Studio 54, where anything could happen. Diana Ross is wearing a velvet and taffeta evening dress, from YSL’s opulent Russian collection of 1976. I loved to dance and I loved that moment, that great fandango dip of Diana Ross.
Loulou had come to New York along with the rest of the Saint Laurent group. Saint Laurent had created the masterpiece of his career, the Russian collection of fall/winter 1976. Loulou could borrow anything she wanted. I first met her at her mother Maxime de la Falaise’s annual New York Christmas party. Loulou wore a giant faille silk twill, with a full sweep of skirts hinged on inset velvet hip bands, rigged with silk tassels and passementerie, and with contrasting silk petticoats underneath. And the accessories: rows and rows of rock crystal and pearls, as well as exotic Turkoman silver cuffs and gold high-heeled sandals.
Loulou was like a pied piper. She was the catalyst for Yves and his life/business partner, Pierre Bergé, to go out and have a good time. When Loulou and the YSL clan— Yves, Pierre, Betty Catroux—would hit New York, all of fashionable Manhattan took notice.
Loulou was a rag doll in my hands when we danced at Studio 54. I’d toss her high up in the air and way down to the ground. Then Sir John Richardson, in a bespoke chalk-striped lounge suit, would dance up to me and fling me as far and as firmly as he could in his arms, in a vortex of French Apache-style dancing; just the two of us, in a make-believe world. Cool as a cucumber, no language shared, no furtive obscene gestures, just good old-fashioned fun. I loved every second of it!
During the holiday season, Paloma Picasso came to town and installed herself in a suite of rooms at the Waldorf. She got a limousine, and her entourage would sardine itself into the stretch on our way to a marathon of clubs. Eventually, Loulou and I would drop Paloma and her boyfriend off, and she’d let us hang on to the limo. She didn’t want to go to the after-hours bars we went to, not dressed in YSL! We’d go to Mineshaft, Eagle’s Nest, decadent places. I was out with Loulou, cruising in Paloma’s limo, and we stopped into a dark, happening place in the Meatpacking District. No one would talk to us. Women, especially those in couture YSL silk taffeta and high gold sandals and ropes of rock-crystal beads, were not welcome in this dark cave of louche and deviant sexual pleasures.
Suddenly, a man stood on top of the bar and started urinating on revelers below him. I screamed out to Loulou, “We have to leave, my peau de soie dinner slippers Reed Evins made for me are going to be splashed by a stranger’s urine!” The men hissed at us as we left but we didn’t care. We were having too much fun.
—
Afew months later, I received an invitation to Loulou de la Falaise and Thadée Klossowski’s wedding, which would take place in Paris. WWD let me go; what could they do, I was invited to the ball! But I had to pay my own way, in coach.
Loulou and Thadée’s marriage was all the scandal. Everyone knew that Thadée, the handsome son of Balthus, was the longtime boyfriend of Clara Saint, public relations directress of Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. That was a powerful position. The chic Clara Saint squandered her family fortune living in the Hôtel Plaza Athénée with Thadée for more than two years. Clara was always something of a recluse, but now she was in social Siberia. Still, she kept doing her job. She had to; her money was gone.
Yves and Pierre Bergé threw the wedding party for Thadée and Loulou, which surely complicated matters. One hundred thirty invitations went out. I got one, but Clara Saint did not.
Karl Lagerfeld also received an invitation, and asked me to go with him. Not as a date, but as a buffer. Few people could navigate the social circles of both Karl Lagerfeld and his rival Yves Saint Laurent. Paloma Picasso was able to do it, and somehow, so was I.
The wedding party was held outside, on an island in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. There was a definite awareness that Karl was there with me and not with his boyfriend, Jacques de Bascher. Yves was mad for Jacques and constantly begging Karl to give the handsome young man up. Perhaps Karl could be persuaded to exchange Jacques for a tapestry or something? Everyone knew Yves was madly in love with Jacques and hopelessly bitter. None of this was talked about, but it was known. In French they call it frisson.
Karl and I spent the night seated and snobbish. We didn’t interact with others; very grand. Yves spent the whole night high, redesigning the Zandra Rhodes ball gown Bianca Jagger was wearing. He pulled fresh ferns off the bushes and pinned them right on her ball gown. Bianca stood in quiet agony and let him do it. Yves had a huge, monstrous ego, as big as anyone’s. No one said no to him.
