The recent retirement of Yves St Laurent put me in mind of the unlikely occasion when I saw the famously frail and reclusive genius of haute couture at close quarters, writes Liam McAuley.
It was the spring of 1977 when, for reasons needless to explain here, I found myself in charge of the women's pages of the Sunday Times (known as the Look! pages in those self-conscious days of the 1970s). The ready-to-wear fashion collections in Paris (or prêt-à-porter, as they say in the trade) were coming up; the fashion editor, Brigid Keenan, was on sick leave, and her stand-in, Michael Roberts - a black and beautiful young man who went on to be fêted and feared as fashion editor of Vogue - expressed himself inexpressibly bored with the notion of covering mere ready-to-wear shows, even in Paris.
I had a bright idea, or maybe a rush of blood to the head. I would go myself, and write a plain man's view of the fashion shows. To cover the actual clothes, I would bring Margaret McCartney who, as fashion assistant (yes, it was a well-staffed paper), had the job of booking models and finding clothes for the Sunday Times's own fashion shoots. Margaret enjoyed the occasional chance to write, and happily agreed to the plan. Michael assented with a slow blink and an elegant flap of the wrist.
Taking everybody's picture
Oh happy times for a young journalist - three days in Paris, at the paper's expense! But what to wear? I bought a new pair of blue jeans and teamed them, as they say, with my old brown shoes, a long white raincoat, and my trademark tweed cap. There cannot have been much wrong with this ensemble because a photographer opened fire on me as I entered the Hotel Maurice to see my first show, by a chap called Jean Claude de Luca. To be honest, though, photographers were taking almost everybody's picture, for there was no telling who might be famous.
We all took our seats, amid much Gallic gesticulation and dispute, in a splendid neo-Renaissance room cut by an L-shaped catwalk. The floodlights glared, disco music blared, and the models pranced before us in twos or threes. Sometimes they tossed their heads or rolled their eyes or smiled in mock surprise, as if biting invisible bars of chocolate flake, but mostly they just looked superior, or even bored. One, I remember, had a nose like Karl Malden.
I don't remember much about the clothes, though I liked the see-through numbers, but I noticed that the audience applauded some and shook their heads at others.
When the show was over, the Press piled into a special bus which took us to see the Montana collection, but when we got to the venue - I've no idea where - the doors had already been closed and there was a crowd of about 200 furious people - fashion writers, buyers, PR agents, hangers-on -- milling around on the street and occasionally trying to force their way inside like a bunch of soccer hooligans. After a few minutes of this, I went for lunch.
Thus fortified, I made my way to the Issey Miyake show, plunged into the middle of the throng and was borne past the protesting doormen. Inside the hall, I found a chair near the catwalk, but a tall woman shouted at me in French and American, and made me stand at the side. It was crowded, hot and sweaty, there were strobe-lights and pounding music, and I couldn't see a thing: it was like being trapped in a holiday hotel disco.
Descent into confusion
Somewhat dazed, I got a lift with a woman from the Daily Express to a big amphitheatre in the Bois de Boulogne for the Castelbaljac collection. There, my descent into confusion accelerated. Choking clouds of incense drifted across the crowd, and I thought the motif might be religious. Instead, models dressed like storm troopers marched along beneath multi-coloured laser beams to a deafening techno-rock soundtrack.
After an eternity, the show ended, and I escaped gratefully with about 50 other souls through a side door that someone had uncovered behind the wall drapes, only to find that we were trapped in an enclosed garden. The more unruly women tried to break out through the shrubbery, at grave risk to their couture.
Next day I tagged along to half-a-dozen more shows, by now in a stupor. There was disco music, reggae, electronic pulses, a bossanova band, an interminable Indian raga, and some crackly old Maurice Chevalier records. Models - mostly the same models - drifted past, striding, swaggering, prancing, dancing, slinking or skipping, in tweed jackets, woolly bags, balloon dresses, tent dresses. The photographers blazed away with their crossfire, and the people clapped or tutted. The strangest thing was the atmosphere - intense, hysterical, even paranoid. At the entrance to one show, I remember, the crowd had to pass between two rows of bouncers, and a gatecrasher was kneed in the groin.
Everywhere people talked only about clothes: "I loved Italy, but France is awful. . . I hated Castelbaljac, it was so, so depressing - I just don't see what he's trying to say. . ." At a PR reception, I tried to escape fashion by talking about politics. This was not a success. A buyer (female) assured me that women were emotional creatures who should not have the vote. Switching back to fashion, of a sort, a woman from Harpers and Queen said she owned "the chic-est dog in London".
Interred secretly
The same evening, I first heard the rumour that Yves St Laurent had died. Next day, it was known for a fact that he had already been interred secretly in Marrakesh. But on the third day, as the models came out en masse for the end-of-show applause, the women and men around me suddenly jumped to their feet, shouting "Bravo! Bravo!" and waving their hands, or sheaves of paper, or handbags, in the air. I sat there in a daze for a few seconds. Then, as is often the way with a standing ovation, I got up too.
A big-boned, bespectacled man in a dark suit was standing at the front of the catwalk, blinking nervously behind his thick spectacles, with a frightened expression on his long, pale face. It was, I realised, Yves St Laurent, evidently undead.
He raised his forearms and flapped his hands in an awkward, seemingly sincere, attempt to quell the cheers of his disciples. It occurs to me that at just that moment, I, the bewildered outsider, and St Laurent, the most celebrated figure in fashion, were the only people there who didn't seem to know what all the fuss was about.