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"View Slideshow\n\nThis feature incorporates information from previous articles about Yves Saint Laurent's Paris residence (see Architectural Digest, September/October 1976 and September 1988).\n\nNo designer in the past forty years has been more consistently celebrated or influential than Yves Saint Laurent. Since his house's first couture collection burst onto the fashion scene in January 1962, his genius\u2014the eye for the beautiful and sumptuous, the taste for the theatrical and extravagant\u2014has dazzled, amazed, even startled the world.\n\nProfound cultural influences have persistently informed Saint Laurent's world. His fashion collections have cleverly evoked great art: silk jackets beaded and sequined with Impressionist paintings, Trapeze dresses suggestive of Mondrian. He has used exquisitely grayed, neutralized pinks inspired by the Cubist colorings of Juan Gris\u2014and flaming, shocking, blinding pinks inspired by the brilliant hues of his native North Africa. Indeed, his inspirations are far\u2014reaching, resulting in couture employing Russian peasant chintzes, Moroccan embroideries, flamenco spots on evening clothes. But whether in his fashions or in his interiors, Saint Laurent's vaulting imagination is always in harmony with his flaw-less sense of style and elegance and his unending quest for perfection.\n\nIt was when he was only seventeen and still a schoolboy in Algeria that Yves Saint Laurent became captivated by the work of Christian B\u00E9rard, the great Parisian decorator, illustrator and set and costume designer. After attending a B\u00E9rard-designed production of Moli\u00E8re's School for Wives, the young man wrote to the then editor of Paris Vogue, Michel de Brunhoff, \"Like B\u00E9rard, I would like to devote myself to several things that are in reality one: theater sets and costumes, decoration and illustration. On top of this, I feel very drawn to fashion.\"\n\nBrunoff subsequently hired Saint Laurent to sketch coiffures for the magazine and, later, after seeing the portfolio he had created during a summer vacation, introduced him to Christian Dior, who hired him as an assistant. His career had begun.\n\nIt seems appropriate, then, that Saint Laurent's Paris apartment on the Left Bank was originally designed by B\u00E9rard's friend and sometime collaborator\u2014the icon of Art D\u00E9co design\u2014Jean-Michel Frank. Frank and B\u00E9rard's interiors were madly dapper and stylish yet at the same time modern classics. The pair were celebrated not only in France but also in America, where they designed one of New York's greatest D\u00E9co interiors: the Nelson Rockefeller apartment on Fifth Avenue. Yves Saint Laurent's apartment was also originally designed for an American, which may in part account for its international modernist feel that makes no reference to time or place. It was an ideal background for Saint Laurent's unabashedly eclectic treasure trove of extraordinary objects new and old, gathered from seemingly every culture with a legitimate claim to high style.\n\nAmong the masterpieces of design that densely populate the once spare Jean-Michel Frank rooms are objects by the other greats of Art D\u00E9co: Jean Dunand, Eileen Gray, Pierre Chareau, Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, Pierre Legrain and, of course, Christian B\u00E9rard. The twenties and thirties pieces are offset by well-placed ancient Roman marble torsos or Italian Renaissance bronzes and brought into a more re-cent mode by whimsical zoomorphic furniture designed by Saint Laurent's longtime friends Claude and Fran\u00E7ois-Xavier Lalanne.\n\nAll these wonderful objects are his companions in the never-ending cycle of drawing and designing that is his passion and his life. \"Nobody can imagine my capacity for solitude,\" he once observed. \"For somebody like me, who can't stop accumulating objects, the absence of them is an oddity.\"\n\nAmong the pieces there are notes of Proustian nostalgia: a set of silver-mounted desk accessories that formerly graced the desk of Czar Nicholas II; a seventeenth-century silver-gilt ewer and basin that once belonged to an archduke of Austria.\n\nThere are also touches of the highly personal: framed photos, notes and sketches of friends or people he admires; stacks of books and magazines; vases always filled with his favorite lilies; souvenirs and reminders of friends of earlier days, such as Rudolf Nureyev, Coco Chanel and Jean Cocteau.\n\nAnd Saint Laurent's good friend, Paris interior designer Jacques Grange, has helped with the adjustments and changes to the interiors over time. \"Jacques surpassed himself in refining the details,\" Saint Laurent has pointed out. \"The stitching on the draperies, the quilting on the bedspread, are marvelous.\"\n\nYet the fact that the apartment has sustained its appeal throughout its evolution is best explained in the way that Yves Saint Laurent talks about himself. \"I suppose I can say that my success comes from being completely in harmony with my era,\" he has said. \"I have no nostalgia for the old days. I am glad that things change.\"\n\nHe also rightfully suspects that \"elegance is in the heart, in the very being.\" It is clearly at the heart of both his designs and his life."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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