DOES THE SHOE FIT?
by Cathy Horyn
The New York Times Style Magazine
Published:February 25,2007
Edmund Wilson said of Proust that we always feel as if we are reading about the end of something — “the society of the dispossessed nobility and the fashionable and cultivated bourgeoisie, with their physicians and their artists, their servants and their parasites.” So it is when we think about the house of Yves Saint Laurent. Whether or not YSL is the last great Paris house — it was founded in 1961, 15 years after Dior and 48 years after Chanel — we have the feeling that it is. And, as with so many things that occupy Saint Laurent and his faithful partner, Pierre Bergé, not least posterity, this feeling was the result of a very deliberate effort.
The more we learned about Saint Laurent’s neurotic character, the more Bergé harped on the superiority of his genius; and while misery and degradation scarcely matter in the making of beautiful dresses for rich ladies, they are the recognized, if stock, qualities of a Great Artist. In the early 1990s, perhaps aware of Saint Laurent’s waning influence, Bergé stepped up the rhetoric. He famously declared that when Saint Laurent dies, so ends a particular world. Not the lament of “the last fires of a setting sun,” as Wilson said of Proust’s novel — more like a scorched-earth campaign. Bergé meant for us to think that no one could follow Saint Laurent. If the implications of such sick and desperate thinking have never been examined, it’s because Saint Laurent’s genius was real, his suffering induced sympathy, and Bergé saw to it that the master was put into a museum while still alive.
Of course this would be an extremely cynical interpretation of a fashion legend but for one fact: not one of the three designers who has succeeded him in his house has managed to fully take his place. Despite the magic of the YSL name, despite the millions of dollars invested and the millions lost — as much as $70 million as recently as two years ago — nobody, it seems, can get the brand right. Meanwhile, Chanel and Dior, once seen as dowagers next to cool Saint Laurent, have thrived and earned billions.
Alber Elbaz, the Moroccan-born, American-trained designer who has made such a success of Lanvin, was the first to try at YSL, and while his three collections were more engaging and relevant than they seemed at the time, he got the ax in 2000, after Gucci Group bought the company and installed Tom Ford. Ford certainly had a new vision for the brand, as well as the attention of Wall Street and Hollywood, but his efforts were hindered by the global economic slump that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. It also didn’t help that Bergé continually derided Ford’s work. By the spring of 2004, though, both Ford and the Gucci chief executive Domenico De Sole were out, having lost control in a power struggle with the group’s French owner, Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR).
Initially hired as Ford’s assistant, Stefano Pilati has held the job since then. Pilati is tall and ginger-haired, with a dandy’s outmoded elegance and a charming, if self-conscious, manner that masks sudden changes in mood. He came from Prada, where he had worked on the Miu Miu line with Miuccia Prada and Fabio Zambernardi. Like much of his conversation, Pilati’s designs sometimes betray an intellectual view of fashion more typically associated with Prada than with Saint Laurent. Nonetheless, he’s been responsible for a number of trends, beginning with his first YSL collection, where he reintroduced the tulip skirt and the wide belt and, despite negative reviews, set off a wave of coquettish fashion. Two seasons later, in a Spanish-inspired collection, he scored again, with slim, high-waisted pants. This past fall, few styles were more widely copied than his YSL tunics.
Aware of the gap between the brand’s perceived status and its financial losses, Fran?ois-Henri Pinault, the chairman of PPR, and Robert Polet, the chief executive of Gucci Group, have made YSL a top priority, along with its sister brands Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga. For C.E.O., they plucked Valérie Hermann from Dior, where she had worked closely with its chief executive, Sidney Toledano, and had proved, through her rapport with John Galliano, that she could identify with extreme talent and still please shareholders as well as the chairman of LVMH Mo?t Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Bernard Arnault. In her eight years at Dior, revenues exploded, the company hit upon an advertising image that related more directly and aggressively to young consumers, and Galliano was at his maximal creativity.
