Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent: Fashion Firefight in Paris

The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970’s Paris by Alicia Drake

I picked up this book because I read André Leon Talley’s memoir, The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir. That was a terrific tell-all that really did peel back the heavy silk draperies and multiple layers of gauze concealing how petty and small-minded the fashion industry can be. This is the industry (and it is an industry) that touts glamour, creativity, artistry, youth and beauty, but only if you’re scrawny and what they currently want to see and adore. And only if you’re hot right now and never mind how much they loved you last year. Last year is over and done with.

This year? You’re passé, trite, outmoded, and boring. Come back when you get interesting again and maybe we’ll talk. But probably not, because how could you ever become fascinating and new and interesting again?

Fashion interests me, even though I am not now and never have been a snappy dresser. It so often intrudes in my life in unexpected ways.

For example: I recently bought (because I had to) new eyeglasses. Why did I do this? Because the blind screw in the frame came out and could not be replaced because the optical industry doesn’t manufacture that kind of glasses anymore. They’re not fashionable. Nor do they provide replacement screws. Like the computer industry, the answer to customers like me is “buy a new one, you cheapskate.”

I let myself be talked into very expensive frameless lenses but I had a darn good reason: I wear trifocals. I could never get used to the lines so I buy lineless lenses (which cost more). I’ve also found that I need the biggest possible lenses in order to see better. If I can’t see, I can’t get anything else done.

But, but, but! The fashion industry has declared that smaller frames and thus smaller lenses are what is trendy and selling. Thank God that this year’s models are slightly larger than those darned penny-sized lenses of a few years ago. Even so, the current styles are too darn small. The optician was very helpful, listened to me rant, and she found me the largest possible lenses.

Naturally, they also cost the most. If I wanted glasses that would work for me, I was stuck, so I gritted my teeth, signed the credit card slip, and cursed whoever designs eyeglass frames that don’t take actual human needs into consideration.

That’s my most recent encounter with fashion and eyeglasses. Here’s the second, coming immediately on its heels: my glasses have huge lenses with no frames, meaning I now have to wear eyebrow pencil and mascara when I go out in public. My eyebrows are sparse and white, so at age sixty, I’m learning to apply eyebrow pencil to improve my appearance. And mascara. I draw the line at eyelash curlers (instruments of torture) and eyeliner (I’ll poke my eye out).

What is fashion but being concerned about our appearance? And how we fit into the world? And what we like, think, sing, eat, watch, do and where we go on vacation? So many, many parts of our life are fashion-driven even when we don’t admit to it. Clothing in fashion is as fraught with peril as fashion trends in business or education. I want to look good without pouring in huge amounts of time, energy, and money. Make no mistake, it takes effort to find well-fitting, flattering clothing, especially if you have an actual woman’s body with tits, hips, and an ass and you’re not six feet tall. Or young and scrawny.

You’ll have to learn how to sew or spend huge amounts of time shopping and develop a relationship with a tailor.

What does this ranting have to do with The Beautiful Fall? More than you would suspect, as it turns out. The Beautiful Fall, as the title says, is about Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent, and how their lives and careers intersected. Their ideas and visions of how dresses should look, even at the haut couture level, eventually filter down to my secondhand level. Remember the simple A-line shift, the Mondrian dress? That was Saint Laurent. Remember that great scene in the movie The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly educates our naïve heroine? Every word was spot on.

What an astonishing book this was. Utterly and completely fascinating. I had no idea that Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent knew each other back in the late 1950’s in Paris. But they did. There’s a picture of them, both prizewinners, of the 1954 International Wool Secretariat Competition. Saint Laurent won for dresses, Lagerfeld won for coats, and another young woman (Colette Bracchi) won for suits. Ms. Bracchi vanished into the mists of time, but we all know who Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent are.

Their lives intertwined with each other, as would be expected since they both worked in fashion in Paris at the same time. Yet they didn’t do the same kind of work. Saint Laurent was always haut couture. He eventually designed ready-to-wear and he’s known for it, but when I think Saint Laurent, I think of his gorgeous, glorious, groundbreaking collections.

