collective of contemporary-art curators.

  STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA—son of Balthus, brother of Thadée—is skilled at playing the Prince de Rola.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA realized his dream of marrying Loulou in 1977.

  JEAN-PAUL KNOTT, yet another veteran of the Saint Laurent studio, founded his eponymous fashion company in Brussels in 1999.

  HAROLD KODA was curator in charge of the Met’s Costume Institute from 2000 to 2016.

  JANE KRAMER’s epic takedown of Pierre in The New Yorker appeared in 1994.

  CHRISTIAN LACROIX probably would have preferred that his wife, Françoise, hadn’t insulted Yves at a ball in 1987, announcing, “He’s been doing the same thing for twenty years.” Today, Christian is living every designer’s worst nightmare: Somebody else owns his name.

  KARL LAGERFELD, who designs the Chanel and Fendi collections, did not attend Yves’s funeral.

  ALISTAIR LAIRD is director of nineteenth-century paintings at Bonhams.

  JEAN-CHRISTOPHE LAIZEAU handled PR for Loulou when she created her own company.

  ELIZABETH LAMBERT worked as a fashion editor under Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar.

  WILLY LANDELS got to know Loulou and Maxime as a fellow house guest of Teddy Millington-Drake, the painter, on Patmos. He was born in 1928, grew up in Como, Italy, and apprenticed early on as a scenic painter at La Scala.

  BRADLEY LANDER was often described as Maxime’s (unofficial) adopted son, and describes himself as “a risk analyst in Southeast Asian geopolitics.”

  KENNETH JAY LANE (1932–2017) had the kind of friendship with Maxime where, if he was launching a new collection of costume jewelry and Women’s Wear was coming to do a story, he’d enlist her to beguile the reporter and pose for the photographer. Soon after he married Nicky Samuel, his cover was blown by WWD, which crowned him “the Host-est of Murray Hill.” Loulou clearly hoped the Home Shopping Network would do for her what QVC had done for him.

  JEANINE LARMOTH (1930–2008) wrote Murder on the Menu, “a witty essay on the snob sociology of the English murder novel,” with killing recipes.

  FRAN LEBOWITZ is the author of four slim books and the subject of Public Speaking, a documentary by Martin Scorsese.

  MARIE-DOMINIQUE LELIÈVRE wrote the most disinterested of the four Saint Laurent biographies, Mauvais Garçon.

  ROSI LEVAI worked at the Met during John McKendry’s tenure, and was Maxime’s upstairs neighbor when she moved downtown after his death.

  JEAN-NÖEL LIAUT is Hubert de Givenchy’s biographer and the author of Les Anges bizarre: Un Siècle d’excentricité, which memorializes Loulou dressed for a party at Château Lafite in acacia branches. She carried a pair of secateurs so that her neighbors at dinner could prune her to avoid getting scratched.

  CAROLINE LOEB was shattered when Thadée left her to marry Loulou. She is best known for “C’est la ouate” (literally, “It’s the Wadding”), a 1986 hit in France. Caroline also directed Shirley, a play about fellow Saint Laurent outlier Shirley Goldfarb.

  CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN, when he was a scrappy club kid, never imagined he and Loulou would one day become the kind of friends who take trips down the Nile together. Louboutin is one of the Big Three of high-end women’s footwear, with Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo.

  JEAN-PIERRE DE LUCOVICH was a chroniqueur mondain in Paris in the seventies, before Yves retreated from society.

  HÉLÈNE DE LUDINGHAUSEN’s role as directrice of the Saint Laurent couture salon is brilliantly deconstructed in 5 Avenue Marceau.

  DANIELLE LUQUET DE SAINT GERMAIN, the legendary Saint Laurent house model, was long gone from the cabine by the time Loulou joined Yves. In 2013, she sold at auction a transparent chiffon and feather evening dress from the 1968–1969 Saint Laurent couture collection for which the Bergé-YSL Foundation paid €118,750, with fees. Luquet de Saint Germain had modeled the prototype (without a bra, as designed) when the dress was first shown.

  CHARLES LYSAGHT, as Ireland’s premier obituarist, battles against what he calls the country’s “great culture of the gushing eulogy.”

  CHINA MACHADO (1929–2016), the Chinese-Portuguese model turned Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor, had already lost the bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín to Ava Gardner when she famously posed for Avedon in 1958 with a troll pompadour, flicking her cigarette.

  AXEL MADSEN wrote the first Saint Laurent biography, 1979’s Living for Design: The Yves Saint Laurent Story.

