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History before 1962
Pierre Bergé est né le 14 novembre 1930 à l'île d'Oléron. Sa mère est institutrice et son père inspecteur des impôts. Après un court déménagement à Lisieux en Normandie, la famille rejoint La Rochelle, où Pierre va au Lycée. Très studieux, il se passionne pour la littérature et la politique. Ses parents rêvent de le voir intégrer une grande école mais Pierre décide quelques semaines avant son bac de se lancer dans une carrière littéraire.
Très jeune, il est marqué par sa rencontre avec Jean Giono et Jean Cocteau. Il restera leur ami jusqu'à leur mort et continue encore à s'occuper de leur œuvre. Il est aujourd'hui le titulaire du droit moral sur l'œuvre de Jean Cocteau.
"Notre monde à l'époque était Oran et non Paris. Ni Alger, la ville métaphysique de Camus aux blanches vérités, ni encore Marrakech et sa bienfaisante magie rose. Oran, une cosmopole de commerçants venus de partout, et surtout d'ailleurs, une ville étincelant dans un patchwork de mille couleurs sous le calme soleil d'Afrique du Nord."
Yves Saint Laurent, 1983
Place de la Concorde, 1948 / Place de la Concorde, 1948
Quelques mois avant son baccalauréat, Pierre Bergé quitte l'école et se dirige vers Paris. Il s'installe près de la République et devient marchand de livres d'occasion. Dans une interview au magazine Vogue en 1980, il dit : "Je ne voulais pas me faire avaler par le système. J'avais décidé de devenir écrivain ou journaliste. Je suis donc venu à Paris."
Yves Saint Laurent s'intéresse de plus en plus à la mode parisienne. Il reproduit des modèles dans les magazines de mode de sa mère avant de se pencher sur ses propres créations.
Juste après son 17e anniversaire, Yves saint Laurent remarque une annonce dans Paris-Match pour le concours annuel du secrétariat de la laine dont les juges sont des couturiers célèbres comme Balmain et Dior. Il envoie trois croquis : une robe, un tailleur et un manteau et gagne le troisième prix de la catégorie "robe".
Accompagné de sa mère pour accepter son prix, Yves Saint Laurent découvre Paris pour la première fois.
Première rencontre avec le directeur de Vogue, Michel de Brunhoff, qui aura une influence décisive sur lui. Il exhorte Yves Saint Laurent à passer son bac avant d'entrer dans le monde de la mode.
Pendant trois mois, Yves Saint Laurent suit les cours de la Chambre syndicale de la haute couture.
Yves Saint Laurent obtient à nouveau le premier et troisième prix "robe" du secrétariat de la laine.
Le modèle qui obtient le premier prix - une robe de cocktail en crêpe noir - sera réalisé dans les ateliers de Hubert de Givenchy.
La même année, Karl Lagerfeld, 21 ans, obtient le premier prix "manteau" .
Le jurydu concours du Secrétariat de la laine. Michel de Brunhoff est debout en costume sombre, Christian Dior assis à l'extrème droite / The jury of the Wool Secretariat competition. Michel de Brunhoff is standing in dark suit, Christian Dior is sitting
Yves Saint Laurent s'ennuie aux cours de la Chambre Syndicale auquel il s'est inscrit, au grand damne de son père, Charles, qui ambitionnait qu'il soit avocat. Yves Saint Laurent pense à quitter l'école. Charles intervient auprès de Brunhoff pour qu'il reçoive Yves Saint Laurent. Celui-ci lui apporte de nouveaux dessins qui ressemblent étrangement à la collection "A" de 1955 que Dior est en train de préparer. Brunhoff appelle immédiatement Dior pour qu'il rencontre Yves Saint Laurent avant de partir en vacances.
Yves Saint Laurent commence à travailler comme styliste chez Christian Dior sans avoir terminé ses cours. Son premier travail est de décorer le magasin.
Le mannequin Victoire et Anne-Marie Muñoz sont ses deux meilleures amies. L'ambiance est joyeuse. Yves Saint Laurent : "Nous riions tout le temps. Notre studio était juste au-dessus du bureau de M. Dior. Il nous entendait et disait "Que faites-vous encore ? J'aimerais vous rejoindre !".
Yves Saint Laurent admire l'autorité dont fait preuve Christian Dior. "En surface, Monsieur Dior paraissait gentil et légèrement fragile, mais en fait il avait une force incroyable" a dit Anne-Marie Muñoz.
Yves Saint Laurent s'occupe désormais de dessiner les accessoires pour les licences, puis de créer les modèles pour les collections couture.
