## The Fitting Room on Rue Spontini

The Fitting Room on Rue Spontini

Yves Saint Laurent stood in the fitting room of Christian Dior's atelier in January 1958, twenty-one years old, pinning the hem of a trapeze dress that would save the house. Dior had died four months earlier. The board had promoted his youngest assistant to creative director — a decision born less from faith than panic. Saint Laurent's first collection, shown that week, replaced Dior's New Look silhouette with a higher waistline and a softer shoulder. The press called it a triumph. Women bought it. The house survived.

He lasted four years.

In 1960, Saint Laurent showed a collection inspired by the Left Bank: black leather jackets over wool skirts, crocodile motorcycle boots, peaked caps. Dior's conservative clientele recoiled. The board, already uneasy with his youth and his nerves, let him go when he was conscripted into the French army later that year. He served twenty days before a breakdown sent him to a military hospital. Marc Bohan replaced him at Dior. Saint Laurent, discharged and furious, sued for wrongful dismissal. He won. The settlement paid for his own house.

Rue Spontini, 1961

Saint Laurent opened at 30 bis Rue Spontini in 1962 with his partner, Pierre Bergé. Bergé handled the business. Saint Laurent handled the cloth. The division was absolute. Their first collection — forty pieces shown in a borrowed apartment — introduced the pea coat and the sailor blouse to haute couture. It was received politely. The second collection, in 1963, included a double-breasted wool jacket cut like a man's smoking jacket, worn over a silk blouse and narrow trousers. This was less polite. Saint Laurent had spent his Dior years sketching eveningwear. Now he was dressing women for dinner in menswear.

The smoking jacket became Le Smoking in 1966: a full tuxedo in black grain de poudre wool, with satin lapels and a straight-leg trouser. It was not the first time a woman had worn trousers to an evening event — Marlene Dietrich had done that thirty years earlier — but it was the first time a couture house had cut a tuxedo specifically for a woman's body and called it eveningwear. Some restaurants refused to seat women wearing it. Saint Laurent kept making it. By 1975, it was a wardrobe fixture for a particular kind of client: the ones who worked, travelled alone, and didn't wait for an invitation.

What He Actually Did

Saint Laurent's technique was appropriation, not invention. He took the trench coat, the safari jacket, the navy blazer, the peasant blouse — garments that belonged to soldiers, colonials, schoolboys, farmers — and remade them in couture fabrics with couture construction. A safari jacket in beige cotton drill became a safari jacket in camel cashmere. A Russian peasant tunic became a tunic in gold lamé. The shapes stayed legible. The materials elevated them just enough.

This was different from what his peers were doing. Courrèges and Cardin were inventing new silhouettes in synthetic fabrics. Saint Laurent was reworking old ones in silk and wool. His references were explicit: Mondrian dresses in 1965, African-inspired collections in 1967, Chinese opera coats in 1977. He showed a collection based on Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Another based on Velázquez. He was criticised, often fairly, for treating other cultures as a costume box. He kept doing it. His clients kept buying.

The atelier on Rue Spontini employed forty petites mains by the mid-seventies. Each garment took between eighty and three hundred hours. A beaded evening jacket might take longer. The house showed two haute couture collections a year and, from 1966, ready-to-wear under the Rive Gauche label. The ready-to-wear was made in factories, not ateliers, but it carried the same silhouettes: the same blazers, the same blouses, the same trousers. You could buy a version of Le Smoking off the rack for a tenth of the couture price. Thousands did.

The Collapse

Saint Laurent's last decade at the house was a slow unravelling. He had always been fragile — the 1960 breakdown was the first of several — but by the 1990s the fittings were erratic, the collections repetitive. He relied on his studio to fill in the gaps. The 1998 spring collection was widely understood to have been designed largely by his assistants. In 1999, Bergé sold the house to Gucci Group for $1 billion. Saint Laurent stayed on as creative director for three more collections, then retired in 2002. He was sixty-five. He died in 2008.

The house he left behind was profitable but directionless. Tom Ford, installed as creative director in 2000, had turned the ready-to-wear into a commercial juggernaut — low-cut blouses, high-cut trousers, a version of sex that sold very well to a very young customer. It had almost nothing to do with what Saint Laurent had been making. Ford left in 2004. Stefano Pilati followed, then Hedi Slimane, then Anthony Vaccarello. Each brought their own vision. None of them kept the smoking jacket in the permanent collection.

What Remains

The Le Smoking survives, barely. Vaccarello shows a version most seasons — sometimes in silk, sometimes in wool, always with the same wide lapel and straight leg. It sells, but not in volume. The house's current business is built on handbags and shoes: the Sac de Jour, the Kate, the Loulou. The ready-to-wear skews younger and shorter than anything Saint Laurent designed. The haute couture atelier closed in 2002.

What remains of Saint Laurent's work is not in the collections but in the wardrobe. The tuxedo jacket for women is now so common it no longer registers as a statement. Same with the blazer, the safari jacket, the blouse worn open over trousers. These are default options now, available at every price point, made by every brand. Saint Laurent did not invent them, but he made them acceptable in contexts where they had not been acceptable before. That was the work: not the garment itself, but the permission to wear it.

Bergé kept the Rue Spontini atelier as a museum after Saint Laurent's death. It is not open to the public. The fittings rooms are intact, the cutting tables still in place, the bolts of cloth stored in the same cabinets. It is a monument to a way of working that no longer exists at the house that bears his name. The current Saint Laurent operates out of a steel-and-glass building in the eighth arrondissement. The fittings are done in Milan. The cloth comes from the same mills, but the hands that cut it are different.