Detail Shot, 10.27.23 (Yves Saint Laurent in Algeria)
I close-read things.
Yves Saint Laurent, one of France’s great national treasures, was born in a part of France that is not French anymore. He hailed from Oran, in what came to be known as Algeria; his was a family of pieds-noirs (“black feets”), French settlers so-called because they wore big black boots or because they wore black shoes at all or because the grapes they stomped for wine darkened their soles. The etymology is hazy. But the transition of Saint Laurent's homeland, from far-flung French province to the an independent nation, and Saint Laurent’s small part in France’s attempt to stop it, is one of great violence with a fashion tragedy thrown in for good measure.
About a century before Saint Laurent was born, the governor of Algiers slapped the French consul with a flyswatter. France’s army had procured a huge stock of grain to feed its troops, but payment was slow in coming. Things got heated, and thwap! France took great insult and, in 1827, blockaded the Ottoman Empire outpost. France had recently been in the habit of losing colonies—Louisiana to the Spanish in 1762, Quebec to the English in 1763, Haiti to the Haitians in 1804—so in 1830 King Charles X initiated a full-on invasion as a sort of imperial pick-me-up. The incursion was successful militarily but not royally, and Charles was deposed that same year. But France enjoyed the renewed feeling of conquest, and when its Armée d’Afrique seized Constantine in 1837 Charles’s successor installed an immensely popular gallery in the Musée historique de Versailles devoted to the campaign. Jennifer E. Sessions, in her history By Sword and Plow, highlights a Parisian shawl merchant’s petition to the parliamentary Chamber of Deputies that read, “the African war and above all the glorious capture of Constantine have revived all the memories of our old glory [and] rejuvenated all the traditions of national heroism.” Subjugating people was good for the national feels.
A beachhead secured, France began importing its citizens. And when France took an L in the Franco Prussian war, the Mathieu-Saint-Laurents picked up stakes from Alsace to move south in 1872. Settlers gathered enough property, by lowballing Algerians for and sometimes straight up stealing their land with the implicit backing of the occupying army, that those like Saint Laurent’s wealthy family enjoyed a lifestyle not far off their mainland counterparts with themselves placed atop a hierarchy that shoved the people who had been there first underfoot. By the time he was born in 1936, Alice Rawsthorn writes in her 1996 biography of the designer, “the life of a French settler’s son in Oran was much the same as much the same as that of a young boy in provincial France.” His father dealt in insurance and owned a chain of movie theaters. Alicia Drake’s The Beautiful Fall, which interweaves Saint Laurent’s story with that of his contemporary, Karl Lagerfeld, contains of a photo of a teenage Saint Laurent on an Orani tennis court pied nus in deeply pleated, deeply cuffed shorts and a sporting shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She also notes that Orani women like Saint Laurent’s mother strolled the local promenades in copied French fashions, for which the fittings gave him one of his earliest exposures to the art of dressmaking.
The Algerians were, naturally, not happy about all this. When Charles X was removed from office, they asked that they be allowed to choose their own rulers—just as the French had done. Non. As millions of Algerians died from violence and famine and disease, the settler population increased considerably. When Saint Laurent’s great-grandparents emigrated, there were about 130,000 French citizens in the colony, and in his time that number had swollen to nearly one million. The civil rights and political representation of the French extended across the Mediterranean, but Algerians were continuously denied a civic place in the nation that had imposed itself upon them, rendered second-class citizens in their own homeland. A few might have been granted citizenship here and there, maybe, but full assimilation was always opposed by the settlers lest they lose their perch in Algerian society. Algerians began agitating for independence politically forming political parties that France would in turn dissolve or whose demands it would dismiss. In 1936, the year Saint Laurent was born, France’s prime minister presented a plan to the legislature that would have created a pathway to citizenship for some Algerians—like 25,000 at most—but the settlers torpedoed it. Algerian nationalists, increasingly weary of their ignored attempts at a political solution to their colonial problem, argued that it did not go far enough. When Algerians celebrating Germany’s World War II defeat unfurled in Setíf a flag they had designed to represent themselves, French soldiers violently quashed their protest. Algerians in turn attacked settlers, killing about 100. The French military and the pieds-noirs retaliated by killing tens of thousands of Algerians. Against this background, the National Liberation Front began planning an armed resistance. Mere weeks after a conscription-age Saint Laurent left Oran to study fashion design at the Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne—upon the advice of the editor of French Vogue; the two met through a family friend after Saint Laurent placed third in a prestigious design contest—the FLN launched the Toussaint Rouge. A couple dozen attacks killed a handful of soldiers and settlers; the Algerian War had begun.