Hermann says she agreed to take the YSL job even before she met Pilati, convinced that she could turn things around. “First, I think YSL is a fantastic brand,” she said over lunch in Paris last December. “Second, it was a great challenge, because it was losing so much money for so long.” Hermann, a wife and a mother of three, rarely avoids eye contact, though her toughness is mediated by enthusiasm. She added: “Is it a desperate situation? No. That’s why I came, because I was sure we could do something.”
Since the problems at YSL date to the early ’90s, fixing them will take time. But to Hermann, the turnaround is now a certainty, if not a fact, and she points to the success of the Muse and Downtown bags and the draw of classic YSL themes like leopard print and patent leather. Last year, revenues rose a strong 19 percent, to 194 million euros (about $250 million). Hermann is no less proud of her relationship with Pilati, though one suspects it has its trials. But, as she told me: “There isn’t one day when we’re not talking. I think it is part of the deal. If he fails, I fail. And if I fail, he will probably fail as well.”
The skeptical view among editors and even some of his friends is that Pilati has still not created a YSL that feels new and relevant and that immediately connects with women the way, say, Prada or Chanel do.
Part of the problem is that each season, Pilati seems to take one step forward, only to fall two back. He can create looks that are unique to the season, but in a way it doesn’t matter; by the time he has finished piling on the accessories, or putting them on a superlong runway, or photographing them according to some obscure concept, you don’t care how different the garment is. One colleague suggested that it’s too complicated and overly intellectualized. Zambernardi of Prada told me, “So far, I like what Stefano is doing for YSL, and I never liked what Tom Ford did.” But while not wishing to sound critical of his friend, Zambernardi said that in “wanting everything to be conceptual and very thoughtful,” Pilati can get bogged down and lose sight of what’s contemporary.
This was especially true of his spring collection, staged on a long runway so thickly covered with violets and dirt that each time a model seemed on the verge of losing her footing, the audience gasped. And Yves Saint Laurent, of all fashion names, is supposed to symbolize freedom and power.
“I know!” Pilati said, looking agonized when I brought it up. “That’s what annoyed me the most — I had lost the dynamic of the Saint Laurent woman. These women were fragile looking, and it’s not the woman I want! They’re wobbling!” He said the original idea was to suggest a woman leaving a city and tracing her own path by walking on the violets. “And violets are a symbol of modesty and virginity,” Pilati added. But that wasn’t the dominant thought one had of the show. It was: Why does he have to make everything so difficult?
Filling a giant’s shoes is not easy, and at least with Saint Laurent’s, it was always assumed that the fit would never be perfect — which is altogether different from getting the brand right. Also, Saint Laurent carried such emotional weight with people who were young in the late ’60s and ’70s, when the house seemed to be the psychic center of fashion, that successors were bound to be uniquely punished if they didn’t get the line of the shoulders just so or possess his same romantic color sense. Mind you, if one were to take Bergé’s claim that “Yves is like Proust” to its logical extreme, one would see the fatal impossibility of duplicating Saint Laurent, or any great designer, since everything is relative to the time and place where it is first experienced. Surely the laws of relativity apply equally to master and successor.
Nonetheless, there is a burden attached to YSL. “To begin with, this house has so much myth behind it and under it,” Elbaz told me. “It was a house that was not a house. It was one big family. I felt like a son-in-law in that place. Mr. Saint Laurent” — who retired in stages, continuing to design the couture collections until 2002 — “let me have the daughter, which was the ready-to-wear.” He laughed. “Now that I got a divorce, everybody says, ‘Oh, he was fabulous.’ ” To Elbaz, the essence of Saint Laurent was perfection, but to make his collections seem relevant, Elbaz felt he had to play with imperfection — turning 12 classic dresses, for example, into 12 shirts. He was roundly criticized. “Is it too much Saint Laurent or is it not enough? That’s the whole issue with that house,” Elbaz added.
