Christopher Petkanas brings the world of haute couture and one of its goddesses—Loulou de la Falaise—alive in this exuberantly entertaining oral biography.
Loulou de La Falaise (1947-2011) was one of the most important women in the history of twentieth-century fashion, a brilliant iconoclast descending in a direct line from Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. Born into a family of aesthetes, she was the daughter of a French nobleman and a British mother, Maxime Birley, a tornado of creative flamboyance. In 1968, Loulou’s Bohemian spirit, coupled with her fearless sense of style, caught the attention of Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008)—the most influential designer of his time.
Thus began an exquisitely intimate and sometimes painful personal and professional relationship, unequaled in the annals of artistic collaboration: for thirty years, until his retirement in 2002, Loulou de La Falaise was Yves Saint Laurent’s right hand, muse, chief confidante, and the Merlin behind all those extravagant accessories—clanking bronze cuffs, towering fur toques, necklaces with stones the size of boulders—that became a crucial element of the YSL “look.” Saint Laurent, a famously troubled genius, relied on Loulou to inspire him, make him laugh, talk him off the ledge—and get him to the next groundbreaking collection.
Parallel to this passionate narrative runs another, darker one, exposing the underbelly of fashion at its highest level and revealed here for the first time. Many times over the decades, Loulou, feeling devoured and unfulfilled, wanted to break away from Yves. After he died, the glory years when everything had been paid for behind her, she faced with increasing desperation the bare need to earn a living.
In Loulou & Yves, Christopher Petkanas traces Loulou de La Falaise’s life chronologically through the memories of more than two hundred “voices”: husbands, lovers, extended family, friends, enemies, slightly less bitter detractors, colleagues, groupies, Yves, pundits, hangers-on, Loulou herself. Topping the A-list of figures who tell her story in their own words, uncensored, are Andy Warhol, Karl Lagerfeld, Mick Jagger, Cecil Beaton, Tom Ford, Diana Vreeland, Thadée Klossowski, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Hubert de Givenchy, Manolo Blahnik, Diane von Furstenberg, Elsa Peretti, Betty Catroux, John Richardson, Alber Elbaz, Christian Louboutin, Grace Coddington, Ben Brantley, Bruce Chatwin, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, André Leon Talley, and Pierre Bergé. Christopher Petkanas brings them all together in Loulou & Yves for a cocktail party that swirls around one of the most scintillating women the fashion world has ever known.