France was in a losing way again. Vietnam had secured its freedom after nine years of war in August of 1954. Increasingly turbulent Morocco would gain independence the next year, as would Tunisia the year after that. But Algeria had so many settlers and had so long been a central feather in France’s imperial cap that the nation decided to dig in. As Saint Laurent began his rapid ascent to the heights of French fashion, France’s military began its deadly attempt to stay in charge. The escalation, rendered epically in Gillo Pontecorvo 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, unfolded slowly. A pied-noir plants a bomb. The FLN, using “women chosen for their French appearance—lighter skin, attractive features—dressed in contemporary clothing, makeup applied, the bombs placed beneath clothing,” as Timothy DeMay writes at n+1, explode two of their own. The occupation intensifies, the violence becomes more extreme. An Atlantic writer worried that The French would say hundreds of thousands of Algerians died in the conflict, and the Algerians say a million more than that. The Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun kept a journal during the war, and its entries provide a wild contrast to Saint Laurent’s charmed life:
When Saint Laurent placed first in the same design contest (besting a young Lagerfeld), his father wrote a letter to that same Vogue editor in 1955 trying to keep a bored Saint Laurent from dropping out of school. The editor got him a job at Christian Dior. A few months into Saint Laurent’s tenure, Feraoun is worried about ruining his new pants in the back of a taxi listening to a man talk about retrieving his nephew from colonial police, who had arrested and whipped him in search of someone who had killed one of their colleagues.
When Saint Laurent was designing costumes and sets for Baron Alexis de Redé’s 1956 Bal des Têtes, an assignment that significantly raised his profile, Feraoun contemplated torture: “Police wearing boots” might jump on a victim’s stomach; the victim is beaten until “he is covered in blood and his clothes are torn;” he waterboarded until his stomach is distended with liquid, “add the cold cell and the wet clothes to this torture.” When a former student of Feraoun’s fights a soldier who had insulted him, the police torture and kill him; the policeman who pulled the trigger, in a good mood, buys six meters of cloth from an Algerian merchant that he's sure will impress the wives of his fellow officers.
After Dior died and Saint Laurent was named his successor in 1957, Feraoun recalled a conversation with a soldier who was a veteran of the French Resistance and denied that the Algerian independence struggle had any commonality with it. “Of course, our situation is not the same as that of someone who acts like the SS of the gestapo,” he wrote as Saint Laurent was back in Oran as he prepared the sketches for his debut show.
While Saint Laurent was causing a ruckus by dropping hemlines too far, too fast for Fall 1958 (three inches instead of the customary maximum of two!), Feraoun worries about the long-term effects of the war on the Algerian psyche: “My God, when is all this going to end? I am quite concerned that this atmosphere of fear, suspicion, insecurity, and anxiety will become the common fate of future generations, who will become inured to living in a constant state of alarm.”
