WHEN DIOR DIRECTOR JACQUES ROUET CONVENED A NEWS CONFERENCE on Nov. 15, 1957, the fate of the house of Christian Dior hung in the balance.
A month earlier, the designer had died unexpectedly in the Italian spa town of Montecatini. After a decade of celebrated fashion success, Dior’s death called into question the future of fashion’s most massive and influential business. Dior owner Marcel Boussac pored over his options; he even considered closing the business.
As Rouet came into the room, reporters crowded round. He began to speak.
“All designs will be executed by Yves Mathieu-Saint Laurent, the preferred disciple of Christian…”
His sentence went unfinished as the media clamored in excitement. It seemed unthinkable that a young, unknown designer had been selected to perpetuate the legacy of Dior. But from the moment Saint Laurent assumed the master’s mantle, he seemed destined for greatness.
Saint Laurent joined the house at 19 after he won a wool competition in Paris and showed some of his sketches to Michel de Brunhoff, the editor in chief of French Vogue. Brunhoff recognized the designer’s prodigious talent and likewise was dazed by Saint Laurent’s sketches, which bore an uncanny resemblance to the A-line look his friend Dior had designed for his spring 1955 couture collection.
When Brunhoff showed Dior the sketches, the couturier hired Saint Laurent as an assistant. The young designer’s first task was to decorate the Dior boutique.
Saint Laurent was charming and handsome. He dressed conservatively in blue or gray suits and eyeglasses perched on his thin nose. He was shy and reserved. Few thought him capable of summoning the chutzpah to “save” the house of Dior.
With a mere nine weeks to prepare, Saint Laurent left for Oran, Algeria, where his family lived, and sealed himself off in his room to sketch. He worked furiously, with incredible determination and intent. By the time he returned to Paris with scores of sketches crammed into his luggage, it was obvious Saint Laurent knew exactly what he wanted to achieve.
On the day of his first show — Jan. 30, 1958 — the Dior salons were crammed with people.
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“I was so nervous,” Saint Laurent recalled in a 1998 interview with W, WWD’s sister publication. “But it was also exhilarating. I was young, carefree and convinced I would succeed.”
The audience was charmed by Saint Laurent’s audacious silhouette. It was short and swingy, with narrow shoulders and a knee-length hemline. He called it the Trapeze line. In a nod to his master, he called one ball gown Lily of the Valley, after Dior’s favorite flower.
Coming after the more austere and constructed couture of Dior, Saint Laurent’s collection breathed a youthful air into the house. These were clothes for a new generation.
Saint Laurent was swept triumphant out on the balcony overlooking the Avenue Montaigne. Some people sobbed. Workers applauded him from below. Photographers surrounded the beaming young man, immortalizing the moment.
Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s partner, had yet to meet the young couturier with whom he would later found his own couture house. But he remembered being present at Saint Laurent’s Dior debut.
“I was invited to go with [artist] Bernard Buffet,” recalled Bergé. (Buffet and Bergé were together at the time.) “I didn’t know anything about fashion. I’d never seen a Dior collection — never. But, at once, I understood. The reaction was enormous. The death of Dior had been enormous. I understood that this young man, Saint Laurent, was destined to be the great couturier of tomorrow.”
Bergé had known Dior. He met the designer with Buffet, who owned a house in the South of France. Dior had a house nearby and visited occasionally.
“I liked Dior a lot,” said Bergé. “I admired him. He was highly cultivated.”
Bergé was one of the last people in Paris to see Dior before he died. “We dined together [with Buffet] the night before Dior left for Italy.”
After Saint Laurent’s triumphant debut, fate brought Bergé and Saint Laurent together. Marie-Louis Bousquet, who was Harper’s Bazaar’s woman in Paris, invited Bergé and Buffet to dinner with Raymonde Zehnacker, a key member of Dior’s design studio, at the Cloche d’Or, then one of Paris’s hottest restaurants.
Days later, Buffet sketched Saint Laurent for a newspaper, bringing Saint Laurent and Bergé closer. “Two or three days after that, Raymonde Zehnacker called me and said Saint Laurent needs a vacation,” Bergé said. “Why don’t you invite him to the South of France? And I said yes. It was 1958.”
At that time, the house of Dior was a machine, employing 1,000 workers to make haute couture alone. The pressure Saint Laurent had on his shoulders was enormous.
He adopted work methods similar to the late Dior’s. Before each collection, he’d close himself off for 15 days with a pile of blank paper and draw from morning until night. When he returned, he would call his staff and spread the sketches on the floor. There were hundreds, divided by theme: Cocktail, day dresses, evening, suits.
Saint Laurent wanted to bring a lighter, more modern couture to the house of Dior. He liberated the silhouette by removing all of the architecture Dior had put into it. His first collection had been a sort of manifesto for an era that was coursing toward technical progress and personal liberation.
More than a decade had elapsed since Dior’s New Look. Saint Laurent represented the changing of the guard.
Nonetheless, it would have been impossible to label Saint Laurent a radical, at least not yet. He was a workaholic, in the studio at 9:30 a.m. and working until 8 p.m. After the last member of staff left for the day, he would go to remerchandise the boutique.
During his time at the head of Dior, from January 1958 to July 1960, Saint Laurent presented six collections. After the Trapeze came the Arc line, then the Long Line and then Tomorrow’s Silhouette. His last collection, winter 1960, Saint Laurent called Suppleness, Lightness, Life.
With each season, Saint Laurent got bolder. The Arc line was lighter and looser than the Trapeze; he dropped the hemline below the knees. The Long line was more classical and less controversial. But his fourth collection stunned again, showing so-called hobble skirts well above the knees.
Dior had never shied from controversy. Why should Saint Laurent pull his punches? Times were changing, and Saint Laurent took his work as a couturier seriously enough to look at and to distill the world around him into his designs.
But Saint Laurent’s audacity was not always appreciated. Dior’s more conservative clients found him extreme. And the company’s management grew nervous about what Saint Laurent meant for business.
“Yves brought a great gust of youthfulness to the house,” said Bergé. “He dusted everything off. The fourth collection wasn’t very well received.”
Saint Laurent’s encore, for spring 1960, was much more classical and controlled, but he returned to his rebellious streak by his sixth and final collection. It was a homage to the Left Bank intelligentsia, the beatniks that were crowding jazz clubs.
“There were skimpy bubble skirts in sleek wool, slinky black turtlenecks in finest cashmere and gleaming crocodile-skin jackets lined with mink,” wrote Alice Rawsthorn in her book, “Yves Saint Laurent.” “It was the first time that such a close approximation of street styles had been seen on a couture catwalk.”
“I think it was the crocodile jackets that did it,” joked Bergé. “Boussac got the idea he needed to replace Yves.”
Fate conveniently intervened. The government conscripted Saint Laurent to serve in the French army in the Algerian War. While the controversial designer was away, Boussac replaced him with the more classical Marc Bohan.
Saint Laurent’s relationship with the house of Dior hadn’t ended totally, however.
After he suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized, he and Bergé resolved to open their own couture house. The problem was where to get the money.
“No one knows this,” confided Bergé, “but at the time, Rouet tried to persuade Boussac to open a small house for Saint Laurent. He started to work on a business plan, the number of workers, etc.
“Ultimately, Boussac said no. But it was thanks to that document, drawn up by Rouet, to open a couture house parallel to Christian Dior — he wanted it to be on the Avenue Montaigne next door to Harry Winston — that I opened the house of Saint Laurent. We changed very little of Rouet’s plan.”