Although Ford initially got on well with Bergé and Saint Laurent and based his first YSL show on Saint Laurent’s muse, Betty Catroux, he soon realized he could never hope to take YSL in a new direction if he allowed Bergé to be involved, as Bergé expected. This may account for Bergé’s scorn. In any case, revivals of fashion houses have tended to work best when the founders are dead or otherwise absent. Bergé, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has been more visible since Ford left and PPR took control of Gucci Group. Pilati said that after his spring show, on the violet catwalk, Bergé told him he longed for the day when he — Pilati — did something simple, a comment that on the face of it seems benign. But Pilati is vulnerable in other ways. A year ago there was a rumor that Hedi Slimane, of Dior Homme, would replace him, a suggestion fueled by the Saint Laurent-like perfection of Slimane’s fall 2006 men’s show.
“I really couldn’t have cared less when I heard all those rumors,” Pilati said one afternoon in his studio. “I’m very aware of my limits — everybody knows them.” I asked him if he thought Slimane could do a better job at YSL. “I respect him,” Pilati replied. “I would like to say yes, he could do it. But nobody’s ever seen a women’s ready-to-wear collection from him.”
It’s probable that anyone holding the reins at YSL, at least while there are still people around who care, would feel vulnerable. As Pilati said: “I knew from Day 1 that I could be attacked from many angles. Because I’m Italian, because I’ve never been famous, because Hedi was better, because Alber was better, because Tom was better, more powerful and more beautiful. I mean, everything!” He smiled. “And I knew it from Day 1.”
Another issue occupying the front row is whether Pilati’s clothes are cool. A lot of editors don’t think so. They use terms like “fussy” and “too Italian” to indicate they don’t think his sensibility is ideal for a French house whose sex appeal was defined by a bourgeois housewife dipping into a local brothel. Of course, editors lodged similar complaints against Karl Lagerfeld when he first went to Chanel. But the question of cool has never been in doubt with Lagerfeld, nor with Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga. “I’m aware that, somehow, Saint Laurent is not cool,” Pilati said. ‘’But it has the opportunity to be.”
Olivier Zahm, the editor of the magazine Purple Fashion and a friend of Pilati’s (he also works on the men’s ad campaign for YSL), suggests that the definition of cool may be limited by the perspective of editors and ultimately not as free as the opinions of young consumers.
“There’s a lot of supercool stuff on the runways, but nobody will wear it,” Zahm said. “I think Stefano has a good understanding of what a young lady in London or New York wants to wear if she loves fashion, in the old-school sense.”
While Pilati has every reason to feel secure in his job and in his relationship with Hermann, there is a tentativeness that creeps into his work, an element of second-guessing that is reflected in the brand’s advertising images as well. It may be that he doesn’t have a strong right-hand person (Pilati said this is the case), or it may be that he is unduly influenced by the last opinion he heard, as friends and colleagues suggest.
A French editor, after seeing Prada’s collection of turbans and jewel-tone satin mini-dresses, remarked that the clothes were just the kind that Pilati should be doing at YSL. Certainly few houses have a greater claim to those references than YSL. In fact, Zambernardi believes that Pilati should take YSL “back to zero,” and added: “I think it’s difficult to do new things when the founder is still around. For French people, Saint Laurent is an institution. They almost feel that nothing is going to get better than him.” It is, finally, this thinking that is holding the house of YSL back, and making a dutiful son-in-law of the talented Mr. Pilati. Maybe Alber Elbaz was onto something when he thought that imperfection was the only way to be modern. Maybe to get YSL right, you just have to be a little bit wrong.
Very good read. Love how Alber Elbaz pointed it out, "Is it too much Saint Laurent or is it not enough? That’s the whole issue with that house." And it's good to see Pilati's honesty. "That’s what annoyed me the most — I had lost the dynamic of the Saint Laurent woman." "I'm very aware of my limits — everybody knows them.
