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| Yves Got to be Kidding | |||||||
| Our columnist browses through some of Saint Laurent’s most celebrated designs, and begs the reverent fashion press to please reconsider | |||||||
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| Jan. 14 — After fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent retired last week, I couldn’t help feeling like a character in that Hans Christian Anderson story about the emperor who parades naked before his adoring subjects. |
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| THROUGHOUT A
LONG WEEK of endless tributes to Saint Laurent, no one seemed willing to
say what only the child from that old story was able to say: This emperor
of fashion has no clothes! Sure, the fashion press lauded him, but after leafing through all the photo retrospectives of his work, I couldn’t help but notice that not only do Saint Laurent’s designs, how you say?, stink, but are as dated as a white collar on a Wall Street broker’s powder blue shirt. This is the guy, after all, who gave us the “rich peasant” look in the mid-1970s, a collection that made women look as if they walked right off the pages of “Anna Karenina” and directly into a Beverly Hills consignment shop. And there was also Saint Laurent’s “Chinese evening pajamas,” which were a good look ... if you want to be mistaken for a hostess in a Japanese salaryman’s bar. |
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| Sure, the
fashion press lauded him, but after leafing through all the photo
retrospectives of his work, I couldn’t help but notice that not only do
Saint Laurent’s designs, how you say?, stink, but are as dated as a white
collar on a Wall Street broker’s powder blue shirt. |
So I felt compelled to write about Saint Laurent for four
reasons: 1. Everyone else was, so what the hell? 2. Saint Laurent is not dead, but merely retired, so I can write whatever I want about him without risk of receiving hate mail decrying my insensitivity. The rule in journalism is to never speak ill of the dead, but the rule does not apply to the creatively dead. 3. I don’t like how everyone calls him YSL, which makes him sound less like a designer than a new high-speed Internet provider that promises lightning-fast connections but still gets bogged down when you try to download porn. 4. I’ve always considered haute couture (which, roughly translated, means “You look like a multi-colored llama in a monsoon”) to be nothing but an elaborate joke by which top designers separate fairly ugly rich people from large sums of cash. Now, I’m not rich and, judging from my hate mail, have no sense of humor, so maybe I just don’t get it. But don’t blame me, blame that cabal known as the Fashion Press. For years, I have been a student of the particularly offensive form of celebrity worship that masquerades as fashion “journalism.” Every season, no matter what the designers send down the runways, fashion reporters find a way to call it “daring,” “innovative” or “simply perfect.” I swear, if Donatella Versace sent three chimpanzees down the runway dressed in soiled prison uniforms, the New York Times would find a way to call it “a defining statement of who we are right now.” And fashion photographers? Don’t even get me started. Just focus the camera and show the freakin’ clothes for once! As expected, the fashionistas “reported” the “news” of Saint Laurent’s retirement with about as much journalistic objectivity as a Pravda reporter covering a new Stalin Five-Year Plan. The New York Times: “If Chanel liberated women from the corseted era before the First World War, Mr. Saint Laurent put them in masculine styles that gave them authority. For someone who has often been psychologically isolated from the world, who seldom ventures much beyond his homes in Paris and Morocco and who was frequently high on drugs, Mr. Saint Laurent has been extraordinarily attuned to what women want.” In case that paragraph didn’t sound enough like a parody, the Times quoted New York designer Fernando Sanchez, who apparently disregarded 99.999 percent of the planet when he said, “Yves dressed a world.” He then described that world as “a really good world where people cared about chic, great refinement and the art of living. That world is gone. And it’s gone even more since Sept. 11. Who today wants to talk about Mme. Rothschild’s ball at the Hotel Lambert?” Seriously, do you even have a clue what that man is talking about? After reading that, I felt like Paul Reiser’s character in the movie “Diner” when he says to his equally clueless friend, “Do you ever get the feeling there’s something going on that we don’t know about?” The International Herald Tribune picked up where the New York Times left off: “Mr. Saint Laurent will go down in history as the Mozart of designers, combining imagination and virtuosity with the lyrical, romantic and playful ... His appropriation of men’s clothing not only created the 20th century woman’s androgynous look, it also expressed the essence of feminism, just as his see-through dresses of 1968 reflected sexual liberation.” Let’s see, I count at least four contradictions in that one paragraph. No matter, this is fashion journalism. The article also quoted a distressed Nan Kempner, the famous American socialite, as saying, “I’ll have to go naked.” I think I speak for the majority of New Yorkers when I say that we all pray to God that the seventysomething Kempner is merely speaking hyperbolically. Now, socialite Blaine Trump is another story entirely. If she wants to make a vow to give up clothing, I’m all for that. Saint Laurent always said that his goal was always to “empower” women through his designs, and, according to the Washington Post, “to reassure them, to give them confidence, to enable them to assert themselves.” (You know, by putting them in a see-through blouses with manly shoulder pads.) The paper also quoted Hamish Bowles, who holds Vogue’s European editor-at-large position (a title that means he doesn’t have to come back to the office from lunch), as saying that Saint Laurent’s “most enduring legacy was, in fact, to appropriate men’s wardrobes for women.” In other words, he made us all look alike. Some legacy. The Gap does that for a lot less money. Only the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan was able to cut through the hysteria to see Saint Laurent with clear eyes, scoring big points with this columnist for blaming the French for elevating him “to the rarefied and dangerous level of icon.” Givhan gave Saint Laurent some credit, but concluded that he “stayed on until, increasingly, he seemed to be a holdover from another era ... a stagnant symbol ... [who] struggled on the runway, often producing collections that looked as if they’d been pulled from storage rather than born of a lively and vigorous creativity ... Saint Laurent was French fashion frozen in time.” Tell it, sister! But rather than prejudicing you, dear reader, I, like Saint Laurent, want to empower you to judge for yourself whether Saint Laurent is the naked emperor from that kid’s story or a bold innovator with a sketchpad in one hand and a vial of Xanax in the other. |
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In one 1969 photo, Saint Laurent is flanked by two models, one wearing one can only be described as a freshly laundered gypsy outfit, the other wearing a khaki leisure suit, an ammunition belt and black leather boots up to mid-thigh (can she sit down in those?). I suppose his 1965 Mondrian-influenced dress was flattering, if you wanted to look like an advertisement for Microsoft Windows 98. And I guess the world was just sitting around waiting for him to create the first female tuxedo suit, but tell me, would anyone accept Diane Keaton—10 years ago!—or Dame Edna be caught dead in this thing? It goes on. Is the woman in this photo supposed to look stylish or merely like a 1970s Detroit pimp? Are women supposed to wear this to a costume party on Evita Peron’s birthday? Maybe I’ve been in too many clinics lately, but doesn’t this outfit look like something Dr. Mark Greene might find fetching on an ER scrub nurse? Didn’t this look go out after Madonna’s Like a Virgin tour? And is this a hat or are two gypsy moth caterpillars trying to mate on this woman’s head? I suppose it’s better than this hat, which I thought went out of fashion after the recording industry phased out the LP in favor of CDs. OK, so maybe the emperor does have clothes. But, man, they stink! Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His website is at http://www.gersh.tv/ © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. |
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Perspectives