Discover Loulou de La Falaise, Yves Saint Laurent’s creative right hand

The Biography of Yves Saint Laurent’s creative right hand Loulou de La Falaise is best known as Yves Saint Laurent’s creative right hand and closest friend, but her story is fascinating on its own. “Inventing oneself is a way of earning one’s living” - Loulou de La Falaise Published in 2018, Christopher Petkanas masterfully weaves the voices of more than 100 interviews to create a complete biography of Loulou de La Falaise (1947-2011). This is especially impressive because it mostly covers a drug fueled, sex-crazed, and all-together wild era that most participants do not remember. Reading like a cocktail party conversation and inspired by Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s 1982 biography of Edie Sedgwick, “Edie”, Loulou’s story is told through the first-person statements of the people who were there. Instead of telling the story from one perspective, we hear the words of her friends, colleagues, enemies, and admirers, a Who’s Who of fashion history, including Inès de la Fressange, Christian Louboutin, Ricardo Bofill, Andrè Leon Talley, Robert Goossens, Jacques Grange, Hubert de Givenchy, Kenzo Takada, Diane Von Furstenberg, Manolo Blahnik, Cecil Beaton, Kenneth Jay Lane, Tom Ford, Elsa Peretti and Christian Lacroix. Highlights include the working dynamic behind the scenes at the Saint Laurent fashion house, not only as told by Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé, but also between the three people crucial to Saint Laurent in his daily life: Loulou de La Falaise, Anne-Marie Muñoz, and Betty Catroux. There is also the untold story of Loulou’s design leadership for a generation of Saint Laurent accessories, especially the couture costume jewelry, and the story behind the largest private collection of Saint Laurent jewelry, the Kendra and Allan Daniel collection, which I hope will one day be a part of a museum exhibition. Gossipy, glorifying, mean and multilayered, peers, outsiders, lovers, and haters help create an incredible second look at the world behind Alice Drake’s 2006 fashion history masterpiece, “The Beautiful Fall”. As such, this book is a necessary addition to the library of anyone interested in fashion history.