My MANy Bags News #153

Tom Ford: Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge "Made My Life Such Misery"

Found this article on Fashionologie, as published on The Advocate magazine... oooh, 'dog' fights, not 'cat fights' also exist in the 'upper management' of the fashion world. Poor Tom... Poor YSL... There's always 2 sides to a story. So this was something interesting to read about.

The relationship between Yves Saint Laurent, his business partner Pierre Berge, and his ready-to-wear successor Tom Ford was clearly a strained one. In 2004 as Ford was leaving the label, Saint Laurent said of Ford: "I think he has a lot of talent for, what do you call it, marketing. But he never showed interest in the archives." In between tales of his first sexual escapades and how he snuck his longtime partner Richard Buckley into A Single Man, Ford returns the favor in the December 2009-January 2010 issue of The Advocate:

“I don’t even remember much about my time at Yves Saint Laurent, though I do think some of my best collections were [there]—other than that black-and-white initial one. That one wasn’t very successful and wasn’t very good. But being at Yves Saint Laurent was such a negative experience for me even though the business boomed while I was there. Yves and his partner, Pierre Bergé, were so difficult and so evil and made my life such misery. I’d lived in France off and on and had always loved it. I went to college in France. It wasn’t until I started working in France that I began to dislike it. They would call the fiscal police, and they would show up at our offices. You are not able to work an employee more than 35 hours a week. They’re like Nazis, those police. They’d come marching in, and you had to let them in and they’d interview my secretary. And they can fine you and shut you down. Pierre was the one calling them. I’ve never talked about this on the record before, but it was an awful time for me. Pierre and Yves were just evil. So Yves Saint Laurent doesn’t exist for me. I have letters from Yves Saint Laurent that are so mean you cannot even believe such vitriol is possible. I don’t think he was high when he wrote them either. I just think he was jealous, and Yves and I were friends before I took over the company. But then we began to move the company forward and were very successful . . . he just became so insanely jealous . . . that phase in my life just doesn’t exist anymore.”

Source: Fashionologie