On wardrobe - Jeff Koehler in TLS:

‘In January, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris will mark the sixtieth anniversary of Yves Saint Laurent’s inaugural collection by exploring his connections with Proust. “Like Proust, I’m fascinated most of all by my perceptions of a world in awesome transition”, Saint Laurent wrote in the catalogue to a retrospective of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983, the first given to a living designer. “And my heart has always been divided between the vestals of constancy and the avatars of change.” For four decades, Saint Laurent observed this dichotomy, producing revolutionary designs while continuing to work in long-standing haute couture traditions. Drawing on elements from the male wardrobe that projected confidence and authority without sacrificing femininity, he created some of fashion history’s most influential designs for women, including le smoking tuxedo, tailored trouser suits and safari jackets, jumpsuits and trench coats, sheer chiffon tops, the Mondrian shift and Catherine Deneuve’s entire wardrobe in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967).’

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‘ Born in Oran in 1936, Yves Saint Laurent was a shy, anxious child raised in a house of women with his two younger sisters, mother, grandmother and aunt. His father managed a chain of cinemas across North Africa and was often away. They were well-off enough to have French servants and to move for the summer to a beachside villa in Trouville among equally privileged friends of the extended family. Laurence Benaïm’s biography of 2002 (published in an English translation by Kate Deimling in 2019) is full of vivid scenes and details from a colourful childhood. Like Proust, he was indulged by his mother, who let him cut up her dresses to make clothes for dolls and had a local tailor sew up his first designs for his sisters. At the time of his retrospective in New York, he wistfully remembered her dressing for dinner parties and, when “about to leave for the ball, com[ing] to kiss me goodnight, wearing a long dress of white tulle with pear-shaped white sequins”. The vision recalls the first thirty-odd pages of Du Côté de chez Swann, where the narrator’s “sole consolation, when I went upstairs for the night, was that Mama would come kiss me once I was in bed … the moment when I heard her coming up, then the soft sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, hung with little cords of plaited straw, passing along the hallway with its double doors, was for me a painful moment” (Lydia Davis’s translation of 2003).’

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‘In 1954, at eighteen, Saint Laurent left for Paris to study at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. Algeria’s brutal battle for independence from France had started (it would last until 1962 and leave one million dead), and Saint Laurent’s family fled with only what they could carry in cardboard suitcases. The speed of Saint Laurent’s ascent remains without parallel. After less than three months’ study, he was hired by Christian Dior as an assistant. When Dior unexpectedly died three years later, the timid prodigy was handed the reins of the world’s most famous fashion house. He was twenty-one (half the age Proust was when the first volume of his opus appeared). His inaugural Trapèze collection of 1958, which discarded his predecessor’s signature geometric shapes, tight constructions and cinch-waisted New Look for lighter, more fluid designs, was a resounding success, and the tall thin boy in Buddy Holly glasses shot to the top of the industry, where he remained unchallenged for decades.’

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‘Soon after, with his romantic partner Pierre Bergé handling the business side, Saint Laurent opened his own maison. The first collection, presented in January 1962, opened with a navy-blue wool pea coat, heralding a distinctive new liberated style for women. But the pressure was immense, and by the mid-1970s, Saint Laurent was addicted to cocaine and painkillers and, according to Benaïm, drinking up to two bottles of whisky a day. The addictions helped to fuel severe depression, explosive behaviour and high anxiety, and instigated a number of stays in a psychiatric hospital. All this sent him into a near-complete retreat from public life.’

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‘ Instead, according to Francine du Plessix Gray, who profiled Saint Laurent in the New Yorker in 1996, he more or less shut himself in his room, saw few people, rarely even answered calls, and often did little but read Proust. (And what volumes he owned. Among them was a luxuriously bound edition of Du Côté de chez Swann that Proust inscribed to “his little darling”, the writer and painter Lucien Daudet; it sold at Sotheby’s in 2018 for €1.51 million, shattering the record for a French book.)
His conflation of the novel with his own life went beyond the imagination. Located ten miles up the coast from the seaside resort of Cabourg (fictionalized by Proust as Balbec), where Proust spent his summers, Château Gabriel had once belonged to Gaston Gallimard, and it was here that Proust had first met his future publisher. For Saint Laurent, the French interior designer Jacques Grange recreated a Proustian world, decorating the villa in the style of À la Recherche, with aquatic blue and green waterlily murals, heavy drapery and Napoleon III furniture. Each bedroom was named for a character: Bergé’s was Baron de Charlus, Saint Laurent’s was Swann. Beside Proust himself, it was with Swann – the sensitive, erudite hero with exquisite taste in art who was, as the son of a Jewish stockbroker, an outsider working for the highest echelons of society – that Saint Laurent felt the most affinity. When he travelled, the designer used the pseudonym Swann; in Normandy, he slept in his bedroom.’

Read the article here.

Life imitates art, all right, but maybe the desire to imitate art came first.

And creation is just a lid on the simmering pan of suffering. The suffering would have been there anyhow.

But suffering or no suffering, traveling under the name of Swann appears to be an excellent idea. It’s my good intention for the period 2022-2030.