6/5/08

France Salutes the Ultimate Couturier

France Salutes the Ultimate Couturier

Francois Durand/Getty Images

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, attended Yves Saint Laurent's funeral service on Thurday in Paris. More Photos >

Published: June 6, 2008

PARIS — Two shopgirls in their uniform red jackets and black blouses stared down from the windows above the Elena Miro shop on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré on Thursday, as the fashion world gathered below them to mourn Yves Saint Laurent.

Elena Miro is across the narrow street, blocked by the police, from the Saint-Roch church, sometimes considered "the church of artists," because it contains the graves of Corneille and the landscape architect André Le Nôtre. There the world of French power and glitter held funeral services on Thursday for Mr. Saint Laurent, who was generally regarded, as the daily Figaro called him, the finest fashion-designer of the last half of the 20th century.

He rarely if ever designed for the women who buy at Elena Miro, which sells clothes for what is gently termed full-figured women. But he was considered a liberator of women, making trousers both fashionable and acceptable, and it was largely the women of Paris who lined the streets behind the police to mourn Mr. Saint Laurent and who stood to watch the big screen that showed the funeral going on inside.

They clapped as Mr. Saint Laurent's plain oak coffin entered the church, and again, 90 minutes later, when it left, this time covered with the flag of France.

"The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves," he once said. "But for those who haven't had the good fortune of finding this happiness, I am there."

He died June 1, at 71, of a brain tumor, after an enormously creative and tumultuous life, which was also marked by psychological fragility and drug abuse.

For someone whose clothes could be light-hearted — dinner jackets for women and transparent blouses — the mood inside the church, lavishly decorated with greenery, jasmine and white lilies, was respectful and somber. But his colleagues and some of the famous women they dressed shared the sense of the streets that this was a life to be celebrated, and that he had brought glory to France, whose domination of fashion is considered long gone.

The president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, was there, with his third wife, the former model and singer, Carla. Like many of the women in the church, she wore black trousers, a gesture of respect and even homage to Mr. Saint Laurent, for whom she once modeled.

Catherine Deneuve, one of his most loyal friends and customers, carried a sheaf of green wheat into the church, then read a eulogy to him, in the form of a poem by Walt Whitman.

There was considerable head-turning, too, as famous designers and celebrities filed by, among them Sonia Rykiel, Jean-Paul Gaultier, John Galliano, Christian Lacroix, Vivienne Westwood, Valentino, Hubert de Givenchy, Kenzo Takada and Inès de la Fressange.

Other celebrities included the actress Jeanne Moreau, model Laetitia Casta, Farah Diba Pahlavi, the widow of the deposed Shah of Iran, Bernard Arnault, the chairman of the luxury group of companies LVMH, and François and François-Henri Pinault, who own the brandname of Yves Saint Laurent.

Many of them lined up, eyes wet, to take communion, but as much as the priest tried to capture the importance of Mr. Saint Laurent, it was his former lover and business partner, Pierre Bergé, who spoke most movingly.

The two men, who remained business associates and friends long after their romance ended, decided to create a civil union together in the days before Mr. Saint Laurent died, Mr. Bergé said. The French union, known as a "civil pact of solidarity," carries mutual rights and responsibilities, but is short of a marriage.

"It's going to be necessary to part now," Mr. Bergé said, addressing his friend in the coffin. "I don't know how to do it because I never would have left you. Have we ever left each other before? Even if I know that we will no longer share a surge of emotion before a painting or a work of art, all that I know."

Mr. Bergé's voice broke. "But I also know that I will never forget what I owe you, and that one day I will join you under the Moroccan palms."

Mr. Saint Laurent, born in Oran, Algeria, will be cremated and his ashes buried in a botanical garden he restored in Marrakesh, Morocco, near a home he and Mr. Bergé bought together.

He will mark Mr. Saint Laurent's grave with the words, "French couturier," Mr. Bergé said. "French because you could have been nothing else. French like a verse of Ronsard, a parterre of Le Nôtre, a page of Ravel, a painting of Matisse."

Outside, as President and Mrs. Sarkozy walked behind the flag-draped coffin, a military honor guard played, given Mr. Saint Laurent's rank as a Grand Officer in the Legion of Honor, awarded to the dying man in December by Mr. Sarkozy.

But the incongruities abounded. Called to the army in September 1960 for 27 months of compulsory service during the Algerian war, despite running the house of Dior, Mr. Saint Laurent had a nervous breakdown three weeks later. He was put into the psychiatric ward of a hospital, where he was drugged and left alone in a room to be caressed and abused, he said in 2002.

"In two and a half months, I was so scared I only went once to the toilets," he said. "At the end, I must have lost 35 kilos and I had disturbances in my brain."

On Thursday, as the band played and official France paid homage, all that, too, was forgotten.






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