Yves of Destruction

The thing to remember about Yves Saint Laurent, the greatest living couturier, is that he doesn't know when to quit. He is a man of extremes, a champion binger. Give him his favorite brand of cigarettes, Peter Stuyvesant, and he will run through them like a child running through corn. ''He smokes 150 a day,'' says Pierre Berge, who, as the business brains behind Saint Laurent and the person closest to him for the past 42 years, has seen him through far more easily fatal forms of self-abuse. Once in Marrakech, when he was still getting high (mostly on cocaine, Saint Laurent says), his friend and court muse Loulou de la Falaise showed him how instead of smoking hashish he could get the same effect from pinching a little bit off and swallowing it. ''He said, 'You can do that?''' recalls her husband, Thadee Klossowski, a son of the painter Balthus. ''And she said, 'Sure.' Well, that day he had eaten the whole thing.''

And the excesses weren't confined to drugs and drink. ''I've had an extraordinary sex life,'' Saint Laurent told me in September. Indeed, to look at the lithe, thin, shadowy figure of Saint Laurent in the late 1960's and early 70's, when he had himself photographed nude for a cologne ad, is to realize just how willful he was. ''Wild, dirty talking, really funny,'' is how Karl Lagerfeld describes him in those days. Today, Saint Laurent rarely leaves his apartment on the Rue de Babylone except to go to work. His public image is that of a lonely nervous wreck being bullied by the more aggressive Berge. Seeing Saint Laurent now, it's difficult to picture him collapsing his friends with laughter -- or taunting Berge, then his lover, so mercilessly that once, according to Klossowski, Berge picked up a knife and chased Saint Laurent down a flight of stairs. But he was always hard to pin down. Recalling the apartment on the Place Vauban that Saint Laurent shared with Berge in the 60's, Klossowski says: ''Yves had this tiny room, with a sliding door and one window, very narrow. Just a bed and this window, out of which he would escape. God knows where he would go.''

And then -- how can one describe the effect of entering his Rue de Babylone apartment? How did this man, between the cigarettes and the drinking and the going out the window, have the stamina to accumulate not just a Goya, a couple of Picassos, a Matisse, an Ingres, a Cezanne, a trove of silver and a collection of cameos second only to Catherine the Great's, but also to arrange it all so that it perfectly reflects, in mood and layers, the whole complex Saint Laurent personality? Well, that's the answer: it takes a strong person. It is true that he has suffered psychologically, and is often depicted as a fragile plant, but his sufferings, to gauge from both his long career and his elaborate surroundings, are those of an oak rather than a willow. ''I've seen him transform himself completely when it was the occasion to appear, and I would laugh,'' says the designer Fernando Sanchez, a friend since 1954. ''It's great show biz.''

But nowhere is Saint Laurent more excessive than in his talent. The Mondrian dresses, the smokings, the safari look, the military styles he did for Catherine Deneuve in ''Belle de Jour,'' the 1976 ''Ballets Russes'' show, which made the front page of The New York Times (''Yves Saint Laurent presented a fall couture collection today that will change the course of fashion''), and the notorious 1940's show in 1971, which enraged everyone. Saint Laurent didn't just create the square-shouldered silhouette that became the dominant look after Chanel's cardigan suit; he imposed it on the world. And even when he was in shocking shape, high or plunged in a destructive love affair, he still had reserves of strength. At one of the lowest points in his life, Saint Laurent produced one of his most exhilarating shows: a ready-to-wear collection based on ''Carmen,'' shown in October 1976, which included more than 300 numbers and ran for three hours.

Saint Laurent is 64 now. He was 21 when he achieved fame, as Christian Dior's successor. Since then, he has lived in a kind of permanent adolescence, surrounded by the same friends he has known for 30 or 40 years, protected by the same man, even adored by a series of small dogs that are only technically different dogs since each was given the same name. ''It doesn't matter at all what is real or not,'' Berge says, laughing a little. ''Everything must be the same, and that may be because Yves is frightened everything will be replaced.'' This refusal to admit life's normal regrets has, of course, marked Saint Laurent with a permanent innocence. It explains why people describe him in mystical-artist terms -- Yves lives in the clouds,'' his friend Betty Catroux says; ''Yves is like Proust,'' Berge says -- but it doesn't account for how a skinny kid from Oran, Algeria, also managed to be a star at 21 and have his own fashion house by 25. ''Ambition, ambition, ambition -- from the beginning,'' Sanchez says.

