12 posts tagged "Pierre Berge"
Designer’s Best Friend
If man’s (and woman’s) most loyal companion is the dog, designers are no exception. The latest issue of the menswear biannual Man About Town pays homage to a few that know more than most about the inner workings of fashion. For the canine-themed 10th issue—featuring shoots not only by the usual fashion suspects like Paolo Roversi and Willy Vanderperre, but this time, by famed Weimaraner enthusiast William Wegman, too—the magazine sought out the pups of the fashion elite, who are photographed by Erwan Frotin.
The dog’s life: Not bad, if you’re a designer’s pet. Azzedine Alaïa has eleven animals (including one owl), but it’s his St. Bernard, Didine, who gets the close-up. “Animals make people better,” the designer says. That may explain the care Alaïa lavishes on his creatures, like the mastiff, Shamsi, he used to carry in a baby’s sling. “I took him on the Concorde,” Alaïa remembers, “where I said to the stewardess, ‘this is my son, he’s traveling with me.’ She didn’t spot him so she just said, ‘Oh, of course, sir.’” Dries Van Noten’s Airedale, Harry, is treated to fashion heirlooms: Van Noten and his partner, Patrick Vangheluwe, bought him a cushion that originally belonged to Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé’s French bulldog, Moujik, at the Christie’s auction of items from the couple’s country estate. (The original Moujik has long since passed away, but his successor, also called Moujik, appears in the issue alongside an interview with Bergé.) And in her interview with Jo-Ann Furniss, Donatella Versace reveals that her Jack Russell, Audrey, is a full-on diva. “She is the top, the toppest model of all,” Versace says. Has she as big an ego as Kristen McMenamy? Furniss asks. “Bigger.” What about Linda Evangelista? “Hmmm. Well, not on that level, no.”
Man About Town 10 launches next week at Colette.
Jean Paul Gaultier Signs On With Diet Coke, Natalie Portman’s Vintage Dior Dress Sells For $50,000, And More…
Jean Paul Gaultier has found a new gig as the creative director of Diet Coke. The designer will re-create the soft drink’s can and bottle designs, as well as star (as a detective, a therapist, and a journalist) in three short promotional films. [Vogue U.K.]
Kabuki theater is the subject of the latest exhibition at the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation in Paris. The exhibition, which runs until July 15, includes ornate costumes and accessories, show programs, and films. [WWD]
Natalie Portman’s vintage Christian Dior dress recently sold for a reported $50,000. After appearing on the Oscars’ carpet last month, the 1954 gown was bought by a private couture collector in London. [Grazia Daily]
Miuccia Prada found her way back onto Forbes‘ annual billionaires list with a net worth of $6.8 billion. The designer is also ranked as Forbes‘ 79th most powerful woman, while her husband and Prada chief executive office Patrizio Bertelli came in at number 296 on the billionaires list. [Forbes]
Christopher Bailey was recently named chair of Fashion Fringe, a British competition that looks for emerging design talent. Bailey’s duties will include selecting finalists and providing mentorship. “I am very proud to be partnering with them to unearth the next generation of exciting designers,” Bailey tells WWD. [WWD]
Pat Cleveland Remembers “The Tenderness And The Anger” Of Saint Laurent And Bergé’s Amour Fou
In recent years, a new designer documentary has sprung each spring. Ultrasuede, a Halston profile, premiered at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, and Matt Tyrnauer unveiled The Last Emperor, his extended close-up on Valentino, the spring before.
Last night, at the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of L’Amour Fou, Yves Saint Laurent had his turn. Director Pierre Thoretton tenderly revisits the relationship between the late designer and his life and business partner, Pierre Bergé (above), and ends on the Christie’s sale of their blockbuster art collection. Thoretton takes a more somber and meditative approach than his predecessors in the genre, with the unloading of the couple’s prize possessions functioning as a sort of final chapter in their love affair. “I don’t believe in souls,” Bergé says in the film.
After the credits rolled, Olivier Theyskens and Sky Ferreira stood reflectively on the sidewalk outside, Googling the subjects’ birth dates. Alec Baldwin, quasi-disguised in thick-frame glasses, was in an intense conversation with Tyson director James Toback as he exited. Julia Restoin-Roitfeld made a hasty retreat. (You’ve got to love the Tribeca Film Festival mix.)
Also part of the post-screening crowd was Pat Cleveland, who wore her first YSL dress when she was 14 and modeled for Saint Laurent after first meeting him in Paris in 1970. She said that even if it wasn’t necessarily packed with surprises, the film had gotten the relationship right. “It was so out in the open, all of that—I mean the tenderness and the anger. Dealing with Pierre was always such a trip, because he was also so serious and so businesslike. But you understood the relationship.” L’Amour Fou, she added, doesn’t just represent Bergé’s side of the story, but “a chance to show his emotions. He doesn’t like to, basically, show that side of himself. He’s heartbroken. We all are.”
