Loulou de La Falaise; 4 May 1948 – 5 November 2011) was a
fashion muse and designer of fashion, accessories and jewellery associated with
Yves Saint Laurent. Author Judith Thurman, writing in The New Yorker magazine,
called La Falaise "the quintessential Rive Gauche haute bohémienne".The
daughter of an Anglo-Irish fashion model and a French marquis, she helped
inspire Saint Laurent's 1966 women's tuxedo Le Smoking and his see-through
blouses, according to The Independent.
Louise Vava Lucia Henriette Le Bailly de La Falaise was born
on 4 May 1948 in England, the eldest child and only daughter of Alain, Count de
La Falaise (1903–1977), a French writer, translator and publisher, and his
second wife, the former Maxime Birley (1922–2009), an Anglo-Irish fashion
model, whom photographer Cecil Beaton once told, "You are the only English
woman I know who manages to be really chic in really hideous clothes".
Three of her christening names honoured relations: Louise
(her father's elder sister, who died as a teenager); Vava (one of the names of
her maternal grandmother, Lady Birley); and Henriette (the name of her paternal
grandmother, Henriette Hennessy, Comtesse Alain Hocquart de Turtot). La Falaise
was allegedly baptised not with holy water but with Shocking, the scent by
fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, her mother's employer.
After her parents' divorce in 1950, following her mother's
infidelities and a French court's declaration of her as an unfit mother, Loulou
and her brother went to live with foster families until she was seven. After
that, La Falaise was enrolled in English boarding schools, and "her school
holidays were shared between mother, father, and the second foster
family". She attended a boarding school in Switzerland as well as the
Lycée Français de New York, though was expelled from each due to her rebellious
nature.
La Falaise's maternal grandfather was portrait painter Sir
Oswald Birley, and an uncle was Mark Birley (1930–2007), restaurateur and
founder of the London nightclub, "Annabel's". Another uncle, her
father's elder brother, was Henri de La Falaise, Marquis de La Coudraye,
(1898–1972), film director and third husband of American actress Gloria Swanson
(1899–1983). Her paternal grandfather was a three-time French Olympic gold
medallist in fencing, Louis Gabriel de La Falaise (1866–1910).
Loulou de La Falaise had one sibling, Alexis Richard Dion
Oswald Le Bailly de La Falaise,(1948-2004), a furniture designer, who appeared
in the Andy Warhol film Tub Girls. After the death of her uncle in 1972, her
father became the Marquis de La Coudraye, as he died without issue. After her
father's death in 1977, her brother assumed the title, Marquis de La Coudraye
(until his death in 2004).
Her niece, Lucie Le Bailly de La Falaise (born 19 February
1973), a model, is the wife of Marlon Richards, son of Keith Richards and Anita
Pallenberg. Her nephew, Daniel Le Bailly de La Falaise (born 6 September 1970),
is a professional chef and food writer and the current Marquis de La Coudraye.
The family's actual surname is Le Bailly, though members
have used Le Bailly de La Falaise, referring to an ancestral estate, since the
mid 19th century; it is typically abbreviated to de La Falaise.
La Falaise moved to New York City in the late 1960s, where
she briefly modelled for American Vogue before turning to designing printed
fabrics for Halston. Late in the decade she worked as a junior editor at the
British society magazine Queen, during which time she met Saint Laurent.Eventually,
she moved to Paris, where she joined his haute-couture firm in 1972. Responding
to a description of her as a Saint Laurent muse in 2010, La Falaise responded,
“For me, a muse is someone who looks glamorous but is quite passive, whereas I
was very hard-working. I worked from 9am to sometimes 9pm, or even 2am. I
certainly wasn't passive.”
"Her official task was to bring her eccentric style to
accessories and jewellery, and she duly came up with often-chunky designs
incorporating large colourful stones, enamel work or rock crystal". La
Falaise also inspired Saint Laurent with her inventive wardrobe: "one week
she was Desdemona in purple velvet flares and a crown of flowers, the next
Marlene [Dietrich] with plucked crescent-shaped eyebrows". In 2002, when
Saint Laurent retired, La Falaise began producing her own clothing and
jewellery designs. As reported in The New York Times by fashion writer Cathy
Horyn, "The clothing line captured much of her rare taste—well-cut blazers
in the best English tweeds, French sailor pants in linen, striped silk blouses
with cheeky black lace edging, masculine walking coats with fur linings, and
gorgeous knits in perfectly chosen colors".