In the past decade, people paid more attention to Saint Laurent's appearance than to his work. He was in such bad shape in the early 1990's -- lethargic from tranquilizers and bloated by the 25 Coca-Colas a day he had substituted for alcohol -- that sometimes Berge had to literally push him onto the runway after his shows. Berge's bossiness led people to conclude that he is Saint Laurent's tormentor. In truth, the relationship is as complicated in its entanglements as it is morbid in its fascination.

Although Saint Laurent's own collections in the 90's were often reprises of his greatest hits, other, more assimilative designers were able to give his classic styles a modern spin -- no one more so than Tom Ford, who turned Gucci into a hot brand. In late 1999, Gucci bought the Saint Laurent company. The sale, which came to almost $1 billion, gave Gucci the ready-to-wear and fragrance divisions; Saint Laurent and Berge were left with only the haute couture house (which its owner, Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, runs at a loss of $11 million a year). The deal received a tremendous amount of attention -- not just for the money involved but also for its symbolic resonance: Ford represents the new and exciting; Saint Laurent, the old and passe. Even Berge, who loathes nostalgia, says he would hate to be in Saint Laurent's shoes, designing for a group of rich socialites ''who are absolutely over.''

Berge insists that Saint Laurent feels no rivalry with Ford -- nor anything else for him, really. ''Yves has never seen a Gucci dress,'' he says. ''It doesn't exist for him.'' But last July, when he presented his fall couture show, with Ford seated front and center, the rest of Saint Laurent's old friends, like Catroux and Deneuve, felt he was throwing down a gauntlet. The clothes he showed had so much savoir-faire -- and sin, with bare bottoms flashing through lace -- that every outfit seemed to be a lesson in French chic.

And on the day of Ford's first ready-to-wear show for the YSL label, Oct. 13, when it was supposed by many that Saint Laurent was at home in Marrakech and beyond ordinary caring, he was, in fact, less than half a mile away, on the Rue de Babylone. Berge says Saint Laurent came back to Paris only because of the unseasonable heat. But Madison Cox, the American landscape designer who was Berge's boyfriend in the 1980's and remains close to both men, had been in Marrakech, and he had a different view. ''I think this whole business with Gucci is the one thing that's keeping Yves revved up,'' Cox says. ''Wouldn't you be if suddenly there's a new kid on the block whom everybody loves and adores? I'm sure it all had to do with that show.''

Why this look into Saint Laurent's world now? Because from out of this most irrational life came the most coherent fashion. Because we have entered the age of Ford, the rational man, a man not burdened by his doubts, who describes his job as ''interpreting the mood of the world and turning it into things that people want.'' As John Fairchild, the former publisher of Women's Wear Daily, says: ''Tom is totally secure, and the strength of Saint Laurent is that he's totally, totally insecure. He's struggling all the time.'' For each of their talents, these two simply belong to separate worlds.

Whether or not you care about clothes, this transition marks the passing of an era, the end of a parade of genius that began with Poiret and Chanel, made its way through Schiaparelli, Dior and Balenciaga and ends, nearly a century later, with Saint Laurent. These were people, all of them original, all of them to some degree freakish, who changed the way women dressed. Not a hemline, not a cut, as designers will do today. But fashion. And no one did it with more clarity and self-destructive fury than Saint Laurent.

Saint Laurent's apartment on the Rue De Babylone, where he has lived alone since Berge officially moved out in the early 80's, gives him the perfect psychological advantage over visitors: they are immediately struck dumb. There in the living room is the wall of pictures hanging salon style that hits you as soon as you walk in -- a montage of virtually every major 20th-century artist. There's the Goya, resting on its own stand in the far corner next to the suite of Jean-Michel Frank's Modernist furniture. In a way, it is a room of two minds, because at the other end the mood is more lush, more 19th century, with a pair of leopard sofas surrounded by tables, ornamental displays of rock crystal and many more layers of objects. The downstairs library, where Saint Laurent and his entourage gathered and regathered during the 70's and 80's, contains comfortable chairs covered in white linen, more paintings -- Mondrian, Warhol -- and big vases of Casablanca lilies. The one ascetic exception is Saint Laurent's bedroom, which is small, almost a monk's room, with a cross above a low bed that faces a drawing of a male nude.

