Based on an intriguing little stub on The Awl, I found myself reading this brilliantly insane interview with Stefano Pilati, head of YSL. With a title like “The End of Elegance,” how could it be anything but grand? The “this-is-not-your-world” bar was set high with “He was sitting in his office in Paris, dressed to the nines, while I wasted away on my bed like a Nan Goldin photograph.” It was later topped – easily – by everything else that was said. Including “[w]hen people enter our store they imagine cashmeres, silk cravats, shirts in crepe de chine, crocodile shoes. Obviously, we make them, but it’s like hitting myself in the balls. I have 800 cashmere coats and 900 silk cravats.” What does that even mean?
I smirked my way through the first page-and-a-half of self-congratulatory nonsense, before coming to this gem:
“Consider this: Yves Saint Laurent was one of the first designers to revisit vintage. If you read his biography, you’ll see it. He used to go to London to the first secondhand markets and find clothes from the 30s. That’s how he invented the tuxedo. He bought a man’s smoking jacket and put it on one of his muses.”
I…hm. I am certain – certain – that Yves Saint Laurent did not invent the tuxedo. But then, who did? Thank goodness I’m using the internet, and there are thousands of answers for everything. According to the myth the internet sets out, the tuxedo as we know it was “invented” in 1886 by a wealthy tobacco magnate named Pierre Lorillard IV. Yes please! Mr. Lorillard and his wealthy tobacco magnate family lived in New York state – slightly upstate from New York City in a town called Tuxedo Park.
Tuxedo Park is a place I know well, since fully half of our camping expeditions start with either a train or bus ride to or through Tuxedo Park. It is definitely a place for the hoity-toity, though I’m not sure how many magnates of any kind live there now. Tuxedo apparently derives from p’tauk-seet-tough, an Algonquin phrase meaning “home of the bear.”
So! Mr. Lorillard “invented” this new formal wear for men, and named it after the town where he was busy being a rich, rich, rich, rich, rich man. It is unclear whether he actually wore his invention or not – I prefer the version of the story in which his son, Griswold Lorillard, was rebellious enough to go against the grain and wear the short jacket.
The takeaway, of course, is that major fashion house designers are all insane, and can’t be taken seriously about anything.
“But I love this experience, and I love my job. I’m more grateful for the lifestyle this job has bought me than for the fame or the recognition. If I walk the streets and somebody recognises me and asks for my autograph… well, it stuns me. I ask myself, “What did I do?” I mean, are you sure you want my autograph? Because, if we lived in Picasso’s time, what would this person do if they met Picasso? Would they ask him to kill them? “
Amazing.