She also designed cloisonné boxes and porcelain vases for
Asiatides, as well as jewellery for the boutique of the Majorelle Gardens in
Marrakech, Morocco.
After more than three decades designing jewellery and
accessories for Saint Laurent, La Falaise launched her own fashion business,
designing ready-to-wear, costume jewellery, and accessories, which were
retailed in the U.S. as well as two Loulou de La Falaise shops in Paris.
She sold simplified versions of her jewellery designs in a
line created for the Home Shopping Network and created costume jewellery for
Oscar de la Renta. She operated two of her own shops in Paris, one of which was
designed by her brother, Alexis.
On 6 October 1966, she married Desmond FitzGerald, 29th
Knight of Glin (1937-2011), an Irish nobleman. They separated the following
year and divorced in 1970. Her title upon marrying the knight was Madam
FitzGerald.
On 11 June 1977, she married Thadée Klossowski de Rola, a
French writer, who is the younger son of the painter Balthus in Paris, France.
She wore a harem-and-turban ensemble from Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. They
had one child:
Anna Klossowski de Rola, co-founder of the contemporary art
collection called "MGM."
La Falaise died at Gisors' hospital, France, on 5 November
2011.The cause of death was not specified, other than as the result of a
"long illness".An obituary published in Women's Wear Daily stated,
"According to sources, de la Falaise was diagnosed with lung cancer last
June, but implored intimates to keep her health a private matter".
 |
Loulou de la Falaise: Yves Saint
Laurent’s reluctant muse
For 30 years, she helped Saint Laurent see things through
rose-coloured glasses. A new book reveals why the troubled designer was drawn
to his right-hand woman’s more-is-more style
Lauren Cochrane
Wed 2 May 2018 06.00 BST
Loulou de la Falaise, a woman whose Wikipedia entry starts
by describing her as “a fashion muse”, always gave the idea short shrift. “To
me, a muse comes to have cookies and a chat and looks frightfully smart,” she
said. “I didn’t see it as someone who worked as hard as I did.”
As detailed in Christopher Petkanas’s book, Loulou &
Yves, De la Falaise was by Yves Saint Laurent’s side for 30 years. They began
to work together in 1972. “He was very vague about [my job],” she remembered.
“He didn’t specify what I was going to do.” Her daily responsibilities show she
was a multitasker of the highest order. They included everything from helping
decide on the colour of a collection (“Yves has a phenomenal sense of colour,
but he needs me to jerk it out of his system,” she said), to the casting of
models (she encouraged the house to use Kate Moss), designing the jewellery and
walking Saint Laurent’s French bulldog, Moujik. Principally, however, De la
Falaise was there as a taste check, someone to try ideas on – sometimes
literally – and to brainstorm with. “She is charm, poetry, excess, extravagance
and elegance all in one blow,” said the designer. “We make a stewing pot.
Things bubble and brew.”
De la Falaise’s style
is now the stuff of legend – and Pinterest boards. Headscarves and turbans
became her trademark – on her wedding day in 1977, she married Thadée
Klossowski in a white turban with coral-red tassels – while her attitude to
dressing could be summed up as: “Why wear one skirt/sweater/necklace if you can
wear four?” As with all style icons – from Jane Birkin to Kate Moss and Rihanna
– a frustratingly indefinable flair was at the heart of it. “I’ve always longed
to pull off wearing a couture dress with a bit of old tat from a flea market,”
says De la Falaise’s sometime associate Nicky Samuel in Petkanas’s book, “but
only a few women succeed.” De la Falaise was one of them.
If De la Falaise was part-inspiration at Saint Laurent, she
was also there to gee up the famously troubled designer, with her trademark
light disposition. Betty Catroux, who is also described as a Saint Laurent
muse, says De la Falaise “saw everything through rose-coloured glasses. She was
our Prozac”.