''I spend most of my time in my bedroom,'' Saint Laurent tells me in a sweet voice. ''I love my bedroom.''

He has on a brown seersucker sport coat, with a silk pocket square and brown trousers, and his hair, which is a bottle shade of ash blond, is combed into a smooth cap. His breathing is lumbered, but he looks well, slimmer than he has in years. And though he moves slowly, I think it has less to do with age than with the knowledge that people will wait for him. Cox recalls the image of himself and Marina Schiano, who ran Saint Laurent's New York operations in the 70's, lying fully dressed in evening clothes on a bed, just waiting for the call to come from Saint Laurent saying whether it would be Maxim's or Caviar Kaspia that night.

Even now, it is almost impossible to look at Saint Laurent without seeing him in relation to Berge -- not only because they have never been able to disentangle their lives (though Saint Laurent says he once thought about it) or because Berge is often assumed to be the force that drove Saint Laurent, sometimes cruelly, to fame and success, but also because they are complete opposites. Where Saint Laurent is melancholy and has the past on his mind, Berge is tempestuous and unsentimental. He doesn't bother to hide the ugly side of his nature, nor does he feel the need to show you the tender side. Saint Laurent, on the other hand, is much harder to fathom. Outwardly, he is a model of sensitivity and reserve. ''Deep down,'' Fairchild says, ''he is very intelligent, superaggressive and very combative.'' Where Saint Laurent tends to isolate himself in Paris or Morocco, and then complain that he's lonely, Berge, at 70, remains curious. ''There were a lot of angels around the crib when Yves was born, but one angel was missing -- that's for the art of living,'' Sanchez tells me. ''I'm not talking about having grand homes but, rather, enjoying, having a good time. Pierre has this talent. Pierre can renew himself.''

Though often single-minded in his judgments, Berge spreads himself over several worlds. It was through his friendship with Fran-->ois Mitterand, the late French president, in the mid-80's that Berge became head of the Opera de la Bastille, which allowed him to exercise his talents in new ways. Saint Laurent, who has few interests outside of fashion, is devoted to only one world, his own. If there is one thing either man hates it is to be ignored, and the ways in which they demand attention, while controlling the people around them, are as ingenious as they are different. Saint Laurent does it by making everyone dependent on his egocentric moods; his indifference to people is such that even friends say they can hardly recall him beginning a conversation with ''How are you?'' Berge does it by possessing them. ''The minute you leave him or commit some act of treason, the cord is broken and it's as if you no longer exist,'' Cox says.

Lagerfeld likes to point out that in the early days, before money and drugs changed things, Saint Laurent was ''full of life, full of sparkle.'' Lagerfeld blames Berge for Saint Laurent's ivory-tower existence. Of course, Saint Laurent's depressions, for which he has been hospitalized, and his ravaging alcoholism in the 80's may have left Berge no choice but to be more protective. And Lagerfeld's frequent pokes at Berge are part of an old enmity that makes the houses of Chanel and Saint Laurent rivals. But Lagerfeld is right that Saint Laurent used to lead a vastly different life than he does today. De la Falaise, who fell in with Saint Laurent's circle and then became a design assistant in the early 70's, says: ''Yves used to be totally brilliant at one-man shows. Hysterically funny. He had for me a very English sense of humor, rather childish, entailing a lot of imitation and dressing up. Sometimes we'd dress up Pierre.''

Of all the hothouse groups that arose in Paris in the 70's, none were hotter than Saint Laurent's, with its hip clothes, louche friends and powerful connections to the haut monde. The glamour of the entourage had an almost gravitational effect on the status life of the era, drawing in everyone from Andy Warhol to Rudolf Nureyev, baronesses to drug dealers. In one way or another, Berge, who can be very generous, managed to put a lot of people in his debt. He made sure Saint Laurent was surrounded by friends who stimulated him creatively, and he endured their childish antics and mettlesome comments about how square he was. Being the central adult figure in Saint Laurent's spacey playpen must have had its perks, and at times it must also have been galling. But it was the price he paid to keep Saint Laurent happy and productive. And so it has always been hard to tell, in the shifting battle lines of their relationship, who was the weak one and who the strong one.

