Before us is actually a monologue of a long-term business partner and life partner of Saint Laurent Pierre Bergé, the founder of the fashion house “YSL”. It is clear, therefore, that the story turned out to be biased, but in this case it went to the benefit of the picture. After all, who else could know better about the great couturier than Berge? Their personal and business relationships have long been a legend in the fashion world.
Now the elderly, but not lost statistics and charm Berger leisurely remembers what was the man who revolutionized the fashion industry. The camera travels through the magnificently furnished rooms of Saint Laurent’s apartment, where we see a huge collection of artworks – Picasso, Goya, Mondrian, African sculpture – Paris antiques, a library with many names, rare photos of Mayakovsky, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, Maya Plisetskaya, etc. (Alas, the collection has to be sold, and at the end of the film, we arrive at Christie’s auction house, where “art scavengers,” as Berger calls them, buy it up for a price.) Together with alternating photographs and video shooting, the narrative as a whole resembles the books of Proust, Saint Laurent’s favorite writer: these are scraps of phrases, memorable days, houses, gardens and guests.
Berger recalls meeting Yves, then the budding successor of Christian Dior, in 1957, their difficulties in creating the YSL house, rest and creativity in Marrakech, Morocco, the May 1968 revolution, the depressions and loneliness of his friend. About the actual design ideas of Saint Laurent said little, but the idea can be made. Everything was new to me here, so I turned my ears and listened.
The notorious fashion revolution of the 60s, one of the locomotives of which was Saint Laurent, was not only to simplify the outfit, shorten skirts, move to a more geometric shape of the dress, etc. Fateful was the refusal of designers to sew only for wealthy buyers (haute couture) in favor of mass production of well-tailored clothes for everyone, sold in our time in boutiques of shopping centers (pret-a-porter). Now it is probably even hard to imagine how important the advent of casual inexpensive women's dresses has become. There was a real liberation of women from the triad of “house-husband-children”, began emancipation in practice.
The film talks about it, as if by the way, counting on the knowledge of the viewer. The authors are much more interested in a very personal view of the hero. The tone of the film is almost always sad. I wasn't bored at all, though. In my opinion, the memories of loved ones give a much more accurate idea of a person than the reasoning of third-party analysts. And it seems that for all his victories and breakthroughs, Saint Laurent remained a lonely man, absorbed in the work of a perfectionist, the biggest admirer and creator of his women. Berger calls him a genius who saw his time more clearly than many and even predicted its course. Oscar Wilde’s beautiful expression, “Before Turner there were no fogs in London,” best describes Yves Saint Laurent’s role in fashion and art.