Everything at the ball was correct on the surface, but once the drugs came out, people were off having sex in the woods and getting into other kinds of debauchery. Karl and I wanted nothing to do with it; we left early.
The next morning I flew back to New York. It was midsummer and I was still settling into a new apartment, on East Fourteenth Street. None of my lights worked, which meant I must have forgotten to pay my electric bill before I went to Paris. It was too hot to go out, so I went to sleep in the heat.
Not until the next morning, on my way to work, did I realize this was a major blackout due to the heat, one that is still referred to as the blackout of 1977. Didn’t matter. All I cared about was my work. I walked down to the WWD office on Twelfth Street and got my next assignment.
Photograph by Arthur Elgort
Sauntering down Fifth Avenue in a Savile Row Huntsman bespoke suit, in December 1986, I believe.
Photograph by Arthur Elgort
In the Tuileries garden, April 1984, telling Bill Cunningham to take a picture of something that caught my eye. The coat is silk wool Perry Ellis. The hat is vintage.
Photograph © The Bill Cunningham Foundation. All rights not specifically granted herein are hereby reserved to the licensor With Bernadine Morris, of The New York Times, on the rue de Rivoli in Paris. My jacket lining is made from three full Hermès scarves! I wonder where that suit is now? In some attic?
IV
Marian McEvoy, the bright and attractive longtime WWD editor in Paris, was returning to New York to be a fashion editor at The New York Times. After three years honing my skills at WWD in New York, it seemed to me I was the perfect candidate to replace her in Paris.
Mr. Fairchild and Michael Coady, my biggest supporter at WWD, devised a final test before they offered me Marian’s job. While everyone else on staff went home for the Christmas holiday, I was put in charge of the entire upcoming “In and Out” issue. A concept Mr. Fairchild himself created, “In and Out” was one of the most popular issues: It proclaimed who was in because they looked great, and who was out because of some flaw, or maybe some spat with Mr. Fairchild.
For one whole week, I sat in the conference room alone and edited the pictures and layouts, making all the choices by my personal instincts. Mr. Fairchild and Mr. Coady came back and approved the entire issue, with no changes or edits. And just like that, I was promoted to Paris correspondent of WWD, which meant a massive jump up the masthead and an all-expenses-paid relocation to Paris, France.
A fortnight later, I left New York with thirteen mismatched suitcases. WWD put me up in the best duplex at the Hôtel Lenox, a modest Left Bank place on rue de l’Université, only three minutes up the street from Karl Lagerfeld’s grand and luxe apartment in the famous landmark Hôtel Pozzo di Borgo.
Upon arrival, on a cold January evening, I dropped off my luggage and went straight to meet Karl at his flat. We then took a taxi to La Coupole, a trendy bistro known as a fashionista hangout. A dinner was being thrown in my honor.
That night, I put on a veneer of sangfroid, while I actually felt quite unsettled by the sudden new life I had agreed to adopt. On one side of La Coupole was Karl’s camp, most of whom were supplemented financially by Karl to every degree: Anna Piaggi; her boyfriend, Vern Lambert; Jacques de Bascher; and Karl’s expert curator for French antiques, Patrick Hourcade. Across the way, on a banquette, sat Betty Catroux; Loulou de la Falaise with her husband, Thadée; Baron Eric de Rothschild; and Yves Saint Laurent. N
either side openly registered the other’s existence, though they loved to sit across the aisle and gaze at each other over sauerkraut and frankfurters or steak tartare.
Karl and Yves had once been friends, long ago, but now there was that ongoing frisson between them. All over the affections of the handsome French aristocrat Jacques de Bascher. It was like the War of the Roses. The court of Versailles.
Like a fusillade, I fired off into the uncharted domain of YSL versus Karl Lagerfeld.
Somehow I felt at home with these newfound friends. All the principals were gay, something that was understood and never discussed. In this world, there were no victims, only high-octane egos.
