Yesterday here, discussing linear or nonlinear autobiographies, I was trying to describe how Jerry Hall's My life in pictures breaks out from a chronological line sometimes to talk about particular subjects: example -- in Chapter 2, "Paris," as her modeling career gets going, she has a segment on photographer Helmut Newton, and another on designer Yves Saint Laurent.
These are followed, in Chapter 3, with a series of back-to-back paragraphs about seven photographers she posed for, and her experience with their work and their style -- all accompanied by startling and unique pictures.
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Yves Saint Laurent: A Very Special Designer
When the film Belle du Jour came out in 1967 the fashion world was electrified by the fact that Yves Saint Laurent had designed all the dresses. In this scandalous erotic film, Catherine Deneuve plays a bourgeois housewife who has a secret life as a daytime prostitute, just for fun. It gave a double life to luxury clothes.
When I arrived in Paris, I was invited to model for Yves Saint Laurent and then given a contract to model his designs. I appeared in all his catwalk shows, and was thrilled to be asked to do the first photo campaign for his new perfume, Opium. The photographs were taken by Helmut Newton (and are reproduced here as magazine tearsheets) and the campaign was a huge success.
Yves was a genius and a charming fragile man. I got to know him well, because as part of my contract, I had to attend high profile parties and events with him -- always dressed in couture YSL, of course.
Yves always made you feel as if your opinion mattered. He used to call his design studio 'The House of Love'. He wanted to know, did you like the outfit? Did you feel good in it? He was very sensitive; if you thought a dress might look better slightly different, all you had to do was hold it or lift it a certain way and he would pick up on that and change it and in that way you felt you were contributing and collaborating. He loved women and he wanted you to be really happy and to think that your outfit was just the best.
I modelled in all of his shows. The last catwalk show I did, in 2002, was a retrospective of his work in Paris. Yves had all the models who'd appeared in his clothes throughout the years, Catherine Deneuve, Veruschka, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell and many, many others.
We showed clothes from the sixties, seventies and eighties. His health was really failing by then and he died a few years later, but I will always remember him as a lovely man. ------------ [end / excerpt]
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When I was going to school in Boston, I bought a fragrance by YSL. (For some reason it was available at a price I could afford -- not anymore!) I really liked it, and when another freshman girl asked me about it, I showed her the bottle and said it was,
"Yah - VESS Saint LORR - ent."
She let me know that was pronounced
"Eve Saint Lorr - AHNT."
She didn't tease me about it, or act superior compared to my lack of sophistication. She just gave me the information.
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