Klossowski, who kept a diary during those years, recalls the scene at the apartment that Berge and Saint Laurent shared before they acquired the Babylone home: ''Yves would tease Pierre and make him really furious. And then they would make up and all that. All of this was very, very amusing for us. I mean, Yves was very good-looking, and Pierre was this bundle of energy, and they were very sexual. He and Pierre might go out for the evening, and then Yves would go back to his little room with the sliding door. There was a collage of pinups on the wall of porn and film stars, quite a lot of male bodies. And he would sort of brood. And sometimes he would come out with us and be extremely funny, always sort of taunting Pierre. There's a very easy way to taunt Pierre, and that is to refer to him in the feminine -- elle. Pierre would immediately be furious, and they would have a fight. I don't know, they had this rather childish and sort of S-and-M relationship. But Yves obviously depended immensely on Pierre and was furious when Pierre would flirt with another boy.''

In the early 70's, as Berge concentrated on building the business, by adding more perfumes and licensing the Saint Laurent name, Saint Laurent devoted himself to being, as he told me, ''the leader for fun.'' At that point, his drug-taking was mild, mainly marijuana; LSD, though around, scared him, he said. But it was obvious to his friends that he was hugely susceptible to drugs' effects. ''What's extraordinary about Yves is how allergic he is to drugs and alcohol,'' Klossowski says. ''Give him a glass of wine and he's drunk. Give him a puff of a joint and he's high. Give him two puffs and he's out of his mind. And it gets worse''

For someone who is manic-depressive, who was apparently high a good deal of the time, Saint Laurent's creative output was remarkably fluent and prolific. He was high, Klossowski says, when he did the three-hour ''Carmen'' show, and in the middle of a nervous breakdown when, in 1976, he presented his ''Ballets Russes'' collection, a gorgeous display of chic peasant romance. (He entered the American Hospital a few weeks before the show and returned afterward.) Obviously, drugs did not hinder his creativity, nor did his sexual pursuits. At one point, I remarked to him that he must have had a very free sex life to have designed, in 1968, the first see-through dress for haute couture, a black chiffon caftan doused with ostrich feathers around the hips. He replied: ''Absolutely. My sexuality is lost now. And it's a shame for creativity. No alcohol, no sex -- it's very, very difficult.'' Frankly, I think he's selling his creativity -- and himself -- short. As Sanchez says with a weary laugh: ''I know Pierre would argue me under the table, 'Ah, tu ne comprends pas! You don't understand!' Yes, I know. Pierre has said it himself -- that Yves was born depressed. But considering he was born depressed, he has done quite a good number.''

Nothing has ever interested him more than work. He could be out all night, drunk, and the next day he'd be back in his studio sketching and giving direction to his staff members, most of whom have been with him since the house opened. And for someone who rarely travels beyond his homes in France and Morocco, who is almost provincial, he has an incredibly fertile imagination. The evidence of this can be found in the climate-controlled storage bins of the Centre de Documentation Yves Saint Laurent, the $5 million archive facility that Berge opened this year and that he had the foresight to make Gucci support in perpetuity. But the thing that stays in my mind is how Victoire Doutreleau, a star model at Dior in the 50's, recalled looking down one day at Saint Laurent's worktable and seeing, ''mixed up with the dresses,'' his drawings of men having sex. The phrase ''mixed up with the dresses'' is exactly right: Saint Laurent didn't draw an aesthetic line (and certainly no moral one) between designing a ball gown and escaping out the window.

He got ideas everywhere. Andre Leon Talley, a Vogue editor, recalls the example of a couture show that Saint Laurent did in 1977 that Women's Wear Daily dubbed ''the Broadway Suit.'' ''I said to Yves, 'You saw a production of 'Porgy and Bess?''' Talley says. ''I mean, he was making clothes that were truly black -- the way I used to see black women in the South dress. I asked Yves how he got the idea to do this, and he said, 'Coming across the bridge in my VW' -- he was still driving -- I turned on the radio to music from the production, and it gave me the inspiration.' That's a very creative mind. I mean, Yves has not traveled to Spain, but he got the Spanish thing for 'Carmen' from Goya, through Balenciaga through Zurbaran. He got those Spanish Gypsies.''

