The Dark Story of Yves Saint Laurent: The Genius Who Destroyed Himself
Yves Saint Laurent did not merely dress the twentieth century. He invented large parts of the modern woman’s wardrobe — trousers as power, the tuxedo as evening armour, the safari jacket as city uniform — and then spent the rest of his life paying for that invention with his own nervous system. The official legend, repeated for decades by his partner Pierre Bergé, was that he was “born with a nervous breakdown.” The more useful story is narrower and harsher: a shy, bullied boy from colonial Algeria was handed a throne at twenty-one, broken in a military psychiatric ward at twenty-four, and then required to produce two couture collections a year while fashion, chemicals, and a codependent love affair finished the work the hospital had started.
He was born Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent on 1 August 1936 in Oran, then French Algeria, into a prosperous family. His mother had style; he had difference. School was a long humiliation. Thin, theatrical, and homosexual in a garrison town, he later said he had always felt “different from the others and suffered terribly for it.” Drawing was the only reliable escape. By his teens he was already designing paper dolls and theatre costumes. Paris, when he reached it, was less a discovery than a destination he had been sketching toward his whole life.
Christian Dior hired him in 1955. When Dior died of a heart attack in 1957, the house gambled on the twenty-one-year-old assistant. His first collection, shown in January 1958, was the Trapeze line: narrow shoulders, a raised waist, a flare that felt like youth after the architecture of the New Look. Crowds cheered him from the balcony on Avenue Montaigne. The press named him the petit prince. In a single season he had saved a house and become the face of French fashion.
The fall came two years later. France was still fighting the Algerian War. Saint Laurent was called up. He lasted about twenty days. He collapsed and was sent to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, where he spent two and a half months in a psychiatric ward. The treatment was of its era: isolation, electroshock, and tranquillizers in doses a doctor later admitted were the strongest that could be given. Saint Laurent recalled the details with unusual precision. He was so frightened he used the toilet only once. He dropped to thirty-five kilos. His brain, he said, was disturbed. The same doctor told him he would come back. While he was inside, Dior fired him and replaced him with Marc Bohan.
He always dated his later depressions and addictions from those weeks. Bergé dated them earlier — to birth. Both versions contain a truth and a convenience. The hospital was real trauma inflicted on a young man already stretched thin by fame and by a war that had made his hometown a battlefield. The “born broken” story also made Bergé indispensable: the robust manager of a genius who could not manage a chequebook.
In 1961 the two men founded the house that still bears Saint Laurent’s name. Bergé ran the business with ferocious competence. Saint Laurent designed. Together they turned couture into a global brand and ready-to-wear into a serious proposition. Rive Gauche opened in 1966. Le Smoking, the women’s tuxedo of the same year, remains one of the most copied garments of the century. He put women in peacoats and safari jackets, in Mondrian blocks and see-through blouses. In 1971 he posed nude for his own men’s cologne. The clothes argued that a woman could occupy the same visual authority as a man and look better doing it.
The personal arrangement was never simple. They were lovers, then no longer lovers, then something more durable and more damaging: a partnership in which Bergé organised the world so Saint Laurent would not have to touch it. By the mid-1970s, people around them said, he could not write a cheque or book a flight without Bergé. In 1976 Bergé moved out of their apartment on the Rue de Babylone. He left, he later said, “not for another person but for myself, to save myself.” Yves “had started living a life of self-destruction that I did not want to witness.” They remained bound until Saint Laurent’s death.
The mid-1970s are the hinge. He had already won. Then he entered the Paris of all-night clubs — Le Sept, later Le Palace — and the orbit of Jacques de Bascher, Karl Lagerfeld’s companion and a professional seducer of other people’s partners. Hashish, opium, amphetamines to work, Valium and whisky to stop working, then cocaine. Betty Catroux, his closest muse, later said the point was simple: “the strongest things… so as not to be in reality.” The collections of those years — Russian, Spanish, Chinese, the scandalous Opium perfume of 1977 — were among his most extravagant. Some of the beauty was fuelled by the same substances that were wrecking him.
Biographer Marie-Dominique Lelièvre and others date the real deterioration to 1976–77, not to childhood. A doctor she consulted noted the obvious: a classic depressive has no energy. Saint Laurent had enormous energy. What he had looked more like a bipolar or cyclothymic pattern amplified by drugs, by the industrial calendar of fashion, and by a personality that treated suffering as both wound and raw material. He threw ashtrays. He vanished into nightclubs and was sometimes collected from hospitals. At his peak he smoked on the order of 150 cigarettes a day. Friends spoke of a “Judy Garland syndrome”: stimulants and sedatives to meet the schedule of a star who could not stop being a star. Bergé called him manic-depressive: days of wild happiness, then blackness. “Even with a wonderful collection, he was a very, very unhappy guy. More than unhappy. Really.”
There is a less romantic portrait in Lelièvre’s Saint Laurent, mauvais garçon. In that telling he used people, had few real intimates, and became a tyrant when drunk. Catroux said he did not have friends and loved nobody. The model Victoire, the only woman he considered marrying, said he did not love women; he used them. Both versions — doomed poet and drunken tyrant — can describe the same man on different nights.
By the 1990s the public image was of a recluse behind thick glasses, bloated or skeletal depending on the year, sometimes pushed onto the runway after a show. There were detoxes. Around 1990 he appears to have stopped the heaviest use. The work continued, more museum than laboratory. In 1999 the ready-to-wear business was sold. Couture stayed with him until he decided it could not.
On 7 January 2002, at the atelier on Avenue Marceau, he read a prepared statement and left without questions. “Every man needs aesthetic phantoms in order to exist,” he said. “I have hunted mine out, pursued them, tracked them down. I have grappled with anguish and I have been through sheer hell. I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day I was able to come through all that, dazzled yet sober… I did not choose this tragic descent, but through it I was able to rise to the heavens of creativity.” He quoted Proust on “the magnificent and pitiable family of neurotics” and claimed membership.
He died on 1 June 2008 of brain cancer, aged seventy-one. Accounts differ on whether he was told. A few days earlier he and Bergé had entered a French civil union. At the funeral Bergé said the love had never stopped, even after the “divorce” of 1976.
The tempting narrative is that genius and self-destruction are the same flame. Saint Laurent half-believed it. Fashion loves that story because it makes the clothes feel expensive in a spiritual as well as a monetary sense. A colder reading is available. A hypersensitive, ambitious, sexually persecuted young man was put under industrial pressure no nervous system is built for. Mid-century psychiatry answered his first collapse with shock and sedation. The 1970s answered the second with a pharmacy and a nightclub. Bergé both protected him and needed him dependent. The collections that still structure how women dress were made by a man who was still more or less intact. Much of what followed was the maintenance of a legend by a person who was no longer intact.
He did not only destroy himself. The system that crowned him at twenty-one, the lover who organised his life, the chemicals that let him meet deadlines, and a culture that prefers its artists wounded all helped. The clothes remain. The man, by the end, had become one of the phantoms he said every artist needs — except this one had to live inside the phantom until the body gave out.
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