As with many people who present as sweetness and light, De
la Falaise had her own troubles. Born in the UK to the French writer Alain de
la Falaise and socialite Maxime Birley, she and her brother Alexis were sent to
live with a couple in rural France as children. De la Falaise’s first
fashion-show experience was being taken to Paris as a child by her aunt, Gloria
Swanson, and she was friends with Andy Warhol by the time she was 15. She used
drugs and alcohol, and developed hepatitis in her 20s; she died three years
after Saint Laurent, in 2011, at the age of 63. While she had started her own
label after parting ways with Saint Laurent when he retired from the house in
2002, it is for her associations with the designer that she will be remembered
– muse or not. Her importance was summed up by Paris Match after she died. The
headline? “The second death of Yves Saint Laurent.”
|
Loulou & Yves: The Untold Story
of Loulou de La Falaise and the House of Saint Laurent
By Christopher Petkanas
No one interested in fashion, style, or the high-flying
intrigues of café society will want to miss the exuberantly entertaining oral
biography Loulou & Yves: The Untold Story of Loulou de La Falaise and the
House of Saint Laurent, by Christopher Petkanas.
Dauntless,“in the bone” style made Loulou de La Falaise one
of the great fashion firebrands of the twentieth century. Descending in a
direct line from Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, she was celebrated at her
death in 2011, aged just sixty-four, as the “highest of haute bohemia,” a
feckless adventuress in the art of living―and the one person Yves Saint Laurent
could not live without.
Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008) was the most influential
designer of his times; possibly also the most neurasthenic. In an exquisitely intimate,
sometimes painful personal and professional relationship, Loulou de La Falaise
was his creative right hand, muse, alter ego and the virtuoso behind all the
devastatingly flamboyant accessories that were a crucial component of the YSL
“look.” For thirty years, until his retirement in 2002, Yves relied on Loulou
to inspire him with the tilt of her hat, make him laugh and talk him off the
ledge―the enchanted formula that brought him from one historic collection to
the next.
Yves’s many tributes shape Loulou’s memory, as if everything
there was to know about this fugitive, Giacometti-like figure could be told by
her clanking bronze cuffs, towering fur toques, the turquoise boulders on her
fingers and her working friendship with the man who put women in pants. But
parallel to this storyline runs another, darker one, lifting the veil on
Loulou, a classic “number two” with a contempt for convention, and exposing the
underbelly of fashion at its highest level. Behind Yves’s encomiums are a pair
of aristocrat parents―Loulou’s shiftless French father and menacingly chic
English mother―who abandoned her to a childhood of foster care and sexual abuse
straight out of “Les Misérables”; Loulou’s recurring desperation to leave Yves
and go out on her own; and the grandiose myths surrounding her family. Loulou
felt that her life had been kidnapped by the operatic workings of the House of
Saint Laurent, and in her last years danced with financial ruin. Delving beyond
the “official” version of her life, Loulou & Yves unspools an elusive
fashion idol―nymphomaniacal, heedless and up to her bracelets in coke and
Boizel champagne―at the core of what used to be called “le beau monde.”
On the theory that everyone loves a cocktail party, Loulou
& Yves traces her life chronologically through the charming literary device
of oral biography, in which the spoken memories of more than two hundred
“voices”―husbands, lovers, extended family, friends, enemies, slightly less
bitter detractors, colleagues, groupies, pundits, and hangers-on―are seamlessly
interwoven with those of Yves and Loulou themselves. Readers mingle at the
party as invited guests, listening in on Andy Warhol and Karl Lagerfeld and
collecting clues from Mick Jagger and Tom Ford as the narrative unfolds.
Topping the A-list of figures who tell Loulou’s story in their own words,
uncensored, are Cecil Beaton, 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. In a fluent round of
sparkling conversation, author Christopher Petkanas brings them all together
for a party that swirls around one of the most scintillating women the fashion
world has ever known.
“She’s the sounding board,” Yves rhapsodizes of his second
self in Loulou & Yves, a sweeping, waspish work of fashion and social
history. “She’s never wrong.”
About Christopher Petkanas
Marjorie R. Williams author photo_credit Kent Lineback
While living in Paris, Christopher Petkanas covered Loulou
de La Falaise and the House of Saint Laurent from 1982 to 1988, picking up with
Loulou again more than two decades later, in 2010, the year before she died. He
has written for The New York Times, Vogue, and Architectural Digest, and his
previous books are At Home in France: Eating and Entertaining with the French,
and Parish-Hadley: Sixty Years of American Design (with Sister Parish and
Albert Hadley). He now resides in New York
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