He was intuitive. Journalists have tended to overstate the role of the street in influencing his designs, especially in the early 90's, when his shows lacked vitality. But Saint Laurent's real gift wasn't for adapting a look that was already popular. Rather, it was an imaginative readiness for the farthest particle in the fashion galaxy. He was like the Hubble telescope: he saw things early, distantly, and blew them up big. In 1971, he saw Paloma Picasso in a 40's dress she had found at a flea market. At the time, there was no sign of turbans and wedgies on the horizon, and certainly no nostalgia for a style that still had depressing associations with the war. But based simply on his own farsightedness, he designed an entire collection around the look, including a chiffon dress in jungle camouflage. On the day of the show, sensing hostility from the press, Saint Laurent stocked the audience with his muses, who had on clothes from the collection.

The show was a disaster. ''The things we heard -- This collection is for sitting on the bidet,''' recalls de la Falaise, who was watching from the American and British press section. ''After the show, we all ran up to Yves's little office and broke into hysterical laughter. It was so nerve-racking hearing people say such awful things.'' But in a matter of months the collection's influence was everywhere.

For years, Berge has been telling the fashion world that Saint Laurent is different from other designers because he is an artist. And everyone could see for themselves the harmonious collections, the clothes that were just right, the colors that were never a shade off. What they could not see was the emotional wreckage that was piling up, nor the way that Saint Laurent felt increasingly pinned down by his artistic struggles. Berge, out of necessity -- he had the image of the house to protect -- threw up a protective screen around Saint Laurent such that even now only a few people know how bad things were getting. And the problem was to affect the house of Saint Laurent well into the 80's.

In 1973, Saint Laurent fell obsessively in love with Jacques de Bascher, an extremely good-looking and decadent man with a complex personality that in less rarefied circles might be called merely twisted, but that made him fascinating. Friends say Saint Laurent was so besotted that he sometimes drove around and around the square where de Bascher lived, honking his horn. When Berge looks back on the four-year affair -- which some believe was conducted mostly by Saint Laurent in swooning letters -- he can see that de Bascher represented a freedom. ''I want to be honest,'' Berge says. ''Yves needed somebody like that at the time. He needed to escape from his own world.'' But Berge blames de Bascher for leading Saint Laurent deeper into drug and alcohol use. Almost everyone characterizes the affair as the beginning of a downward spiral for Saint Laurent and a turning point in his relationship with Berge, who adds, ''Everybody hates de Bascher -- except Lagerfeld, of course.''

De Bascher was Lagerfeld's great love, and to add to the anxiety caused by the affair, many in the house thought Lagerfeld had manipulated de Bascher into the affair to hurt Saint Laurent's business. It wasn't true, but Lagerfeld was one of the few people who knew just how unhinged Saint Laurent had become. Lagerfeld says he was not physically involved with de Bascher, as many assumed, but he understood his fatal predilections: ''He was everything I could not be, would be or should be.''

Klossowski says: ''I should think that what attracted Yves to Jacques was a sense of evil, to things that were a bit dangerous. He played with Yves and dragged him into some very heavy scenes. Suddenly, Yves, who was shy and often surrounded by a group -- suddenly he was going out all by himself to bars and coming back barefoot and half-naked and roaming the streets in disarray. I think that's when he and Pierre completely fell out -- well, the relationship changed because Yves became totally impossible. Poor Pierre had a very, very hard time.''

As if some of these events had become too extreme for the people who observed them, part of the record has been put away, perhaps forever. Klossowski stopped keeping his journal. ''It's deeply interred, and I don't think I'll ever pick it up again,'' he says. As for the letters Saint Laurent wrote to de Bascher, who died in 1989 of complications from AIDS, these now reside in boxes stored among de Bascher's effects in Lagerfeld's house. ''We keep them sleeping,'' Lagerfeld says.

In the long aftermath of the 70's, when many of the old entourages broke up, the Saint Laurent-Berge group clung together. This dedication to two aging combatants gave them peculiar poignancy, but they must have felt that they had sacrificed something of themselves in the bargain. It was exhausting to look after Saint Laurent, who was drinking by the liter before he stopped, 10 years ago. De la Falaise had to keep up the mood in the studio. Berge was running around like Florence Nightingale and keeping the rest of the world at bay. Cox says: ''Having witnessed a number of terrifying moments with Yves -- him going nuts or throwing things at people, screaming -- never once did Pierre say, 'Oh that's your problem.' I mean, the hospitals, the psychiatrists, the going to pick up the pieces. Never has Pierre abandoned Yves.''

