His name and spindly YSL insignia are almost as familiar as Sony, Mcdonald's or Nike. Yet when people buy a YSL product, they do so because they associate the name with an abstract image of Parisian chic embodied by the slender, bespectacled designer of the 70s, rather than the portly 60-year-old who potters with his dog in the grounds of his Marrakesh mansion on good days, but struggles against illness and depression on the bad. Laurent has lived to see his name attain such commercial resonance, that public perceptions of it bear little relations to the reality of his life and, in cold commercial terms, it may not matter whether he is dead or alive.
It was not always so. The reason why the name Yves Saint Laurent became a marketable commodity is because in the early part of his career his private and public personae were inseparable. In fact, Saint Laurent's story is one of a man who had fame thrust upon him, and was almost crushed by it.
Succeeding Christian Dior, at the age of 21, Saint Laurent went on to open his own couture house with his lover, Pierre Bergie, in 1962. It was the age of the youthquake when John F Kennedy was rejuvenating politics, and Andy Warhol, the Beatles and Rolling Stones were shaking up the arts. Fashion needed an icon for the new era, and Yves Saint Laurent, with his soulful good looks and flair for creating couture versions of the snappy suits and black leathers he saw in Left Bank jazz clubs seemed ideal.
As the 60s wore on, Saint Laurent hit the headlines with iconoclastic designs reflecting the spirit of an era when the women's liberation and gay rights movements were exploding, and campuses erupting with anti-war protests. At the opening of a Rive Gauche boutique in New York, so many people turned up to see him that the police were called. The confluence of the public and private Saint Laurent culminated in 71 with the introduction of a Rive Gauche men's collection based on his own hippy de luxe wardrobe of kaftans and velvet hipsters.
Yet the strains of fame were showing. One bond between Saint Laurent, Warhol and Nureyev was that all three had become famous at an early age. The other two revelled in their notoriety, but Saint Laurent loathed it. Shy and sensitive, he hated being pestered by strangers and sought refuge in Marrakesh, where he and Berge bought a house.
Morocan sojourns and acid trips enhanced his decadent image, but neither could free Saint Laurent from commercial constraints. He had found it hard enough to handle the pressure of creating a couture collection every six months in the 60s, but in the mid-'70s he had to produce pret-a-porter ranges too, as well as oversee the design of the YSL products for which Berge was selling licensing rights.
The crunch came after the triumphant couture show he staged in 76, inspired by the costumes Leon Bakst created for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russses. It was billed by the New York Times as a collection which would change the course of fashion, but the acclaim aggravated Saint Laurent's fears of failing to meet expectations. His health declined dramatically and, the following spring, a rumour surfaced in Paris that he had died. Even Berge described him as being born with a nervous breakdown.
Severing contact with all but a few friends, Saint Laurent sealed himself away, obsessively re-reading maudlin passages of Marcel Proust and slipping into a self-destructive cycle of drink and drug abuse. His work became as introspective as his life.
As the real Saint Laurent withdrew from the world, Berge was busily moulding him into an institution. A bastion of the gauche caviare circle around France's socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, Berge mobilised his political contacts to organise a retrospective of Saint Laurent's work at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was seen by more than 1 million people before moving on to Beijing, Moscow, Sydney and then Paris. The exhibition sealed Saint Laurent's place in fashion history, as Berge intended. It also marked the moment when popular perceptions of him became rooted in the past, not the present.
Tellingly, the next YSL perfume, Paris, was the first that had no personal association with Saint Laurent, but reinforced the notion of his being synonymous with French style. The idea of Yves Saint Laurent as an abstraction was accentuated by the plethora of YSL licensed products pouring on to the market, and by the fact that the man had made himself invisible.
Even when he failed to appear at a fashion show in 90 after being taken to hospital for detoxification, he was treated sympathetically. For the French, at least, his fragility conformed to the Romantic cliche of a tortured artist.
Having overcome his addictions, his spirits seem to have lifted a little. He is occasionally glimpsed at Paris soirees, proudly clutching a glass of Coca-cola. Years of retrospectives have made him an icon for younger fashion designers such Tom Ford, Miuccia Prada and Marc Jacobs. The collections that inspire them are invariably those of 20 or 30 years ago. But, when his health is good and he bothers to bestir himself, Saint Laurent can still upstage his young admirers by creating achingly beautiful clothes.
Ironically, as his star has risen among the fashion cognoscenti, the power of the YSL brand has diminished after years of exposure on T-shirts, towels and cigarettes. Having sold the company for $ 650 million in 93, Bergie is now trying to unravel the labyrinth of licenses in an attempt to salvage its prestige.
If Bergie was starting afresh by devising a new image for the brand, the defining qualities of Yves Saint Laurent's work, his love of classicism and command of his craft, would be as marketable today. But the old image created by Saint Laurent's charisma and Berge commercial acumen is so powerful, that persuading the public to see the YSL insignia as symbolic of anything other than 70s French style, seems impossible.
Perhaps, one day another designer will revitalise the YSL brand as Tom Ford has done for Gucci, Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, and John Galliano has been hired to do for Dior. But reworking Saint Laurent's signature styles will not be enough, because his innovations have already been copied so often that they are now regarded as everyday clothes.
Alice Rawsthorn
Financial Times