>> The relationship between Yves Saint Laurent, his business partner Pierre Berge, and his ready-to-wear successor Tom Ford was clearly a strained one. In 2004 as Ford was leaving the label, Saint Laurent said of Ford: "I think he has a lot of talent for, what do you call it, marketing. But he never showed interest in the archives." In between tales of his first sexual escapades and how he snuck his longtime partner Richard Buckley into A Single Man, Ford returns the favor in the December 2009-January 2010 issue of The Advocate:
“I don’t even remember much about my time at Yves Saint Laurent, though I do think some of my best collections were [there]—other than that black-and-white initial one. That one wasn’t very successful and wasn’t very good. But being at Yves Saint Laurent was such a negative experience for me even though the business boomed while I was there. Yves and his partner, Pierre Bergé, were so difficult and so evil and made my life such misery.
I’d lived in France off and on and had always loved it. I went to college in France. It wasn’t until I started working in France that I began to dislike it. They would call the fiscal police, and they would show up at our offices. You are not able to work an employee more than 35 hours a week. They’re like Nazis, those police. They’d come marching in, and you had to let them in and they’d interview my secretary. And they can fine you and shut you down. Pierre was the one calling them. I’ve never talked about this on the record before, but it was an awful time for me. Pierre and Yves were just evil. So Yves Saint Laurent doesn’t exist for me. I have letters from Yves Saint Laurent that are so mean you cannot even believe such vitriol is possible. I don’t think he was high when he wrote them either. I just think he was jealous, and Yves and I were friends before I took over the company. But then we began to move the company forward and were very successful . . . he just became so insanely jealous . . . that phase in my life just doesn’t exist anymore.”
Paul Smith
Tabitha
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Mean? Yves was "mean?" He had his name and his reputation to
protect. He was very, very careful about that. And Pierre had the
business to oversee, a two billion dollar business. Of course they
were not happy about someone whose sole preoccupation was with
"what sells." What has Tom Ford created since he left Saint Laurent?
Nothing. He keeps selling and selling himself, that's all. It's all
"le marketing" for Tom Ford. Nothing else, except for his ego, that is.
Totally agree Carlos
You are aboslutely right. He just repeat the same Gucci looks at the YSL collections.
Sad...
As a former Gucci Group employee, I can tell you there were many reasons why Monsieur Saint Laurent did not approve of Tom Ford’s work at Yves Saint Laurent; jealously was not one of them. The primary reason of Monsieur Saint Laurent’s disapproval stemmed from Mr. Ford’s irreverence for the house and the couturier himself. Mr. Ford’s YSL collections were always overshadowed by overt sexuality, while Monsieur Saint Laurent’s collections never lacked sex appeal, but sex was never the essence of the collections.
I feel Mr. Ford saw Yves Saint Laurent as an opportunity to promote his own agenda and elevate his status as a fashion designer who redefined Yves Saint Laurent. Much how Karl Lagerfeld has done at Chanel. Nearing the end of the Ford era, Mr. Ford was pushing to have his name placed on YSL labels so they would read “Tom Ford for Yves Saint Laurent * Rive Gauche*. It was sacrilegious, Monsieur Saint Laurent certainly did not approve as he still held rights to a portion of the company during that time. It was Mr. Ford’s over eagerness to promote himself that did not fare well with Monsieur Saint Laurent.
I must add that I am a fan of Tom Ford; I think he is extremely talented but his ego is as big as the state he was born. My favorite Ford collection at Yves Saint Laurent was actually his final show with the Chinese theme and pagoda shouldered jackets. This collection mirrored Monsieur Saint Laurent and looked to be a promising vision forward for YSL but it was too late, Mr. Ford’s contract was not renewed and he parted a few weeks after the debut of his masterpiece.
Monsieur Saint Laurent was a revolutionist who empowered women and he will not be remembered for anything less. While Mr. Ford is a talented designer, he is foremost a businessman who will forever struggle under the shadows of his time at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent.
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