Loulou & Yves by Christopher Petkanas

Author:Christopher Petkanas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

John force-fed Seventh Avenue Yves until it choked on him. As Yves also sold newspapers, John could find a reason for someone in the bureau to go to YSL three times a week. “Yves stubbed his toe. Go to avenue Marceau.” No excuse for a story was too small. So Loulou and I saw each other a lot. We couldn’t not see each other.

Headquarters was in a Second Empire town house, which after Yves’s retirement became the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent (and not the other way around). Since 2017, it has housed the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris. The building’s façade still shows the spindly interlocking letters Y, S and L: the flawlessly beautiful Cassandre logo Hedi Slimane, one of Yves’s successors, mothballed after officially hacking back the name of the house to Saint Laurent. You entered through heavy glass doors and a thick red velvet draft curtain. From the reception area at the top of the stairs, you might glimpse Anne-Marie on her way to the cabine or ateliers. (In the late seventies, she was earning seventy thousand dollars a year. For Loulou’s salary, deduce what you will.) And you could see into the plush salon where Violeta Sanchez, Kirat Young and Mounia Orosemane, who was said to use black magic if she didn’t get the dresses she wanted, twirled and slunk for Yves in the white-knuckle days leading up to a show, an army of gilded ballroom chairs and enormous humped, buttoned and fringed damask sofas adrift on a green moiré carpet. Yves, who knew Victor Grandpierre from when he designed the original Dior boutique on avenue Montaigne, had asked the decorator for all the bells and whistles of the richly upholstered Napoléon III style, as reflected in the Paris salon of Bonaparte’s niece, Princess Mathilde. To immerse himself in the period, Yves had only to pay a visit to his friends Guy and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild outside Paris at Château Ferrières, whose Second Empire rooms represented an apotheosis of the idiom.

The atmosphere at avenue Marceau was stiff, severe, muffled, formal. Denise Barry de Longchamp, the receptionist and former Chanel model who called out the looks by number at the Saint Laurent shows, sat with brutally good posture, hair scraped back in an immaculate pleat, behind a desk swiped clean of everything but a telephone. She wore a pussycat bow and what passes in France for a smile, thin and tight. Once, in 1983, when I was there to interview Yves, Pierre took the extraordinary meas-ure of greeting me himself, escorting me to Yves’s private office, which cost more to decorate than the combined lifetime salaries of several at-elier workers, but which he rarely used. There was a definite feeling that if Pierre hadn’t personally taken charge of the appointment, Yves might have slipped away. There was a lot riding on it: the launch of Paris, the perfume. Stories on fragrance introductions were the ones you worked hardest to duck at Women’s Wear. Still, when it was

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