Yves Saint Laurent spent his life working in the fashion business, but the man made no secret of the fact that he hated “fashion.” He believed only in style. And his ability to divine the difference between the two is what made him a genius. “Fashions pass,” he liked to say. “Style is eternal.”
If you are a man who must dress for work—suit and tie—Yves Saint Laurent should be your patron saint. And if you don’t have to suit up every day, well, Monsieur Saint Laurent will make you want to—will make you understand that stepping into a suit and tie (and wearing it the right way, as an individual) is not just the most sophisticated, creative move a man can make. It’s also increasingly the most radical.
In 2015, the dress code for a man is as fractured as ever; you can go sockless to the opera and eat a four-star dinner in a T-shirt and jeans. Paradoxically, then, choosing to wear a suit becomes a real act of subversion. For many men, the suit is no longer a Monday-to-Friday straitjacket but rather a statement of their personality. And the statement says: “This is my personal style. I like the way a suit feels.” Yves knew that some men will always stride a little more confidently in a suit, will always want that feeling.
He wore his own clothes—even his suits—with the subtle, individual flair of an artist. The man hated sloppiness. He may have worn his hair long, but it was kempt. He knew jewelry gave a man an air of sophistication. He had those eyeglass frames—the perfect balance of dramatic and discreet, with enough suggestion of bookish bohemia to make you look twice—and he was never without his supremely elegant Cartier Tank watch. There are photos of him through the years, maybe one of him reaching for a sketch or another of him directing a model, his arm outstretched, and there it is, the watch. The fancy watch and the shaggy hair, the impeccable suit and the hipster glasses—it’s the contradictions that made the look his own, and that make those photos feel so modern today.
I’ve always believed true style emerges when a man is not only aware of his roots but remains true to them. Embraces them. Especially the paradoxes that are so often in our roots. The trick is in finding comfort even in the parts of your identity that, as a younger man, you might’ve rebelled against. If you can see your past as a source of stability, a foundation from which you can evolve, you are miles ahead of other guys. Certainly that was Yves Saint Laurent. As he said years later, looking back on his life, “The greatest change came when I discovered my own style, without being influenced by others.” It’s almost too easy these days to forget how transformative an individual Saint Laurent was—or even that he’s truly gone, having died in 2008. Long before Hedi Slimane was given dominion in 2012 over the house Yves founded in 1962, there was Saint Laurent himself.
He had grown up in Oran, a city in Algeria, back when Algeria was still part of the French colonial empire. His ancestors had escaped the Prussian invasion of France in 1870, and in their new land they were among the pieds-noirs, or “black feet,” a term for people of French origin living in Algeria during French rule. From the beginning, Saint Laurent would always seem to be a man straddling two worlds. One part of him was French and upper-class—his father was an attorney, making his money from real estate deals and managing a chain of movie theaters spread across North Africa. The other part of Saint Laurent was something of an outsider, a stranger making his way in a world that didn’t always welcome him.
He was educated in a Jesuit school where he was a tall, gangly boy, tormented for his homosexuality and his shyness. He found his refuge and joy and purpose in sketching. He loved to sketch designs for clothes and seemed to always believe he was destined for greatness. Indeed, as Alicia Drake recounts in her book The Beautiful Fall, as a schoolboy Saint Laurent even wrote an imaginary newspaper review of his first fashion collection, wherein an imaginary reporter extols “the launch of a young couturier, Saint Laurent, who, with one collection, hoisted himself in one bound to the ranks of the greatest.”
It didn’t take him long to turn the fantasy into reality. In 1954, at only 18 years old, he found himself summoned from Oran to Paris, having won a design competition seeking France’s next generation of haute couture talent. From there, his rise was meteoric. He became an assistant at Christian Dior one year later, and within four years he was handpicked to take over Dior’s atelier. After a disastrous detour in which he was drafted into the army (he suffered a breakdown during basic training and was discharged), he and his companion, Pierre Bergé, started the house of YSL in 1962. From his very first collection, in January of that year, Saint Laurent drew a line between ancient and modern. Here was a man who not only understood the forces shifting society and style in the ‘60s but seized them and articulated them.
He gave women clothes that were radical (like his Mondrian-inspired dresses), and he gave them clothes that (as on Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour) embraced the sexiness they longed to reveal. Saint Laurent loved women and their bodies and understood that women wanted to show their bodies. Tellingly, some of his biggest breakthroughs with women’s clothes came through his feminizing of men’s pieces: the peacoat, the safari jacket, and of course, the tuxedo jacket, which he famously transformed into his Le Smoking jacket—and which became a staple of every Helmut Newton mid-’70s photo shoot. Claudia Schiffer later posed in Le Smoking sans shirt, just a tux cut to the navel, sharing her cleavage.
