Toasting Saint Laurent

By Martha Duffy

A New York retrospective revels in glamour and luxury

The first impression is one of vitality and variety. The exhibition rooms of the Costume Institute at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art are bursting with lavish clothes: swift little contemporary silhouettes; magnificent ball gowns seemingly from a grander, more inert age; fantastical garments of no recognizable provenance. A few are so ugly that the eye looks away; many more are heartbreakingly lovely. They are all the work of one man: Yves Saint Laurent, 47, the most famous and influential clothing designer in the world, the king of fashion.

Saint Laurent is the first person to be honored with a Metropolitan retrospective while he is still active. (The only other couturier to have been the subject of a one-man show at the Met: the Spanish designer Cristobal Balenciaga, in 1973.) The choice was made by the museum's director and by the Costume Institute's special consultant, Diana Vreeland, whose judgment it reflects. Says the legendary former editor of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, with the certitude and gusto that she has retained into her eighth decade: "Saint Laurent has been built into the history of fashion now for a long time. Twenty-six years is the proof that he can please most of the people most of the time four times a year. That's quite a reputation."

Those homely virtues--longevity, consistency--are the ones emphasized by Saint Laurent's rivals, such as Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld, in commenting on the Met's selection, and this is not faint praise. Members of the high-fashion elite are rich and coddled celebrities who seldom breathe unscented air, but they risk their names and their companies in the cold atmosphere of commerce with each new collection. There are not many truly wealthy private clients left, and they instinctively flock to whatever guru has had his inspiration certified by the press and by a chic popular line. (Princess Caroline of Monaco may be the only young woman left who patronizes a couturier, Marc Bohan of Dior, the way her mother did.) Walking through this exhibition, one is struck by Saint Laurent's fecundity, his ability to harness everything--nostalgia, whimsy, exotic venues, painting, novels, poems, outright homages to predecessors like Chanel--into inspiration for a dress.

The earliest clothes in the show carry the Christian Dior label. Saint Laurent was 18 when the Master of the New Look hired him as an assistant. The young man had been interested since childhood in theatrical costume and set design and was delighted to be apprenticed to Dior. Four years later, when Dior died suddenly of a heart attack, Saint Laurent was chosen by Textile Magnate Marcel Boussac, who owned the couture house, to succeed him. In 1958 he produced a brilliant debut collection that introduced an A-line dress called the trapeze. It was an instantaneous success. The French, who invented the modern concept of a couturier, celebrated in the street. The boy wonder, tall, handsome and painfully shy, was thrust out on the balcony of the House of Dior to acknowledge the cheers.

Like many other clothes from the late '50s and early '60s, the trapeze still looks easy and contemporary. It is only by lifting the hem that the intricacy of its high-fashion construction is seen: the organza underskirt with horsehair lining in the hem covering a tulle layer and another of silk. Saint Laurent's loose outline for daytime wear turns up repeatedly in his work over the years: the famous Mondrian skimmers of the '60s, the chemise in his latest collection, which has been installed by the fashion press as the silhouette of choice for this winter.

Other Saint Laurent signatures show up early. One is the "little black dress," a Chanel revolution in the '20s and '30s, when it symbolized the offhand smartness of the modern workingwoman. Saint Laurent reigns over this much copied genre, because it seems to fit his double-sided vision of women--as ladies and as tramps. He has confected delicate, gauzy little nothings, sculpted bold ones, produced sexy variations and tarted up a few that can only be called sleazoid.

Of all the strands that run through his daytime wear, the dominant one is meticulous tailoring. An outfit in loden green wool tweed, made for the Dior label, is a marvel of classic grace achieved through proportion and soft pleating. Pants, which Saint Laurent thinks may be his biggest contribution to fashion, have clear, economical lines, never exaggerated, never mannish. Good tailoring is behind what is truly his greatest influence on clothing, the huge (172 outlets) international string of Rive Gauche shops, started in 1966, that sell Saint Laurent's ready-to-wear line. There are only a few examples in the museum show; Vreeland insists that the pieces are hard to find because owners refuse to part with treasures like the YSL classic military overcoat for the nine-month duration of the exhibition, and, she notes, "I don't blame them." Rive Gauche wear is hardly cheap ($1,500 for a wool suit and a silk blouse), but it is durable, seldom extreme and has a shrewd gloss of couture luxury, mostly in the details and the fabrics.

