Living for Design: All About Yves

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."

Though he vows never to abandon haute couture, he finds his challenges today chiefly in the dog-eat-dog arena of ready-to-wear. His men's clothes, which he designs himself, bring in more income--$45 million in U.S. sales alone --than his women's fashions. "I have more to defend in ready-to-wear," he says. "There is more competition there. I am more stimulated." He takes pride in the fact that each of the 58 products that bear his name, from sunglasses to soap and soon to cigarette lighters, has received his own scrutiny and approval.

In Paris, where Saint Laurent and Berge occupy a splendiferous two-story garden apartment on the Left Bank, the elegantly tailored Yves drives himself to work each morning in a dark blue Volkswagen Beetle convertible. (Berge, as the business manager, goes to the office in a chauffeured Rolls.) Settled in at Y.S.L. headquarters, a huge, four-story town-house on Avenue Marceau that must rank as one of the world's most elegant office buildings, Yves hunkers over a small (3 ft. by 4 ft.) folding worktable that is as meticulously arranged as any

Saint Laurent model on the runway. At his left is a stack of white sketching cards; behind him sits Hazel, his beige Chihuahua. Drawing on a Kool, Saint Laurent plucks a dagger-sharp 2-B pencil from a pot at his right and swiftly, unerringly limns a costume. Or, between vision and commitment, he will fiddle with a handful of worry trinkets, the Captain Queeg of couture.

Partly as therapy, partly to explore and extend his artistic philosophy, Saint Laurent is now working on a book for several hours a day. As prolific a writer as he is a designer, he expects to have the first volume ready for publication next year. It is not an autobiography, he insists, adding in the same breath, "I lay myself bare." Publishers are pounding on his door, even on the beaten brass portals of his Saharan retreat. They should not be disappointed: Saint Laurent is articulate, well read and capable of turning a phrase as neatly as a hem. For example: "Over the years I've learned that what's right in a dress is the woman wearing it." He has no title yet, but it could be called All About Yves.

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