Loulou & Yves - eBook

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de La Falaise and the House of Saint Laurent.Dauntless, in the bone style made Loulou de La Falaise one of the great fashion firebrands of the twentieth century. Descending in a direct line from Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, she was celebrated at her death in 2011, aged just sixty-four, as the highest of haute bohemia, a feckless adventuress in the art of livingand the one person Yves Saint Laurent could not live without.Yves was the most influential designer of his times; possibly also the most neurasthenic. In an exquisitely intimate, sometimes painful personal and professional relationship, Loulou was his creative right hand, muse, alter ego and the virtuoso behind all the flamboyant accessories that were a crucial component of the YSL look. For thirty years, until his retirement in 2002, Yves relied on Loulou to inspire him, make him laugh and talk him off the ledgethe enchanted formula that brought him from one historic collection to the next.Yvess many tributes shape Loulous memory, as if everything there was to know about this fugitive, Giacometti-like figure could be told by her clanking bronze cuffs, towering fur toques, the turquoise boulders on her fingers and her working friendship with the man who put women in pants. But another, darker story lifts the veil on Loulou, a classic number two with a contempt for convention, and exposes the underbelly of fashion at its highest level. Behind Yvess encomiums are a pair of aristocrat parentsLoulous shiftless French father and menacingly chic English motherwho abandoned her to a childhood of foster care and sexual abuse; Loulous recurring desperation to leave Yves and go out on her own; and the grandiose myths surrounding her family. Loulou felt that her life had been kidnapped by the operatic workings of the House of Saint Laurent, and in her last years faced financial ruin. Loulou & Yves unspools an elusive fashion idolnymphomaniacal, heedless and up to her bracelets in coke and Boizel champagneat the core of what used to be called le beau monde.