L'un de ses premiers modèles est photographié en 1955 par Richard Avedon à l'occasion de la séance Dovima with Elephants (Dovima et les éléphants) au cirque Medrano.
Il retourne à Oran avant chaque collection pour quelques semaines et travaille à son ancien bureau d'écolier. Après un de ses voyages, il montre une valise remplie de dessins à son amie Anne-Marie Munoz.
Le succès grandissant rend Dior las et nerveux. Yves Saint Laurent contribue de plus en plus aux collections. Pour la collection d'automne-hiver 1957, il fait 35 modèles.
Christian Dior dit à Lucienne, la mère d'Yves : "Yves sera mon successeur". Quelques jours plus tard, il décède d'une crise cardiaque dans une station thermale à Montecatini en Italie.
Au décès de Christian Dior, l'industriel du textile Marcel Boussac envisage de fermer la maison. Mais les licenciés montent à Paris et convainquent le directeur Jacques Rouët de lui faire changer d'avis. Le 15 novembre 1957, Rouët déclare lors d'une conférence de presse avenue Montaigne que Yves Mathieu Saint Laurent devient responsable de tous les modèles de la maison Dior.
"À la mort de Christian Dior, l'occasion qui se présenta de créer mes propres collections me fit abandonner le projet de travailler pour la scène. A vingt et un ans, je pénétrai dans une sorte de forteresse de célébrité qui devint le piège de ma vie. L'amour du théâtre ne m'abandonnerait jamais, mais entre-temps Dior m'avait appris à aimer quelque chose d'autre que la mode et le stylisme : la noblesse fondamentale du métier de couturier. Je crois qu'un créateur qui n’est pas aussi un couturier, qui n'a pas appris les secrets les plus subtils de la création - réelle - de ses modèles, est comme un sculpteur qui donne ses dessins à un autre, un artisan qui les réalise. Pour lui, le processus tronqué de la création s'apparentera toujours à un acte d'amour interrompu, et son style en portera la flétrissure, l'appauvrissement."
Yves Saint Laurent, 1983
Yves Saint Laurent part à Oran pour préparer sa nouvelle collection : "Je savais que j'allais devenir célèbre".
Sa première collection sera à mi-chemin entre le design Dior et des modèles plus confortables.
Paris est au comble de l'excitation. Le 30 Janvier 1958 le salon est plein à craquer pour assister au défilé. La ligne Trapèze créée la sensation.
"Une rédactrice en chef d'un magazine de mode américain qui était devant moi, s'est levée, en larmes. A côté de moi, il y avait également deux françaises en train de pleurer. L'une s'est tournée vers l'autre et dit 'Ma chère, la France est sauvée. C'est Jeanne d'Arc !'"
Marie-José Lepicard
Yves Saint Laurent va au balcon sous les applaudissements. Les photographes sont perchés sur d'autres balcons pour le prendre en photo.
The New York Times : "Today’s collection has made a French national hero out of Dior’s successor, Yves Saint Laurent and comfortably assures the future of the house Dior built."
The Herald Tribune : "Il semblait impossible que Dior lui-même ne soit pas apparu sur la scène à la fin...tout le monde pleurait. C'était un des plus grands moments d'émotion de la mode de tous les temps".
Bien que les deux hommes étaient présent à l'enterrement de Christian Dior, Ils ne s'étaient pas rencontrés formellement.
Après une brève poignée de main à la fin du défilé "Trapèze", ils se rencontrent à nouveau à un dîner organisé par Marie-Louise Bousquet, la représentante en France de Harper's Bazaar. Pierre Bergé gère alors la carrière de Bernard Buffet.
Yves Mathieu Saint Laurent réalise six collections chez Dior, dont le Beat Look (1960).
Yves Saint Laurent est appelé sous les drapeaux alors que la France s'embrouille dans la guerre d'Algérie. Il tombe alors en dépression et est hospitalisé à l'hôpital militaire du Val-de-Grâce.
La presse française accuse Yves Saint Laurent d'élitisme, de vouloir échapper aux responsabilités que de nombreux hommes de sa génération ont acceptées. La Maison Dior nomme Marc Bohan à sa place. Yves Saint Laurent gagnera son procès contre Dior pour rupture abusive de contrat.
Pierre Bergé, seul, se battra pour faire sortir Yves Saint Laurent de l'hôpital. C'est d'ailleurs lors d'une de ses visites à l'hôpital qu'ils décident ensemble de créer leur propre maison de couture.
