Modern Living: Living for Design: All About Yves

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The Saint Laurents, an old and distinguished family from Alsace, settled in the then French territory of Algeria in the 19th century. Yves, who was born in the port city of Oran, still feels drawn to the silky, sun-baked lands of North Africa—no longer to the Algeria of his childhood, now an austere socialist state, but to laissez-faire Morocco. There, at his magnificent Arab-style palace in the ancient fortress city of Marrakech, the designer talked at length last week with TIME Paris Bureau Chief Gregory Wierzynski about his aims, his dreams and his worries. Wierzynski 's report:

He is just 40, a millionaire, world-renowned and, at the peak of his profession, a confident and gracious man. He is pale, despite the Sahara sun, but seemingly healthy. His life with Pierre Berge, his business partner and intimate of 15 years, has probably been as harmonious as most marriages. Yet beneath the patina of assurance, Yves Saint Laurent is a tortured soul, a self-avowed neurotic who is still recovering from an unhappy childhood and the trauma of his brief service in the French army (he spent two months in a solitary psychiatric cell). "Yves," says Berge, "was born with a nervous breakdown." Says Yves himself: "I am ridden by anxieties all the time."

Though he says his designs come out of a "crucible of pain," Saint Laurent has an extraordinarily fertile and precise imagination. Working in Marrakech, seldom spending more than 15 minutes on a single drawing, he designed his latest collection so perfectly that not a bead or button had to be changed when he arrived at his Paris headquarters to inspect the finished array of 106 styles.

"It's an egotistical collection," says Saint Laurent. "I thought like a painter or a writer. I put in it all I had in me, all my favorite painters—Vermeer, Delacroix, Ingres, La Tour, Rembrandt. It's the collection of a painter. Then there is the theatrical side—I love the opera and the music hall, and there was some of that. Then I put in my favorite heroines, like Madame Bovary and Catherine of Russia."

How does the man who put well over a million women into pants explain his abrupt flight into a world of rustling taffeta? Over the past ten years, says Saint Laurent, he had refined his line to the limit and finally felt bored with its simplicity. "I had arrived at a certain purity. This had forced me to repress my fantasy, and I needed a big burst." Besides, Yves considers himself the last truly creative designer around. "A collection is always a reaction to something," he observes. "I was fed up with opening magazines and seeing clothes that I thought were mine but had in fact been done by somebody else. I made a decision to make a dramatic departure."