Yves Saint
Laurent, 71, died Sunday night at his Paris home after a
yearlong battle with brain cancer, said Pierre Berge, Saint
Laurent's close friend and business partner for four
decades.
"Chanel gave
women freedom," and Saint Laurent "gave them power,"
Berge said on France-Info radio. He called Saint Laurent a
"true creator" who went beyond the aesthetic to make a
social statement.
The Gucci Group,
which acquired the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house in
1999, said the designer's death "leaves a great emptiness
but also a sublime inheritance."
"This genius of
creation shattered the codes to create French elegance
which today makes Paris a grand capital of fashion," Gucci
said.
Berge, speaking
Monday on the France-2 TV station, stressed Saint
Laurent's "profound love" for women. He used fashion to
"serve women" and not "use them," said Berge, who
collaborated with the designer for four decades and was his
former romantic partner.
In his own words,
Saint Laurent once said he felt "fashion was not only
supposed to make women beautiful, but to reassure them, to
give them confidence, to allow them to come to terms
with themselves."
Saint Laurent
widely was considered the last of a generation that
included Christian Dior and Coco Chanel and made Paris the
fashion capital of the world, with the Rive Gauche, or
Left Bank, as its elegant headquarters.
The designer
raised the stature of fashion while making it more
accessible, it is widely agreed.
French president
Nicolas Sarkozy praised Saint Laurent for "putting his
mark on a half-century of creation, in luxury as well as
ready-to-wear." First lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, who graced
Saint Laurent's runway during her modeling career,
said she had a "heavy heart" on learning of his death.
Saint Laurent was
born August 1, 1936, in Oran, Algeria, where his father
worked as a shipping executive. He first emerged as a
promising designer at age 17, winning first prize in a
contest sponsored by the International Wool
Secretariat for a cocktail dress design.
A year later, in
1954, he enrolled at the Chambre Syndicale school of
haute couture, but student life lasted only three months. He
was introduced to Christian Dior, then regarded as the
greatest creator of his day, and Dior was so impressed
with Saint Laurent's talent that he hired him on the
spot.
When Dior died
suddenly in 1957, Saint Laurent was named head of the
House of Dior at age 21.
He opened his own
haute couture fashion house with Berge in 1962. The
pair later started a chain of Rive Gauche ready-to-wear
boutiques.
When Saint
Laurent announced his retirement in 2002 at age 65 and the
closure of the Paris-based haute couture house, it was
mourned in the fashion world as the end of an era. His
ready-to-wear label, Rive Gauche, which was sold to
Gucci in 1999 for $70 million cash and royalties, still
has boutiques around the world.
Saint Laurent had
long been rumored to be ill, and Berge said on RTL
radio Monday that he had been afflicted with brain cancer
for the past year.
"He no longer
liked the world of today's fashion ... he said it
didn't understand him," Berge said.
After retirement,
Saint Laurent spoke of his battles with depression,
drugs, and loneliness, though he gave no indication that
those problems were directly tied to his decision to
stop working.
"I've known fear
and terrible solitude," he said. "Tranquilizers and
drugs, those phony friends. The prison of depression
and hospitals. I've emerged from all this, dazzled but
sober."
A funeral
ceremony was scheduled for Thursday at the Saint Roch Church
in central Paris, Berge said, moving the date
announced earlier forward by a day. Saint Laurent's
ashes are to be placed in a vault in the Majorelle
botanical garden in Marrakech, Morocco, which he and Berge
purchased in the 1980s, their foundation said. (Elaine
Ganley AP)