When Saint Laurent showed his “Beat” collection in 1960—”skimpy bubble skirts in sleek wool, slinky black turtlenecks in finest cashmere and gleaming crocodile-skin jackets lined with mink” per Rawsthorn—Feraoun wrote about the hardiness of the Algerian spirit:
In the future, those who are compelled to ponder the profound reasons for their success will suspect that the Algerians’ strength came from the fact that they were forced to submit to the French for an entire century. This developed in us the habit of tolerating the worst humiliations, and at the same time when it came to deception and trickery, we generally had the upper hand. After 1955, when they began systematically to walk all over us, degrade us, and massacre us, we went through a long period of anger, panic, and unspeakable despair. Then we settled into our misery, and each of us, to his own advantage, quickly understood that we were being plunged back into the early years of the conquest, a period about which the old people still talk and that, in our naïvité, we had considered over. So we understood that we had to live again as victims, and we accepted the life offered us. But this life was no longer at an impasse. There was hope. From behind the barbed wire fences surrounding the monstrous “French villages,” the maquis were setting their inept ambushes and dying with insults still on their lips. They called on us to be patient while they were down the enemy’s patience. It is that same old reed story. It is necessary that our children learn the extent to which their elders suffered and the price paid so that they could inherit a name, their pride, and the right to be called Algerians without bowing their heads like the reed in the fable.
It is after the Beat collection that Saint Laurent was no longer able to stand apart from the things done in his name, as a Frenchman generally and as a pied-noir specifically. Charles de Gaulle, who had come to power in 1959, expanded the draft. That ramping up didn’t matter in some quarters, because he was making noises about negotiating with the FLN and granting some degree of Algerian autonomy. Armed extremist factions of pieds-noirs in Algiers rioted and threw up barricades in the city when they sensed they were losing ground in Paris—they would later assassinate Feraoun as part of a wider campaign of reactionary terror. (An Atlantic article, in 1956, fearfully suggested that abandoning the pieds-noirs would result in, at best, “a solitary enclave of French territory fortified against the assaults of the Arab hinterland—a second Israel at the other end of the Mediterranean;” the impulse behind several late-in-the-conflict French mutinies in Algeria was reifying that prediction.”) Saint Laurent had been protected from conscription until then by his importance to Dior, and thus French industry at large. But because his designs were so youth oriented that they threatened to dry up the stream of cash flowing from the pocket books of Dior’s older couture clients, the house decided not to stand in the way of the designer’s being shipped off.
Saint Laurent reported for duty Sept. 1, 1960. He exchanged his fine suiting for the rough fabric of a soldier’s uniform, but before he could even make it out of basic training he had a nervous breakdown. Defending France’s claim to Algeria was going to require a level of brutality that Saint Laurent did not have in him. He had long been a sensitive young gay boy in Oran, one who wore his school uniform collars buttoned to the top and ties near-strangling while his classmates went open-necked; they picked up on his shyness, his effeminacy, his difference, and bullied him mercilessly. The pain from that period lingered in him, and it was resurfaced by his fellow conscripts; they hurled all the same homophobic slurs at him. To boot, nobody wanted to go fight in Algeria. Many of his young, artsy, lefty friends were against the war. His business partner Pierre Bergé once ran a short-lived political newspaper that he claimed (falsely) had contributions from Jean-Paul Sartre, who would go on to write the preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. “Yves did not even have the consolation of suffering in an honourable cause…trapped in intolerable conditions, risking death for a cause he despised,” Rawsthorn writes. Plus, when he was sent to a mental hospital, Dior dumped him for Marc Bohan.
The young designer who had once been hailed for “saving” French fashion after the death of his legendary predecessor, found himself on the other side of too many conservatisms. He was unable to guarantee Dior’s profits. He was unable to fulfill his heteronormative gender duties. He was too frail to defend French empire. And because of this, France threw him in a prison-like facility where, when he wasn’t pumped full of massive amounts of tranquilizers or undergoing electroshocks, he feared for his life. His time there permanently scarred him, and he would forever struggle with addiction and severe mental health issues for the rest of his life. Watch the 2018 documentary Celebration, which is more about Bergé’s long-term struggle to prop up an ever-flagging Saint Laurent than anything else, and witness what remained of him on the other side of his career; it is no small marvel that he was able to mount any sort of artistic effort at all. That is the cost of occupation; rather than allow the Algerians to be Algerians, France threw away countless lives—including Saint Laurent’s—and seemingly infinite resources to stand athwart their freedom, which they wrested for themselves in 1962. It didn’t have to be like that. It never has to be like that.