Let the Costume Ball Begin

Wisdom is to be crazy when circumstances warrant it.

--Jean Cocteau

Along with Cocteau, the avant-garde French writer and film director whose aphorism he quotes frequently these days, Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent may be fou like a fox. After years of beguiling women into austerely tailored pantsuits, now, in this cool age of less is more and casual is all, the world's most influential couturier has stopped the parade with a collection of high-camp peasant fashions that are impractical, fantastical and egotistical. They are also subtle, sumptuous, sensual and jubilantly feminine. The overwhelming first American response, both from those who deal in clothes and those who wear them: let the costume ball begin.

Unlike most fashions that women wear today, the romantic new Cossack-gypsy-Indian-Moroccan all-purpose paisana-princess image--the YSLook --is a deliberate assertion, a statement. It says, in the words of a Washington fashion setter who was in Paris last week, "Aren't I simply devastatingly dazzling!" It is not, at from $2,000 to $10,000 per outfit, for humble folks. Saint Laurent has used with theatrical abandon the old luxurious, tactile fabrics: satin, gold and silver lame, silk faille, velvet, taffeta, chiffon, chenille, mousseline and moire. The materials, fashioned into 106 outfits for Saint Laurent's July 28 showing, bring back blouses with billowing sleeves, bouffant skirts and, yes, soft petticoats, with tight, wasp waistlines defined by cummerbunds, corselets and cinched belts for day and evening wear (see color pages). The clothes are extravagantly ornamented, with braiding, tasseled cords, floral scarves, satin ribbons, hammered gold jewelry. They are topped with turbans, mink toques, babushkas, knit caps, fezzes and feathers, and bottomed with boots, boots, boots. They are an incendiary eruption of color: violet, emerald, scarlet, mint, tangerine, rose, sapphire, turquoise, lime, azure, royal purple.

Added Dimension. Yves' leaves are not newly fallen. The shape of Y.S.L. to come was foreshadowed last spring, when he displayed a ready-to-wear collection that embodied in less expensive form the essence of the couture show. Thus reversing the traditional cycle of a high-fashion collection followed by a mass-manufactured version of the same clothes, Saint Laurent's top-line show echoed--and amplified--his earlier collection. This strategy, rather than the designs themselves, was the real revolution. The very same week that fashion writers were trumpeting the glories of Saint Laurent's haute couture, the ready-to-wear clothes were showing up in the 111 Y.S.L. boutiques from Kuwait to Hong Kong, including 46 in the U.S. At prices ranging from $130 for a wool shirt to $1,110 for a taffeta skirt, they are selling as fast as they can be reordered.

The impact of these clothes, most experts agree, will be felt for years to come. Says Geraldine Stutz, president of Henri Bendel and one of American fashion's savviest seers: "Women have been wearing the pared-down look for some time. Fashion has been simplified and simplified and simplified. Saint Laurent felt that women wanted more glamour, more detail. He has a clairvoyance of what women will want, and then conceives it in ways that women wouldn't conceive of wanting it. What he's saying is thick rather than thin, fuller rather than bone skinny, static rather than fluid. He has made the whole extravagant peasant irresistible."

American women today are not about to burn their wardrobes and capitulate to any diktat from Paris. To be sure, they yielded to the New Look from Christian Dior--Saint Laurent's mentor --in 1947 when, after years of war, they had a yearning for opulence and no wardrobes to boast of. But much has happened since then, not the least the advent of the distinctively American look (TIME cover, March 22). What Yves and such other like-minded French designers as Givenchy and Ungaro are offering is an added dimension. "Saint Laurent's collection," says American Designer Bill Blass, "doesn't make clothes obsolete. Women will keep the clothes they have but will use some ingredient from Saint Laurent." Yves himself (see box) believes women should have "a basic set of clothes--things that won't change." Albert Capraro, 33, Betty Ford's favorite designer, points out: "What this will do is add beautiful romanticism to clothes. Women today want variety. I don't think there's any place for the total look. Saint Laurent's clothes are an addition." Noting that the peasant look was innocently and informally introduced a few years ago by the footloose young returning from Katmandu and Casablanca, Francine Crescent, fashion editor of French Vogue, says, "The mixture of styles is exactly what young people go for. They love the naivete and the beauty." Another extra comes with the Y.S.L. label: humor. As Diana Vreeland, Vogue's editor emeritus, notes, "Surely no one can wear these clothes with a deadpan face." Adds Kalman Ruttenstein, president of Bonwit Teller: "This guy puts it all together and makes it so elegantly wearable."

What smart women will do is use Y.S.L. bits and pieces and integrate them with what they already own. Says Irene Satz, Ohrbach's vice president: "These are really investment clothes that can be mixed and matched." Some Yvesian clothes are already filtering into stores--and selling out at $500 an item. "There will be some horrendous copies," predicts Bill Blass, mainly because the rip-off versions will substitute synthetics for Y.S.L.'s lush materials.

Subsidized Superelegance. The vast expense of haute couture--the latest Y.S.L. collection costs at least $500,000--makes the whole notion of super-elegance for a dwindling few seem anachronistic. Nonetheless, the number of Parisian high-fashion houses still in business remains constant at 25, and the couture industry's sales increased 15% (to $1.4 billion) last year. One reason is that couture, in a Y.S.L. executive's words, is "the locomotive" for a clothing company's lucrative ready-to-wear business. Additionally, the publicity that high fashion generates for Y.S.L.--or Pierre Cardin or Dior--helps boost sales of the entire line of products, from soap to wallpaper, that is marketed under a fashion-house name. As a conglomerateur, with 4,450 employees worldwide, 58 products on the market and annual sales of $200 million, Saint Laurent can afford to subsidize the rich who buy his $5,000 gowns.

Those precious originals he displayed on the runway beneath the chandeliers did not vanquish all critics. Halston, the monarch of American design, wondered, "Where will a woman wear

Yves' designs? Taxis, chairs, doorways aren't big enough for these enormous skirts." And, some asked, how often will a woman get to wear such fantasy clothes? As the perennially best-dressed Mrs. William McCormick ("Deeda") Blair Jr., of Washington and international society, said in Paris, "It's not every day of my life I'd want to look like a Ukrainian peasant!" (She has not yet put down any kopeks for one of Saint Laurent's new creations.)

Some of the bitterest attacks came from Saint Laurent's compatriots, who have a fairly good history of deploring innovation in the arts. "I'm a friend of Yves," expostulated Le Figaro's fashion editor Viviane Ch. Greymour. "But I didn't congratulate him on this collection! It's folklore, a show, theater, dreams." Another complaint--as if buyers of haute couture rode the subway --was that Yves' cloaks and skirts are "too wide to pass through the Metro turnstiles." The unkindest cut came from a jury voting during the week of the showing for the new Golden Thimble award--haute couture's would-be Oscar: it gave the honor to the classic Mme. Gres (runner-up: Emanuel Ungaro), without even mentioning Saint Laurent.

Gallic disparagement could, to some extent, be attributed to a kind of reverse chauvinism: anything the Americans go wild for is automatically suspect. The corollary: the French have come around to buying the Matisses, Braques and Picassos that American art collectors started snapping up 70 years ago. Nor is that too extreme a comparison. Critic after critic referred to Saint Laurent's originals as investments. Women's Wear Daily called them "instant museum pieces."

Their creator says only, "I don't know if this is my best collection. But it is my most beautiful collection." As for practicality, he snorts: "In haute couture you can't think about it. My clothes are addressed to women who can afford to travel with 40 suitcases"--each single bag, of course, bearing the magic Y.S.L. logo. If Yves is fou, wise men should study madness.

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