I had arrived in Paris just in time for the January 1978 couture collections. There was work to be done. As soon as I unpacked, I went to preview Yves Saint Laurent’s collection. I was lucky to be there to witness its making, as it was perhaps the last great collection Yves created in his life.
Over the course of three previews, Yves showed me several pieces and talked about the inspirations and the fabric selections. He told me he listened to Gershwin’s Southern black opera Porgy and Bess in his VW on the way to work and was inspired, based on his vision of black style and life in the segregated South. “I have simply transformed my classics through Porgy and Bess, ” Yves told me for WWD. I arranged a photo shoot to put in WWD in advance of the collection. A teaser, like showing a soufflé before you’ve finished the main course.
This YSL haute couture collection was my first big show. I was on the front row and center, in the Napoleonic gilt ballroom of the Hotel Intercontinental. A runway was built that was about four feet up from the ground, with a huge arch of luxuriant Casablanca lilies arranged for the models to walk through. Classical music played as everyone took their seats. Vogue editors were situated front row on the right, near the windows. Yves’s favorite friends, like Betty Catroux and Catherine Deneuve, were seated on the opposite side from me. Prestigious clients, like São Schlumberger, were also front row, with the supreme views. I entered dressed in my best Sunday tennis-striped suit, armed with my mental agility to look at, and sum up, the total essence of what was special about this incredible world. I walked with enough confidence for ten men. Underneath my groomed veneer, I was silently thanking God I had gotten to this point. To me, this was supreme happiness.
The classical music stopped, and the music of Porgy and Bess floated from backstage. “Summertime and the livin’ is easy” resonated with me in the deepest core of my being. Then came the models. I had to look up as the models paraded past, walking on fine beige linen. The heels and the hats caused the models to tower right up to the tips of the Napoléon III crystal chandeliers that went down the center of the ballroom.
Kirat Young, an Indian model of great elegance, glided down the runway in her draped satin blouse and wrap skirt and mannish wool tailored jacket. Mounia, a gorgeous black model, floated in pale peony-pink wool, a trouser suit with the pants cropped high above her ankles. The show left me inspired!
The collection was a strong marriage of the flou (soft) and tailleur (tailored) techniques. John Fairchild had dubbed this the Broadway Suit collection, because it was daring, showing ankles with cropped, tailored, mannish suits and soft, fluid, floating chiffon blouses, rakish silver straw boaters, and ankle-strap high heels. These clothes called to my mind the way my aunts and my cousins dressed going to our family church on Mt. Sinai Road. Every Sunday was an unofficial fashion show. My sense of style was anchored in the women I observed in church, so this struck me as especially fascinating.
Yves had never actually been to the American South, but he had captured the attitude of the clothes. There was a boldness about the colors, about the contrasting fabrics, and the way the YSL girls wore their hats was with attitude.
Watching the show on the runway, with the inside knowledge of Yves’s inspiration, felt like the final step in understanding the deeper artistic nature of true fashion genius.
After the show, I went to the office and wrote the most brilliant review of my youthful career. I titled it “YSL: At his most influential.” I wrote, “YSL strutted out Broadway, City Lights, Bourbon Street and big-time jazz in a couture collection that is certain to be one of the most influential he has ever done.”
It was nearly midnight, and I sat there alone, typing from memory and emotion on an old noisy telex machine and sending the copy off to New York. I fell into the backseat of a cab, exhausted but with butterflies in my stomach—not from nerves, but from the immense excitement I had witnessed. I was part of fashion history, working for a company that wanted my point of view and my opinion. I knew I would wake up the next morning and have Betty Catroux on the telephone, as well as Karl Lagerfeld, eager to know what I saw and felt at the YSL show. My heart was beating in continued exhilaration. This was what I had dreamed of, but I had never dared to believe I would be in this exalted position so young, so naïve, so innocent. I had arrived in a place where I was accepted and where I now belonged. My blackness was not important. What mattered was that I was smart.
The next day, my review of Yves’s show was on the front page, and it was a smash.
Yves said it was one of the best critiques ever written about his shows. Diana Vreeland sent a telegram exclaiming the virtues of my recent work, the Broadway collection review especially. Mr. Fairchild was so pleased that he promoted me again, to European fashion editor of WWD and W.