As Saint Laurent's psychic struggles made him seem tragic, however, Berge's rise, as a cultural figure and political confidant, made him seem as if he was settling an old score with his former lover. Did he resent Saint Laurent's fame? Saint Laurent says he thinks so, ''a little.'' Was he getting his revenge for being taunted in the early years, for always being the one to clean up the mess?

Or was it all the other way around -- was it really Saint Laurent who was the tormentor? ''I don't care what people think,'' Berge says, dropping the screen for once. ''They think that Yves's the weak guy and I'm the tough guy, but I know the truth.''

It was Sanchez who offered the clue that what these two hate above all is to be ignored. ''Never forget they are a couple, and they are two accomplices who will grab each other's throat, and neither of them will ever let go. They will die with their hands on the other's throat. They would like to be each other's victim, but there is no victim here -- and I would tell it to their faces: 'You're both two monsters.'''

Right after watching Tom Ford's October show, an emotionally cool presentation done all in black and white, after the obligatory backstage photos, Berge went to his car and called Saint Laurent. ''He wanted to know my opinion,'' Berge says a few weeks later as we are sitting in his office, at 5 Avenue Marceau. ''I give it to him. I don't give it to you.'' But it would not be an overstatement to describe the mood among Saint Laurent's crowd, just after the show, as gleeful. The front page of The International Herald Tribune declared Ford's debut ''tepid.''

It is the opinion of many in Paris that although Berge and Saint Laurent sold the business, they are not giving up. In September, they started putting a few articles of clothing, blouses mostly, in the small accessories boutique they still own on the Rue Faubourg St.-Honore. The Gucci people were not pleased. But the blouses are still there, and very beautiful they are, too -- very Saint Laurent. Not 50 feet away, the Gucci store is trying to sell the new image of Saint Laurent in sleek black pants suits.

Ford has met Saint Laurent on four occasions, including once for dinner, and Ford says they got on well. But these meetings were really courtesy calls. De la Falaise told me that when Saint Laurent visited Ford in his offices and saw that the employees were all dressed in a minimalist uniform, he said, ''Tom, we're not so strict, because we are, after all, a family.''

There is no doubt that Gucci will run the company better than Berge did. ''Pierre took wonderful care of Yves - almost too much care of Yves -- but he did not take enough care of the business,'' says a friend who has known them for years. Berge signed too many licenses, often for inferior merchandise, and with typical single-mindedness believed in the old French way of making clothes long after the rest of the world had moved on to more modern techniques.

Ford's strength is that he is not stuck in the old ways. He's not going to spend an evening perfecting a pocket, the way Saint Laurent would. He knows the world isn't interested. He gives his customers what they want: clothes that make them look good, that tie them into the moment, that function as status objects. And he's an adept marketer. His clothes, his boutiques, his ads are conceived with such a sharp focus that they all deliver the same message: clean, cool, sexy.

That Ford is not a designer of Saint Laurent's caliber will matter only to people who have memory, and in time it will be smoothed away. His clothes will look different from Saint Laurent's. They will lack his poetry and romance, but more than this, they will lack the life that so incautiously informed them. ''It's more human,'' Cox says of Saint Laurent's fashion. ''They're car crashes, breakdowns, people who are loved and people who are hurt. And you don't sense any of that with Ford. What he does is good, and it corresponds to what's obviously needed now. But it's not about converging passions.''

All his life, Saint Laurent has been described as a child, and when I was with him, I too sensed his childish sweetness, his harmless-baby regard. But this is not how one should see Saint Laurent. Nor should one think it was innocence that made his art coherent -- or that he was innocent at all. ''But whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple,'' Rebecca West wrote in 1928. ''He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.'' She was referring to Dickens and Thackeray, but no better words exist to describe Saint Laurent: ''These were not men, they were battlefields.'' If the fashion world has imposed any tragedy on him, it is to have seen him only in terms of the clouds.

Cathy Horyn is the fashion critic for The New York Times.