Karl Lagerfeld had a more interesting career. He designed not just ready-to-wear. He designed, as a freelancer, collection after collection for all kinds of names. He finally ended up designing for Chanel and revived a moribund fashion house into the powerhouse it is today. At the same time, Lagerfeld continued to design collection after collection of ready-to-wear as freelancer. He must have designed several dozen collections of clothes every single year going back to the early 1960’s and continued up to his death in February 2019 at age 85.

Maybe he was 85. He listed several dates of birth, depending on the story he was telling and who was listening. Remember, in fashion, you can never be too young but you sure can be too old.

Anyway. Lagerfeld’s level of creativity and work ethic are amazing and deeply impressive. He’s a massive outlier.

Reading The Beautiful Fall, you realize how even more amazing Lagerfeld (and Saint Laurent’s) output is when you start to understand what a dissipated lifestyle they both led.

I said the book is utterly fascinating? It is also shocking and appalling in equal measures.

Oh. My. God. They were in the thick of things in Paris in the ’70’s and then the ’80’s. They had their own courts and entourages, were deeply competitive and if you were in one court, you couldn’t belong to the other. They competed for everything, including the favors of Jacques de Bascher.

The Beautiful Fall is also about the charmed, tragic, and louche life of de Bascher.

Our intrepid author, Alicia Drake, interviewed about 150 people. At least, those were the ones who were willing to go on the record. She interviewed other people who wanted to talk, but they didn’t want to be named. When this book was published in 2006, Saint Laurent, Lagerfeld, and Pierre Bergé were still alive so talking to Ms. Drake was risky. It’s surprising how many people she got to speak on the record.

Saint Laurent did not speak to her. Pierre Bergé did. Mr. Bergé was Saint Laurent’s longtime partner in both life and business and was, based on my understanding of Ms. Drake’s book, the main reason Saint Laurent reached the top of the fashion world and stayed there for his entire adult life. He needed Bergé to run things and keep him from self-destructing. They had a complicated relationship, let us say. Saint Laurent needed Bergé and Bergé needed to be needed.

Karl Lagerfeld did not speak to Ms. Drake. What he did do was sue Ms. Drake for damages for the intrusion into his personal life. He lost in a French court. She’d done her homework, documenting everything, including an extensive collection of newspaper and magazine stories that appeared over the years. Karl Lagerfeld lived much of his life in public and it’s hard to get a judge to agree that your personal life was intruded on when your every move is documented in tabloids, gossip columns, newspapers, magazines, TV shows, and documentaries.

Nonetheless, he still won in a way, at least in France. According to a New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/style/11iht-fkarl.3860665.html), The Beautiful Fall was not translated into French nor were English-language editions available in Paris. Isn’t it nice to be powerful, rich, and important? You can squash impertinent wretches who write impeccably researched tell-alls about you and get away with it, even when you lose in court.

This book is loaded with namedropping. Famous models, designers, writers, artists, actors, and celebrities of every description. They all show up. They all knew each other and went to the same parties.

Even the footnotes are worth reading, as is the index. After a few chapters, I realized I needed to read the footnotes for a given chapter first, so I would know exactly who Ms. Drake interviewed. She didn’t make any of this stuff up, folks. I’m still amazed at what people were willing to say on the record.

The lifestyles are jaw-dropping. Luxury, wealth, power, dissipation, sex, drugs, and alcohol. It’s amazing that so much creativity flowed out, considering all the shenanigans that got in the way. I’ve always wondered how much more creative an artist or designer could be if they weren’t permanently hungover. The Beautiful Fall made me wonder more.

I was mesmerized and you might be too. If you’re at all interested in modern fashion, you won’t go wrong with The Beautiful Fall. Fashion students will be reading this for generations because of the background detail, warts and all, that the glossy magazine interviews don’t talk about.

So why didn’t I give The Beautiful Fall that all important last 1/2 star? Because it needed more pictures! All those famous people and most of them didn’t get a picture! Maybe Little, Brown & Company didn’t want to spend more on photographic credits. That was a serious mistake in my view. The Beautiful Fall is one of those rare reference works: interesting and readable as well as thorough.

It needs more pictures. Lots more pictures, even black & white ones embedded in the text as opposed to full-color, full-page glossies. Fashion students will need to read the book while having their laptop browser open to Google images, so they can see who’s being dished about.

Seeing is important, because that’s what fashion is all about. How you look is the name of the game.

If you’d like to learn a bit more about Alicia Drake, she has a minimalist website.