That’s Not My Age

Loulou de la Falaise, 63, collaborated with Yves Saint Laurent for over 30 years, creating fabulous jewellery, providing a woman’s perspective on fashion and an enduring friendship. She died at home, just outside Paris, on Saturday. Her idiosyncratic style – with a love of colour and texture – was a source of inspiration for YSL. ‘He had a phenomenal sense of colour,’ she said about the designer,’ But he needed me to jerk it out of his system. He had it in him because he was brought up in colour, but then there was all that sort of good education and Parisian conformity. Most people think that if you use colour it won’t be comme il faut and I think I showed him that colour was not vulgar.’

Loulou de la Falaise, Yves Saint Laurent and Betty Catroux.

‘Everything was terribly inspiring,’ de la Falaise reminisced about seventies Paris, ‘The models were great fun, they were very inventive themselves style-wise and designers were very influenced by the way people put together a look. We didn’t have any money and that made us all the more inventive.’

Photos: style.com and zero1mag
Quotes: The Beautiful Fall by Alicia Drake