About the turbulent Love Story between Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé
Yves Saint Laurent was the mastermind, Pierre Bergé the entrepreneur who managed his brand: together they founded an empire and loved each other for 50 years.
L'Amour Fou
Amour fou. A french expression, which literally means "mad love", that uncontrollable, irrational and obsessive passion. This words couldn't describe better the loves story between Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé.
When they met, they were respectively 21 and 27 years old. The long and tumultuous love affair between fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and entrepreneur Pierre Bergé unfolded over half a century marked by passion and betrayals, work and business, attempted suicides and fits of rage, worldliness and escapes. So many escapes. Like those of Pierre, who would pack his bags and flee to the hotel when Yves returned home undone, only to succeed again in search of adventure.
Love at first sight
Before meeting Saint Laurent, Pierre Bergé had already been the companion of the famous painter Bernard Buffet for eight years, whose business he also looked after. However, the spell with Yves was cast in 1958, at the restaurant La Cloche d'Or in Paris. They were both invited to a dinner organised by a mutual friend, Marie-Louise Bousquet. In fact, from that moment on they would never again be separated. For Pierre it was love at first sight, as he admitted years later: 'When I saw Yves, I didn't hesitate an instant to leave him. I forgot, drawn a line over the eight years I spent with Bernard'.
Two interlocked souls
It was Pierre himself who, on Yves's return from the Algerian war, having seen his role at Dior replaced by Marc Bohan, convinced him to found his own fashion house. And the rest is (fashion) history.
In 1962,Pierre Berge who found the necessary capital to open the fashion atelier - for this joint project he also put a flat he owned in the centre of Paris up for sale - and presented the first collection signed by Yves Saint Laurent. Catwalk after catwalk, Yves always had Pierre at his side. Amour fou.
An absolute and unconditional bond: simply unbreakable.
When, at one point, Yven Saint Laurent falls for Jacques de Bascher, a dandy with a bad reputation, Pierre wastes no time and threatens the boy with death. "I did everything for love, without ever letting myself be annihilated, destroyed, erased by Yves. Only my lucidity, my cold blood allowed me to resist and save myself", Bergé would say after the publication of his book-confession "Lettres à Yves", almost a lesson in love for an ever-present absence, from which a number of plays have also been adapted.
Yves and Pierre share passions, one above all art; houses, such as those in Marrakech, Tangier and Trouville-sur-Mer; and then friendships, betrayals and crises. But above all, they share a deep mutual esteem and dependence, the same that will allow them to overcome everything, together, for over fifty years. They only married in 2008, a few months after the designer's death. An absence that Pierre exorcised by addressing love letters to him, now collected in a book: Letters to Yves.