The clothes were that rarest of things: an object of fantasy for both women and men. Saint Laurent understood both sexes. He knew what they both wanted, and harnessed the power of the gaze.
From the moment he arrived in Paris, it was his talent as well as his personal style that set him apart, that caught the eyes of what the French call the faiseurs de feu (the “fire makers,” or power brokers; the people who make things happen). He was a young man from the provinces who still retained the influences of his breeding and his upbringing. It was a time when a man still wore a suit every day. But instead of seeing the suit as something limiting, Saint Laurent infused it with his own sense of style and transformed it into something limitless. And in Paris in the early ‘60s, he seemed utterly apart. Diana Vreeland’s first impression upon meeting him: “a thin, thin, tall, tall boy in a thin suit.” Or as Pierre Bergé said when he thought back to meeting Saint Laurent: “He was an extremely mysterious individual, very introverted and with many different facets and secrets.… He wore very tight jackets as if he was trying to keep himself buttoned up against the world. He reminded me of a clergyman. Very serious. Very nervous.”
I can’t prove it, of course—this is just my own theorizing, speaking as someone who spent enough time, like Saint Laurent, as a boy at Catholic Mass—but I would wager that his time among the Jesuits, among those vestments of black and white, it influenced how he dressed for work. He not only saw the power in a suit but saw the suit as his own vestment, something worn by a man who had the power to create and to conjure.
That clergyman’s rigor would inform Saint Laurent throughout his life. But the other part of his heritage would be awakened as the 1960s turned into the ‘70s, when he started taking holidays in Morocco. At first, it was a quiet refuge, a place where he escaped with Bergé and a few friends. It was also a place where he felt at home, where he felt the echoes of his childhood in Algeria and he started to embrace the louche side of style. This being the ‘70s, he embraced other things, like kif, a Moroccan hashish. The languorousness of the place, combined with the whole mise-en-scène of the ‘70s fashion scene—Mick Jagger jetting in to join them on holiday, Loulou de la Falaise with her duffel bags of astonishing clothes and her bricks of hash—brought out the side of Saint Laurent that was all about sex. And it transformed his personal style. As he later said, “It’s wrong to mistrust one’s sensibility. It is the richest, finest, and most effective thing we have.” That buttoned-up young man now was wearing shirts unbuttoned to mid-chest. It was a period that didn’t last long, but that perhaps he needed to fully own his sensibility—his own duality.
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Like all great artistic breakthroughs, Saint Laurent’s was about stripping style down to its core and making us see it all fresh. We talk a lot at GQ about “style,” and yet even after all my years here I know it is still a mysterious art to many men, the sense that style is like a good head of hair: Either you’re born with it or you’re not. I believe anyone can learn it, as YSL proves as well as anyone. What you have to understand is the difference that emerges in the details. Start with the suit. Remember that Saint Laurent was wearing a jacket and pants, but the last thing anyone would ever do is lay the insult on him of calling him “a suit.” Even all buttoned up, he looked bohemian—equal parts Paris and Morocco. Part of the magic was in his tailoring, the other part in his attitude. If you get your own suit tailored so you feel perfectly comfortable in it—so you are wearing it, as opposed to it wearing you—then you’ll start to develop your own point of view.
Saint Laurent, like all geniuses, understood that style is all about one or two well-chosen details—details that become part of a man’s style signature. Look at his suits. You’ll notice he wears them cut a bit trimmer. Not boxy like so many American suits. The shirts are always white or pale blue, and the ties are always monochromatic or an uncomplicated pattern. He has the watch, hair, and glasses, of course, and like any good midcentury Frenchman, he often has a cigarette in one hand.
Saint Laurent’s ability to focus on the details, to not overthink getting dressed, and to embrace the possibilities a suit afforded him, rather than seeing its limits—this is his style inspiration. He shows men that it is not about how much you can buy and how many pieces you own. Style does not come from acquiring. It comes from editing. With knowing that less is more. Or, as he said, “When I am working, my mind is set on paring things down.”
YSL’s legacy lives on in Slimane. On the one hand, the designers’ personal styles couldn’t seem more different. But in truth, they are brothers. Yves was in love with the street, with the modern, with the new. He once said, famously, “Down with the Ritz, long live the street.” His work was based in the classic, but it was as rebellious and modern as the house Slimane rechristened Saint Laurent Paris. Yes, Slimane’s designs are skinnier and more aggressive, characterized by leather jackets and studded boots and Laurel-Canyon-in-the-’70s suede jackets, but Slimane has shrewdly kept the line elevated, with luxurious materials and sky-high prices, making it coveted by a creative class of musicians and actors and cigarette-smoking art-world types that Saint Laurent himself would recognize. And even now, the line still makes suits—not business suits, but the kind of dark, tailored, rebelliously chic suits meant for men who’d wear them as a kind of statement, perhaps with long hair and a Cartier watch.