Living: Toasting Saint Laurent

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A New York retrospective revels in glamour and luxury

The first impression is one of vitality and variety. The exhibition rooms of the Costume Institute at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art are bursting with lavish clothes: swift little contemporary silhouettes; magnificent ball gowns seemingly from a grander, more inert age; fantastical garments of no recognizable provenance. A few are so ugly that the eye looks away; many more are heartbreakingly lovely. They are all the work of one man: Yves Saint Laurent, 47, the most famous and influential clothing designer in the world, the king of fashion.

Saint Laurent is the first person to be honored with a Metropolitan retrospective while he is still active. (The only other couturier to have been the subject of a one-man show at the Met: the Spanish designer Cristobal Balenciaga, in 1973.) The choice was made by the museum's director and by the Costume Institute's special consultant, Diana Vreeland, whose judgment it reflects. Says the legendary former editor of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, with the certitude and gusto that she has retained into her eighth decade: "Saint Laurent has been built into the history of fashion now for a long time. Twenty-six years is the proof that he can please most of the people most of the time four times a year. That's quite a reputation."

Those homely virtues—longevity, consistency—are the ones emphasized by Saint Laurent's rivals, such as Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld, in commenting on the Met's selection, and this is not faint praise. Members of the high-fashion elite are rich and coddled celebrities who seldom breathe unscented air, but they risk their names and their companies in the cold atmosphere of commerce with each new collection. There are not many truly wealthy private clients left, and they instinctively flock to whatever guru has had his inspiration certified by the press and by a chic popular line. (Princess Caroline of Monaco may be the only young woman left who patronizes a couturier, Marc Bohan of Dior, the way her mother did.) Walking through this exhibition, one is struck by Saint Laurent's fecundity, his ability to harness everything—nostalgia, whimsy, exotic venues, painting, novels, poems, outright homages to predecessors like Chanel—into inspiration for a dress.

The earliest clothes in the show carry the Christian Dior label. Saint Laurent was 18 when the Master of the New Look hired him as an assistant. The young man had been interested since childhood in theatrical costume and set design and was delighted to be apprenticed to Dior. Four years later, when Dior died suddenly of a heart attack, Saint Laurent was chosen by Textile Magnate Marcel Boussac, who owned the couture house, to succeed him. In 1958 he produced a brilliant debut collection that introduced an A-line dress called the trapeze. It was an instantaneous success. The French, who invented the modern concept of a couturier, celebrated in the street. The boy wonder, tall, handsome and painfully shy, was thrust out on the balcony of the House of Dior to acknowledge the cheers.