While the secret of Saint Laurent's longevity is in his daytime clothes, his brilliance shows in his extravagant evening fantasies. There are, to be sure, examples of pure, timeless classicism and of ethereal visions fashioned out of yards of Chantilly lace. More often he sheds convention like an overcoat in springtime. There are reckless forays into nudity, called see-through in the catalogue; avalanches of silk that swell the exemplary trapeze into a balloon; decadent wraith-wear for psychedelic occasions. Is this foolery (all done before the designer turned 40) vulgar, silly, nutty? Yes, probably all three. But some of it is inspired. Viewed today, the 1967 "African" collection, which could be subtitled variations on a beaded curtain, looks fresh, funny and unabashedly theatrical. Because the clothes are strung together with relatively little cloth, they are an almost architectural fantasy on the structure of seams and the niceties of proportion and are the exhibition's most theoretical element.

In the mid-'70s, Saint Laurent turned serious about evening clothes. The fashion press, to which he is acutely sensitive, was giving its most reverent attention to his Rive Gauche collections, and so the couturier decided to teach his critics a lesson. Using lavish matierials, he created dazzling sequences of adornments fit for the queens of legend: Spanish motifs that might have been painted by Velasquez, extravagent conjuries of ancient China and, most famous, the Russian-inspired "rich peasant" collection that was front-page news for the New York Times in 1976. The theme was copied internationally in every price range, and reflections of it can still be seen in Saint Laurent's own work.

These magnificent dresses--them selves worth a visit to the show--provide the dramatic centerpiece for the exhibition that lacks logic. Vreeland's practice of organizing the Met's fashion displays by color, mood, line and occasionally whim is not satisfactory. It is impossible to trace Saint Laurent's career or to see the variety in a given year without making the crowded circuit several times and squinting down at the labels. This is particularly frustrating, since the exhibition rooms, possibly suggesting the museum's priorities, are cramped and poky. One strategy might be to go over the catalogue (Clarkson N. Potter; $35), which contains chronological listings as well as a profusion of pictures.

Vreeland's higgledy-piggledy does have the effect of a kaleidoscope. One sees the arrival of the mini, the pantsuit for day and the androgynous "smoking" for night, boots, turtlenecks, sporty furs. Picasso keeps reappearing, usually in witty design quotations. So do plaids; in 1979, Saint Laurent's heart went deep into the Scottish Highlands, and he made a formidable, fanciful rig. Except for his Mondrian motif, Saint Laurent was not comfortable with minis; the late '60s belonged to Andre Courreges. In fact, despite the influence of specific designs, Saint Laurent has not always led a crowd. He raised skirts in 1959, five years too soon. He lowered them in 1964, when the mini had several years to go. For that matter, he raised hemlines again only two years ago. This had no particular resonance in the mainstream of fashion, but at the smart restaurants in Manhattan's trendy Tribeca, the prettiest girls are in minis and boots.

Probably the couturier got his new minis from the girls rather than vice versa. It is said that Saint Laurent does not get around the streets to observe enough any more. The ebullient man who posed nude for a men's fragrance ad in 1971 is now painfully isolated (see box). He has new rivals. Today Armani commands fashion's thinkers. The Japanese designers are the darlings of the avantgarde. Ralph Lauren has made distinctively American tailoring popular internationally. At Chanel, the talented, aggressive Lagerfeld seems to be mounting a direct challenge to Saint Laurent's supremacy in both the atelier and the boutique. As he did in the '70s when his couture values were threatened, Saint Laurent will probably respond with fiendish flare. If he does not, the reason may be that he is content to reaffirm those values quietly through his designs. One emerges from this retrospective sensing that this is a defiant stronghold of luxury and glamour. As Saint Laurent writes in an essay for the museum's catalogue: "I believe that the couture must be preserved at all costs and the term, like a title, protected from debasement." --By Martha Duffy This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.