PLUS: For more on L’Amour Fou, read our Q&A with director Pierre Thoretton.
Saint Laurent And Bergé’s Amour Fou
There are no merry, over-the-top fashion moments of pugs and private planes in Pierre Thoretton’s L’Amour Fou, a documentary about the relationship between Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent. In fact, Thoretton’s film, which premieres tomorrow night at the Tribeca Film Festival, is quite the opposite of Matt Tyrnauer’s 2008 film The Last Emperor, on the often compared business and creative partnership of Giancarlo Giammetti and Valentino Garavani.
L’Amour Fou is slow, meditative, and a bit moody. It’s culled mainly from archival photographs and footage, silent and lingering shots of their various homes—including the Rue de Babylone apartment, the Chateau Gabriel in Normandy—and 20 hours of introspective and revealing interviews with Mr. Bergé. (Only 40 minutes into the film do you get another voice—in this case Saint Laurent confidantes Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise, who recalls “theatrics and tremendous scenes.”)
But really Thoretton (left) tells their story through their objects and spaces, with an arc that follows Saint Laurent’s death and Bergé’s decision to auction their vast, exquisite collection. It runs from early visits from appraisers, whom Bergé dubs “the undertakers of art,” and builds up to the history-making three-day auction at the Grand Palais, which gives a marked quickening to Fou‘s pulse. Style.com caught up with the director on what it was like to make a movie with one of fashion’s most formidable characters as his star player.
How did you meet Pierre Bergé and end up making the film?
It’s sort of funny, but I met Pierre through my son’s grandmother Catherine Deneuve.
And then?
For about ten years we would see each other about once a week to have lunch. We talked about life. One day I suggested to him that I would like to make a film on his houses, the houses he had with Yves Saint Laurent and their collection. Then Yves Saint Laurent passed away, and I realized simultaneously that I was in the process of making a film that was beautiful but not interesting at all. The only really interesting thing was their love story.
How long did it take before you realized this?
It was about three and a half months. And then of course there was the death of Yves Saint Laurent. It was complicated, and then slowly Pierre accepted it and we started to do interviews related to the film.
What was Mr. Bergé’s initial reaction when the direction of the movie changed?
He was very touched, but most importantly he understood what I was trying to do. And he was surprised. Continue Reading “Saint Laurent And Bergé’s Amour Fou” »
Vive La Rive Gauche
Last year’s giant Yves Saint Laurent retrospective at Paris’ Petit Palais drew raves, but many missed seeing a recap of Rive Gauche, the designer’s ready-to-wear collection, which was the first foray of a French couturier into mass-produced clothes when it launched in 1966. Ask and you shall receive. The designer’s longtime partner, Pierre Bergé, pulled together an exhibition devoted exclusively to Rive Gauche at the Fondation YSL-Pierre Bergé, housed at the Avenue Marceau space where YSL spent most of his career.
Saint Laurent: Rive Gauche, La Révolution de la Mode, which opens today, is curated by Bergé and artistic-directed by YSL’s former right-hand muse, Loulou de la Falaise Klossowski, and features 60 of the designer’s iconic ready-to-wear pieces set in a re-creation of the label’s first boutique, which opened in 1966 at 21 Rue de Tournon on Paris’ Left Bank. “I want to be the Prisunic”—that is, chain store—”of fashion and make clothes that everyone can wear, not just rich women,” the young, white-coated YSL says in an interview of the period that opens the show. Inside, as a backdrop to the clothes, is shop designer Isabelle Hebey’s burnt orange carpeting and aluminum fixtures, Djinn benches by Olivier Mourgue, Japanese lanterns by Isamu Noguchi, and a life-sized wall painting of Saint Laurent by Eduardo Arroyo. YSL’s biggest hits from the sixties and seventies, like the classic navy caban and the lace-up safari tunic (the one worn by his great friend Betty Catroux in a photo from the London Rive Gauche store’s opening day in 1969, which covers the exhibition’s catalog), still look amazingly fresh, set against racks of bright floral dresses. So do the glass cases of Plexiglas parrot pins, rhinestone necklaces, and stacks of hammered metal bracelets, all synonymous with the Rive Gauche look.
“The tricky thing about doing this show was to find multiple editions of the same style and make themes,” said de la Falaise Klossowski. “The shop had to look real. If we’d combined lots of diverse pieces, it would have seemed like a sale.” It was a tough job, but de la Falaise Klossowski, who joined the house officially in 1972, says she’s used to those. “We’d been friends since 1968, and when I went to work for him no one used the word muse,” she remembered. “I thought muses were there to lounge about and look beautiful, so I used to laugh when people started to call me [one]—it was such hard work.”