I walked alone those first moments, never showing how insecure I felt. My cool posturing would serve me well. I was tall, thin, and adored by all who met me: Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, and most of all Karl Lagerfeld. My life was made for me in the City of Lights. My great friends were the important people of the Paris fashion world.
Here I was walking with kings, breaking bread with them, going to meetings in their gilded salons where they shared their designs. It was, to me, the sum total of perfection.
How far I had come from the small, insulated, and segregated Durham, North Carolina, where I survived due to my grandmother’s values that she shared, and by faith and fortitude. Paris offered great characters and subtle intrigues, promiscuity, drugs, scandals—a whole different world from where I had grown up. In Paris, I was always seated on the front row at the couture and ready-to-wear catwalk shows, the only black man among a sea of white titans of style.
Betty Catroux remarked that I “suddenly became king of Paris overnight.” And through it all I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. I’d meet with designers all day, working my way through the throng to see those who were hot and up-and-coming. And then see them and others all again later that night at a party. Then I’d rush over to WWD
headquarters before midnight to type out everything I’d seen and transmit it to New York for the next day’s publication. I never doubted I could be the best writer and stylist for WWD in Paris. They had chosen me. So Paris was my oyster. I never felt Karl and Yves thought of me as anything but one of the players who counted. We all had a certain way of being and we came together as units, little cliques of ego, glamour, and power. I was fully a part of this machine.
I wasn’t supposed to be a fashion editor. I wasn’t supposed to be in Paris. And I certainly wasn’t supposed to be on the front row. Yet there I was.
—
The reality of the situation is not lost on me; people gravitated toward me because I was smart, but also because I was close with Karl Lagerfeld.
While I was in Paris, we only became closer. We spoke early in the morning, before he left the house, almost every day. He loved socializing by telephone. We’d see each other at lunch, or dinner, or at a party, then go home and talk on the phone for two or three hours before going to bed and starting the whole thing over again in the morning.
It was like being with my best friend in college. It wasn’t labored; we weren’t having deep, boring conversations. It was effortless. Karl always treated me as an equal.
When we weren’t on the phone together, Karl and I sen
t elaborate handwritten letters to each other, often delivered by hand across town in Paris. Just the way people did centuries before. Karl loved stationery, and his paper was designed and made just for him. In his rue de l’Université apartment, there was a storage room solely for reams of letter-writing papers and envelopes of various sizes (another storage room housed his massive collection of Goyard hard cases for travel). Out of these large envelopes, pages and pages came in his very baroque handwriting, which I learned early on how to decipher. Writing by hand to a friend was a luxury to him. For years, we communicated by either fax or marathon telephone calls.
Other editors were baffled: What did Karl see in me? June Weir, the senior fashion editor at WWD, asked another editor: “What on earth would Karl Lagerfeld have in common with André?”
People thought I was Karl Lagerfeld’s lover. I was not. Nor was I ever. Nor was I Diana Vreeland’s, as some people gossiped. There is always the thought that as I am a black man, it can only be my genitals that people respond to. The only time I ever glimpsed Karl even seminude was when I found his bedroom door ajar and briefly saw him in only his underpants and knee socks, getting dressed. We were sincerely close, but not that close.
Toward the end of 1978, I interviewed Karl for W, and he spoke more intimately than he ever had before to the press. He said: “When I was four, I asked my mother for a valet for my birthday. I wanted my clothes prepared so I could wear anything I wanted at any time of day. At ten, I was always in hats, high collars, and neckties. I never played with other children. I read books and did drawings night and day.”
I so admired Karl for his complete and unfaltering respect for technique and craftsmanship in his profession. I also admired how his mind worked, aligning world history with the history of modern cinema, literature, and poetry. Every moment with Karl was an exciting tutorial; we shared a deep passion and appetite for knowledge. He spoke fluent French, German, English, and Italian. Through him, I learned about everything from fashion to furniture to social history. I learned so much about France, about the eighteenth century. He was a walking encyclopedia. He had more than fifty thousand books, neatly lined in shelves to the ceiling in his photography studio at 7 rue de Lille, and he read most if not all of them. In fact, I owe Karl so much of my literary education. He constantly sent me books he thought I should read. I still have many of them.
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