11/14/1930 Pierre Vital Georges Bergé is born in l'Ile d'Oléron, France
Pierre Bergé was born on 14 November 1930 in Ile d'Oléron. His mother was a teacher and his father a tax inspector. After a short stay in Lisieux, Normandy, the family moved to La Rochelle, where Pierre attended high school. A serious student, he was passionate about literature and politics. His parents hoped he would attend one of France's top universities, but a few weeks before obtaining his baccalaureate, Pierre dropped out of school to devote himself to a literary career.
His encounters with Jean Giono and Jean Cocteau would leave a significant mark on him. He remained their friend until their deaths and he retains the droit moral covering all of Cocteau's work.
08/01/1936 Yves Mathieu-Saint-Laurent is born in Oran, Algeria
Our world then was Oran, not Paris. Not Algiers, Camus’ metaphysical city of white truths, nor Marrakesh with its benevolent pink magic. Oran, a cosmopolis of trading people from all over, and mostly from elsewhere, a town glittering in a patchwork of all colours under the sedate North African sun. It was a good place to be well off, and we were well off. My summers swept by as if mounted on clouds, at a villa on a beach, where my relatives and friends with similar roots formed an enclave. My father, who owned an insurance business and who was also involved in a few movie productions, was descended from Alsatians who had left Colmar, France, when the Germans took it in I870. Lawyers, judges, notaries, they had worn the robe of public office. One of my ancestors wrote the marriage contract between Napoleon and Josephine and was made a baron for it. In our baggage there had been a certain civilization and an uprooted prestige. Like colonials elsewhere, like provincials, we maintained a lot of ties to our civilization. There were many lovely dinner parties at our comfortable house in town, and I can still see my mother, about to leave for a ball, come to kiss me goodnight, wearing a long dress of white tulle with pear-shaped white sequins.
- Yves Saint Laurent, 1983
Place de la Concorde, 1948 / Place de la Concorde, 1948
1948 Pierre Bergé arrives in Paris
A few months before graduating, Pierre Bergé leaves high school and goes to Paris. He moves into an apartment in the République neighborhood and starts selling second-hand books. In an interview with American Vogue in 1980, he says, “I didn't want to get caught up in the system. I'd decided that I wanted to become a writer or a journalist. So I went to Paris to get on with it.”
1948 The Artist as a Young Man
Yves Saint Laurent becomes increasingly interested in Parisian fashion. He copies garment models in his mothers' magazines, before sketching his personal creations.
1953 "Get your baccalaureate!"
Just after his 17th birthday, Yves Saint Laurent saw an advertisement in Paris-Match magazine for the Wool Secretariat's annual competition, whose judges included famous couturiers like Balmain and Dior. He sent three sketches: a dress, a suit, and a coat.
He went on to win third prize in the dress category.
Accompanied by his mother, he visited Paris for the first time to claim his prize. He met Vogue magazine's director, Michel de Brunhoff, who was to have a decisive influence on his life.
De Brunhoff exhorted Yves Saint Laurent to obtain his baccalaureate before entering the world of fashion.
1954 Yves Saint Laurent moves to Paris
Yves Saint Laurent attends courses at the Chambre syndicale de la haute couture for three months.
11/25/1954 A Winner, Once Again
Yves Saint Laurent wins again at the Wool Secretariat's annual competition: first and third prizes in the dress category.
The design which is awarded first prize - a black crepe cocktail dress - is later made in Hubert de Givenchy's ateliers.
The same year, Karl Lagerfeld, 21, obtains the first prize in the coat category.
Le jurydu concours du Secrétariat de la laine. Michel de Brunhoff est debout en costume sombre, Christian Dior assis à l'extrème droite / The jury of the Wool Secretariat competition. Michel de Brunhoff is standing in dark suit, Christian Dior is sitting
12/1954 "Dior accepted to see me. He looked at my drawings and gave me a job."
Yves Saint Laurent had signed up for fashion courses, much to the consternation of his father Charles who had hoped Yves would become a lawyer. But Yves was fast becoming bored with his courses and was thinking of leaving the Chambre Syndicale school.
Charles asks Vogue director, Michel de Brunhoff, to intervene.
Yves visits Brunhoff with new drawings that amazingly resemble the “A” collection that Christian Dior is secretly preparing.
Brunhoff immediately calls Dior and asks his friend to meet Yves before going on vacation.
1955 Starting at Dior
Yves Saint Laurent began working for Christian Dior as an assistant designer who had not even finished his Chambre syndicale course.
One of his first assignments was to decorate the shop.
His two best friends at Dior were Anne-Marie Muñoz and the famous model Victoire. Yves Saint Laurent: “There was laughter all the time. Our studio was just above Monsieur Dior’s office. He’d hear us and sigh. èWhat are you up to again ? I wish I could join in.’”
