Status Updates From Yves Saint Laurent: A Biogr...

This is an in-depth read, exhaustively researched and steeped in highly detailed interviews and observations. Even with an extended library check-out I’m only halfway through. So I’m taking a break from the brocades and lamés sprinkled through this fascinating bio with some of Bill Bryson’s wry humor..will borrow again in two weeks and resume starting on Chapter 15–“Working in Red.”

"I belong to a generation and a world dedicated to elegance. I grew up in an environment that was very attached to tradition. At the same time, however, I wanted to change all that, because I was torn between the attraction of the past and the future that pushed me forward. I feel divided between the two and I think I always will be. For I know one world and I feel the presence of the other."

'While Valerie Solanas proposed "cutting up men" in her SCUM Manifesto ... Yves offered [women] a much more powerful weapon: ambiguity that electrifies mystery. ... Yves Saint Laurent saw the body as a vine, a serpent, ready to move seductively, as a changeable being like Virginia Woolf's Orlando.'

Benaïm's luscious prose is the artistic equal of the dresses described. Most impressive.

'His [love] had a demonic acuity: he saw everything, sensed everything, and lived constantly on the lookout. But he had a nervous temperament and didn't go in for long studies of people's characters.'