Fashion today is frivolous, fancy, funky, flaky, functional, foolish.
The days of elegance are gone, and so is Yves Saint Laurent.
His death in Paris last Sunday, just before midnight, marked the end
of an era: he was the last of the great couturiers whose creativity was
both an inspiration and a reflection of the times we lived in.
Of course, you might say that grunge and Gothic and glitz are also
reflections of our time, but are they inspiring? Saint Laurent and his
peers were catering to a few hundred women who could afford their
custom-tailored creations, but they were also setting the style for the
rest of us. Manufacturers sent spies to their collections to sketch the
designs, so they could spin out cheap knock-offs for ordinary folks in
Baltimore, Biloxi, and the Bronx. That was how Paris filtered down to
Seventh Avenue.
The reverse seems to be happening today. Street fashion is the
grubby inspiration for designers. Blue jeans and American sportswear are
the common vestimentary denominator for millions around the globe. Call
it democratization -- but I dread the idea of Casual Fridays turning into
Casual Weeks.
Saint Laurent had the genius to sense the zeitgeist and to sublimate
it. For one thing, he put women in pants. Earlier, Coco Chanel
introduced trousers for women, but they were for cruise wear, or strolling
along the boardwalk at Deauville. Saint Laurent's trousers were for city
wear, and even for evening wear. Chanel, with her loose, easy-fitting
garments, freed women's bodies, but Saint Laurent freed women's psyches.
Women in pants were not emulating men -- they were simply establishing a
new parameter of comfort and mobility for themselves.
Skirts have always raised innumerable problems: crossing your legs in
a short one, encountering a gust of wind in a full one, maneuvering a
staircase in a long one. Pants simply sideskirt (literally!) all these
nuisances.
Jean-Paul Gaultier, a few seasons back, tried the opposite -- putting
men into skirts. It didn't work. Gaultier himself looked pretty silly in
one of his creations. Perhaps you have to be born a Scotsman to overcome
the embarrassment and deal with the blatant exposure of knobby knees and
hairy legs. The long sarongs and kikoys that men wear in parts of Asia
and Africa are quite sexy and sensuous, but would definitely lose their
appeal on Madison Avenue.
As a correspondent for CBS News, I often covered the haute couture
shows, and Saint Laurent's presentations were always the most exciting,
not only for the clothes but for the audience. One year, inexplicably, I
was seated in the first row between Paloma Picasso and Catherine Deneuve.
Picasso was friendly, Deneuve was cool, but we all three went backstage at
the end of the show to kiss the maestro.
Saint Laurent, though lionized, was not a happy man. Anxiety,
depression, illness and drugs accompanied him all his life. He is being
hailed as a "legend" now, but for women of the world, he was an
emancipator. If anyone asks, "Who's wearing the pants around here?", the
answer is, "We all are!"