Christian Dior exercised strong authority which Yves Saint Laurent admired. “On the surface he appeared to be gentle and slightly fragile, but underneath he had tremendous strength,” said Munoz of Dior.
Interestingly, Yves Saint Laurent is often described in the same way.
1956 Moving up at the House of Dior
Yves Saint Laurent moved on to designing accessories for licensees and garments for the couture collections.
One of his earliest designs was photographed by Richard Avedon during the 'Dovima with Elephants' shoot in the Medrano Circus, Paris, in 1955.
He would return to his hometown of Oran, Algeria for a few weeks before each show and work at his old school desk.
The trips would be extremely productive, Anne-Marie Munoz recalling that he showed her a suitcase full of sketches after such a trip when they were in a café.
10/24/1957 Yves will be my successor
Christian Dior was increasingly weary and nervous with his growing success. Yves Saint Laurent contributed more and more designs to the collections. In 1957's Autumn collection, he had 35 designs.
Christian Dior told Yves' mother, Lucienne : “Yves will be my successor.”
Several days later, he died of a heart attack in a spa in Montecatini, Italy.
11/15/1957 Yves Mathieu Saint Laurent, the Couturier at Dior
Upon Christian Dior's death, the textile magnate Marcel Broussac considered closing down the fashion house. But the license-holders came to Paris and convinced the general manager, Jacques Rouët, to urge Broussac to reconsider. On 15 November 1957 at a press conference at the fashion house's Avenue Montaigne headquarters, Rouët declared that Yves Mathieu Saint Laurent would be in charge of all designs at the House of Dior.
When Christian Dior died, the chance to create my own collections pushed me to set aside my projects to work in the theater. At the age of 21, I entered a kind of fortress of celebrity that was to become the trap of my life. My love for the theater would never leave me, but in the mean time, Dior had taught me to love something other than fashion and design: the fundamental nobility of the couturier's profession. I believe that a creator who is not also a couturier, and has not learned the most subtle secrets of the actual creation of his models, is like a sculptor who gives his sketches to another, an artisan, who realizes them. For him, the truncated creative processwill always appear as an interrupted act of love, and his style will always bear a brittleness and paucity.
- Yves Saint Laurent, 1983
01/30/1958 The Trapèze Collection - "France is Saved!"
Yves Saint Laurent leaves for Oran with nine weeks to go to the next show: 'I prepared for that collection in a complete state of elation. I knew I was going to be famous.'
Yves Saint Laurent had already introduced the softer 'chemise' look under Dior. For the first collection he decided to go halfway between the formal Dior look and a more comfortable design. A frenzy of anticipation was building in Paris and by the time the day of the show arrived - 30 January 1958 - the salon was jampacked.
Cars blocked the street and bystanders stared at the arriving celebrities. The Trapèze line is a sensation. 'An American fashion editor sitting in front of me rose to her feet with tears in her eyes. There were two French women next to me also crying. One turned to the other and said, “my dear, France is saved. It’s Joan of Arc.”
- Marie-José Lepicard
Yves Saint Laurent went to a balcony over Avenue Montaigne where his photo was taken with people cheering him from the street below. Photographers perched on the other balconies to take shots.
The New York Times: "Today’s collection has made a French national hero out of Dior’s successor, Yves Saint Laurent and comfortably assures the future of the house Dior built."
The Herald Tribune: "It seemed impossible that Dior himself wasn’t coming out at the end... Everybody was crying. It was the emotional fashion binge of all time."
02/03/1958 Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent Meet
Though the two men had been present at Christian Dior's funeral the previous year, they had never formally met.
After a brief handshake at the Trapèze show, the two men attended a dinner organized by Marie-Louise Bousquet, French representative of Harper's Bazaar.
Pierre Bergé was managing the career of Bernard Buffet at the time.
1959 The Dior Collections
Yves Saint Laurent created six collections at Dior, including lower hemlines (1958), raised skirts (1959), black jackets and the Beat Look (1960).
September 1960 Yves Saint Laurent Is Drafted
France was embroiled in the Algerian War when Yves Saint Laurent was drafted into the army. He suffered from a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized at Val-de-Grâce military hospital.
The French press accused Saint Laurent of being an elitist who was avoiding the same responsibilities that many of his generation had accepted.Dior replaced him with the couturier Marc Bohan.
Yves Saint Laurent would later successfully sue Dior for breaching his employment contract. Pierre Bergé waged a one-man campaign to have Yves Saint Laurent released from hospital.
During a visit to his bedside, he and Saint Laurent decided to start their own couture house.
1962 The Beginnings of the House of Yves Saint Laurent
Discover the image gallery of this wonderful tale's first moments. It begins Rue Spontini and today, the Foundation explores its history...