  GERARD MALANGA had a swift, heavenly affair with Loulou after she escaped Donald Cammell. Gerard executed many of Andy Warhol’s silk screens, and appears as the Factory poet “LaLanga” in Tennessee Williams’s Moise and the World of Reason.

  ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE (1946–1989), the iconoclast photographer, was the object of John McKendry’s unrequited love.

  JEAN-PIERRE MASCLET’s famous portrait of Loulou (cover) came out of an unpublished Vogue sitting in the early eighties.

  CHRISTOPHER MASON, a musician and author, was part of the Amy Fine Collins/Robert Couturier coterie of homage-paying youngbloods who made life more interesting for Maxime in the eighties.

  PATRICK MAURIÉS heads the Gallimard imprint Le Promeneur.

  JOHN MCKENDRY (1933–1975) married Maxime in 1967. The example he set at the Met led the way for photography departments in American museums.

  BARBARA MaCLAuREN was a reporter at Women’s Wear Daily in Paris in the seventies.

  BRIGHID MCLAUGHLIN, a retired journalist, who wrote for the Irish Independent, claims she “was the first person to criticize the Anglo-Irish. Lady Mollie Cusack-Smith told me to f___k off… I said, ‘I’m not going to be your servant.’” Still, McLaughlin was fond of the Knight of Glin.

  BRUNO MÉNAGER made drawings that were passed off as Yves’s when he worked in the Saint Laurent studio. He is now creative adviser for fashion at Bon Marché, the Paris department store.

  CHRISTOPHE DE MENIL is a second-generation arts patron—her parents founded Houston’s Menil Collection. But she also goes her own way, designing jumpsuits as evening wear.

  SUZY MENKES writes online for nineteen Vogues.

  RAY MILNER (1889–1975) was briefly Loulou’s father-in-law, when she was married to Desmond FitzGerald,

  FRÉDÉRIC MITTERRAND followed Thadée in Clara Saint’s life after Thadée married Loulou. The terms of the relationship were different—Mitterrand and Clara’s was sexless—but it was just as fraught. Mitterrand’s uncle, François, was president of France, and he himself served as French minister of culture under Nicholas Sarkozy. In The Bad Life (2005), the younger Mitterrand writes proudly of paying for “boys” as a patron of brothels in Bangkok. He later backtracked, somewhat, insisting he had never participated in sex tourism and that his partners had been consenting adults. Mitterrand’s comments sent the media back to The Bad Life to see what he’d written: “All these beauty-pageant-cum-slave-market rituals are a real turn-on for me… you might think that such a spectacle, abhorrent from a moral point of view, would also be repellently vulgar. But I love it beyond reason.”

  DAVID MLINARIC, a decorator specializing in period interiors, helped Desmond FitzGerald with the London flat he and Loulou had as newlyweds.

  PAULE MONORY was keeper of the “le livre” in the Saint Laurent studio, the binder that documented every fabric, every button.

  PIERRE DE MONTJOU, a management consult, and Loulou are first cousins once removed, a connection that led to them being placed as children with the same foster family.

  PATRICIA MORRISROE met Maxime while researching Robert Mapplethorpe’s biography.

  PAUL MORRISSEY directed Maxime in Blood for Dracula. He struck a deal with the Andy Warhol
Foundation whereby some films he and Warhol made together, like Lonesome Cowboys, are credited to Warhol and owned by the Warhol Museum, while others Morrissey made on his own but under the Warhol banner, including Dracula, are his property and are attributed to him.

  CHARLOTTE MOSLEY holidayed with Loulou chez Teddy Millington-Drake on Patmos and attended her and Thadée’s bal de mariés. Charlotte’s marriage to Alexander Mosley—son of Oswald, head of the British Union of Fascists in the thirties, and Diana Mitford—led to her editing the letters of Diana’s writer sister Nancy and coauthoring the memoir of another sister, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire.

  FALLON MULCAHY is working on a master’s degree in sustainability from Harvard’s Extension Program.

  ANNE-MARIE MUÑOZ was Yves’s directrice du studio, one of a trifecta of women on whom he depended for his survival.

  CARLOS MUÑOZ, Anne-Marie’s son, is a photographer and filmmaker. His current project is a documentary on Erró, the Icelandic Pop artist.

  HELMUT NEWTON (1920–2004) could not have guessed the importance his topless portrait of Loulou, first published in 1976, would have in establishing her legend. Newton remade fashion photography, posing models in dog collars and orthopedic leg braces, and in mise-en-scènes borrowed from pornography.

  FRANCESCA OPAČIĆ was terrorized by Maxime as a little girl vacationing with her father, Willy Landels, on Patmos. Opačić and four other British women are the subjects of the 2013 documentary I Married a Serb!