Pierre Bergé
Co-founder of Yves Saint Laurent who was the designer’s romantic partner and power broker
PIERRE BERGÉ, who has died aged 86, was the businessman behind the French fashion house Yves Saint Laurent for more than four decades, and the romantic partner of its eponymous founder for 18 years. The pair had met at a dinner party in Paris in 1958, shortly after the 22-yearold Saint Laurent had been propelled to fame with his first collection for Dior. But there were other rivals to his position as head designer. In 1960 Saint Laurent was conscripted for military service in Algeria, and Dior handed his role to Marc Bohan.
Subjected to severe hazing as a new recruit, Saint Laurent suffered a nervous breakdown and Bergé had him invalided home. When Dior refused to allow the designer back, Bergé successfully sued for breach of contract and ploughed the money into setting up a rival fashion house. By 1966 Yves Saint Laurent had its first ready-to-wear boutique in Paris; within two years, there were 17 others.
While the fashion world hailed Saint Laurent’s creative genius, his partner’s business acumen made them both fabulously rich. Bergé spent the next decade negotiating contracts with product manufacturers worldwide. By buying out Charles of the Ritz, which owned the YSL cosmetics line, in 1986, he increased operating income from £9.5 million to £44 million.
Saint Laurent became the sole designer to own his own perfume; Bergé, meanwhile, served as president of Yves Saint Laurent International until 2002. Under his direction, the YSL logo appeared on products ranging from handbags to own-label cigarettes. The company was the first French design house to be floated on the stock exchange, when it was oversubscribed 27 times.
Small and powerfully built, Bergé cut a strikingly different figure from the lanky and fragile Saint Laurent, and the relationship was often fraught. “One week they’re so close,” observed a friend, “the next they’re not talking; Pierre is slamming doors, Yves is slumped tragically across a sofa throwing burning looks at him.”
Saint Laurent battled with manic depression throughout his life and would fall into cycles of drinking and despondency, leaving Bergé to act as his handler and occasional nursemaid. By the mid-1980s Saint Laurent was walking with difficulty; his features swelled from overuse of tranquillisers and he developed facial tics. Media interest in his health grew so intense that Bergé had to issue a statement denying that his partner had Aids.
Though their romantic liaison ended in 1976, Pierre Bergé remained deferential to the increasingly reclusive Saint Laurent, once describing him to the press as “a man of exceptional intelligence practising the trade of an imbecile”. They continued to live within walking distance of each other, and shortly before Yves Saint Laurent died of brain cancer, aged 71, a deathbed ceremony made him and Bergé civil partners under the law.
Pierre Vital Georges Bergé was born on November 14 1930 on the Ile d’oléran off the Atlantic coast of France. His father, also called Pierre, was a tax inspector and his mother Christiane (née Sicard) worked as a Montessori teacher; both were Left-wing activists.
Though bookish he had little truck with education, and left school without gaining his baccalaureate. He settled in Paris and began dealing in second-hand books, while devoting much of his time to political activism. He joined the World Citizens movement, founded by the American peace advocate Garry Davis, and once shared a prison cell with Albert Camus overnight following a protest outside the United Nations. Other friends at that time included the anarchist poet Andre Breton, who contributed regularly to Bergé’s political paper, La
Patrie Mondiale, and the Expressionist painter Bernard Buffet.
In a presage of his later relationship with Saint Laurent, Bergé became Buffet’s live-in boyfriend and an enthusiastic champion of the artist’s work. The Dior model Victoire Doutreleau recalled watching in appalled fascination at one of Buffet’s exhibitions as Bergé physically hauled his lover from one potential client to the next. “Life revolved around Bernard’s work,” Bergé later admitted; and when public interest in that work began to stall, so did the relationship.
In 1958 Buffet married the model and actress Annabel Schwob de Lur. Meanwhile Bergé’s initial coup de foudre at his first encounter with Yves Saint Laurent had developed into a passionate affair. “I saw in him someone with an immense talent,” he recalled, “very introverted and with many different faces and secrets. I understood all that – the talent and the enigma – very quickly.”
From the late 1970s Bergé also produced various concerts at the Théâtre de l’athénée-louis Jouvet in Paris. These “Musical Mondays” brought him into contact with performers including Placido Domingo and Joan Sutherland. After he turned down a post in the cabinet of president Francois Mitterrand, the authorities named him president of the Association of Paris Opera. Bergé oversaw the opening of the $400 million Bastille Opera house, but caused uproar by ousting Daniel Barenboin as its artistic and musical director. Barenboin accused him and the culture ministers of “administrative terrorism”. Yet the opening season, in March 1990, met with great acclaim. Bergé remained in the position for another three years.
He served as the founding president of the French Fashion Institute and a co-founder of the Museum of Fashion Arts. Francois Mitterrand named him a chevalier of the Legion d’honneur in 1985. Two years later he was made an officier of the National Order of Merit. He was an energetic campaigner for gay rights, and a collector of both Islamic art and first editions.
A reputation for outspokenness led to occasional feuds, and he was scathing about the director Bertrand Bonello’s unauthorised fashion biopic Saint Laurent (2014), which coincided with Jalil Lespert’s film Yves Saint Laurent. While Lespert was given permission to film at the couple’s villa in Morocco, Bergé took to Twitter to threaten legal action against Bonello. “Mean film, homophobic, in which only Ulliel exists,” he added, referring to the actor who played Saint Laurent in Bonello’s version.
An atheist, Pierre Bergé expressed a wish for his ashes to be scattered in Marrakesh. This year he married Madison Cox, an American landscape architect, who survives him.
Pierre Bergé, born November 14 1930, died September 8 2017