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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Of all the garments I have loved and lost, there is one whose perfection gave me such happiness that I've spent decades hoping it will surface in some thrift shop, and when I'm in Paris I never fail to check at the Pere Lachaise of couture, Didier Ludot's grimly glamorous little resale boutique in the Palais Royal. This first deluxe, not to say decent, piece of clothing that I ever owned was a sable-brown Cossack-style maxiskirt by Yves Saint Laurent that zipped up both sides like a sleeping bag. It was made of thick alpaca blanket wool, lined in black silk, and ingeniously constructed without darts so that, despite its weight, it had no bulk at the hips or waist. I bought it in 1969 at the Rive Gauche boutique on Bond Street, in London, which had been inaugurated with great fanfare that year by Princess Margaret and was managed very profitably by a former fashion journalist named Lady Rendlesham. Saint Laurent has always had a penchant for aristocratic sales help.
While he didn't invent designer ready-to-wear -- Pierre Cardin did -- Saint Laurent was the first couturier to make a cult of it, associating the cachet of an exalted label with a line of factory-made clothing and accessories of high quality and audacious chic (he designed them himself, at least for a while) that were marketed globally to a hip, baby-boom clientele. "The Rive Gauche notion of luxury had less to do with money than with attitude," Laurence Benaim writes in her authoritative biography of Saint Laurent, which was published in France in 1993. Benaim also notes that in 1966, when the Rive Gauche line was launched, the ready-to-wear prices were about a tenth of the couture. But a tenth of the unthinkable was still hard for me to imagine. Except for my youth, and an inclination toward idolatry, I was hardly the target Rive Gauche customer, and I have never, unfortunately, had a Saint Laurent body -- leggy and broad-shouldered, with the flat hips, shortish waist, and high, shapely haunches and bosom of the African and Caribbean models he was among the first to employ. At the time, though, I was grateful for the mercy of a long skirt: ruthless minis were the rule. I was also thrilled to have something so certifiably Parisian in a closet filled with the picturesque ethnic frippery that is back in style this year, but which stank of the embroidered sheepskin coat from Afghanistan that I'd bought in an open-air stall next to Gandalf's Garden off the King's Road. Badly cured hippie fur, patchouli, diesel exhaust, mildew, hashish rolled with stale tobacco, mate, and paraffin heating oil are the scents that summon up my remembrance of the late sixties.
I was then writing wine-dark Plathian poetry in a bed-sit with imitation William Morris wallpaper facing a garage south of the river, and paying my rent by tutoring a Hollywood mogul's eleven-year-old son in Berkeley Square. When my pupil's English lesson was finished, the butler served us tea, a repast at which we were supposed to speak French. Since teatime was off the meter, I felt entitled to wrap up whatever solid refreshments we hadn't consumed to take home, and I confess that, in addition to scones and sandwiches, I sometimes also pocketed a handful of raw brown sugar lumps, and on the way to the tube station, which, like Rive Gauche, was on Bond Street, I would eat them furtively, like stolen candy. One Friday, I noticed a discreet "final reductions" sign in the shopwindow, which emboldened me to cross its intimidatingly smart threshold for the first time. The carpet, as I recall, was the color of a blood orange, and there were little mauve chairs, and futuristic lighting, and a black-and-white portrait of Himself in the style of "Blow-Up." Not much was left on the sale rack, but the marvellously refined skirt with its cavalry swagger and feline nap had been marked down to fifteen pounds -- one of its zippers was "as seen." I had a week's pay in my pocket: fifteen pounds. Many of my romances would begin, like this...
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