All about Yves

Just as a documentary about Yves Saint Laurent premieres this week at TIFF, Marc Jacobs debuts a Spring 2011 collection at New York Fashion Week greatly indebted to the French master’s 1970s golden era.

The new Yves Saint Laurent documentary playing at TIFF, L’Amour Fou, does nothing to dispel the tortured-genius legend of France’s last, lost couturier. Perhaps there’s nothing to be done. His art was his life, and vice versa. The film is narrated by YSL’s lifelong love, partner, and official myth preserver, Monsieur Pierre Bergé. He talks openly about his lover’s fallibilities, but because his lover was an artist, these are not fuck-ups (i.e., being too selfish to care for anyone, even himself), but fatal flaws (i.e., being too sensitive).

In the film, it’s clear the height of His Yvesness — the excesses of self-destruction and creation, the exotic voyages of imagination — was the 1970s. His clothes were exuberant, marked by  fantastic, fat-brush swirling of “wrong” colours (red, pink, orange together) and swinging, louche silhouettes. There was nothing that couldn’t be improved with a big, burst flower; he loved orchids. Marrakesh, his favourite escape, figured heavily in his life. Many of the show models were black or “oriental.” It was YSL who invented one of fashion’s most gorgeous and enduring oxymorons: the haute hippie, the proto-fauxhemian, best embodied by Bianca Jagger.

Speaking of which: “He was the Mick Jagger of couture,” said Florence Muller to the Times earlier this year. Muller is a fashion historian and curator of the YSL retrospective that landed in Montreal soon after the master’s death in 2008. “He, himself, became the incarnation of the ’60s and ’70s. He not only dressed his time, he lived it to the full.”

Hence many of the style motifs that we think of as ’70s — like wide-legged trousers with peasant blouses or kimono jackets — are really more YSL. And that’s why, when the Marc Jacobs show began yesterday at New York’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, live-streaming to the rest of us, I sat up straight in bed, like I’d seen a ghost. So very, very like.

Jacobs did the colours, the silhouettes, the big flowers and big floppy hats. It was like Faye Runaway got picked up by a Taxi Driver. It begged to be headlined “That ’70s Show.” The New York Times‘ Cathy Horyn, in a weary review posted two hours afterward, likened it to jet-set 1970s Antonio Lopez illustrations — yes, Antonio Lopez illustrations of Yves Saint Laurent models. I’m sorry, it’s too much.

Even the MJ perfume gifted to guests, titled with the clever double-entendre BANG!, is being advertised in magazines with a naked pic of Marcy Marc himself; just as Saint Laurent, so long ago, promoted Opium with his iconic nude likeness. The sexxx and glammm suited Yves, who at least seemed to be sensitive (too sensitive) about it; it doesn’t work for Marc, who’s shed all his interesting self-consciousness like the last five pounds. When you watch Marc Jacobs and his shows, you see that he doesn’t want to be someone else anymore; he is.

It wasn’t nearly long enough ago that Jacobs embodied his own era, the carefully grungey ’90s; it’s too soon for him to play reincarnation like this. He’s done the ’80s, redone the ’90s, and this isn’t the first time he’s done the ’70s — but he’s overdone it, so it better be the last of it. He’s running out of eras to recreate, out of nostalgia. Aren’t we all, I guess.

In last Sunday’s Styles, Ruth La Ferla wrote longingly of the ’70s New York nightspot Max’s Kansas City. You know the kind of clubloric place where, apparently, you could have gotten in simply by donning a catsuit made out of safety pins and doll hair, and wearing stripper heels as earrings, where it didn’t matter who you were, just how you looked. The good ol’ nights!

La Ferla talks to Bebe Buell, once a model and singer and Max’s regular, about the go-big-or-go-home dress code. “We didn’t scratch each other’s eyes out if somebody came up with a good idea,” she said. “We thought we could steal it and share it. And if you improved on it, you got kudos for that.”

Blondie’s Debbie Harry, for example, once turned up at Max’s in a coat she had DIY’d out of a Hefty bag. “It was crazy the way she did it,” says Buell to LaFerla, “but it really worked. If somebody pulled that look today, it wouldn’t seem authentic anymore.”

Is the old birdie clairvoyant? Because as the Style was going to press, Ke$ha was going to the VMAs in a garbage bag dress of her own “design.” Sigh. It was a funny play on “white trash,” at best, and at worst… just trash, reeking of leftover ideas. We’re quick to sniff out Ke$ha’s lameness, but we pretend we don’t smell Marc. Perhaps it’s because, if stealing doesn’t make him quite the genius he’s supposed to be, it does make him — as the saying goes — a great artist.

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Tags: Yves   Posted in Vogue Style