Pierre Bergé died September 8, at his home in Provence. He had been ill for some time—and was unable, for instance, to sit for a second interview with me earlier this summer. But the news of his death still took by surprise a country that had long considered him a constant. As French President Emmanuel Macron, long a favorite of Bergé's, wrote on Friday in a Twitter post: "He was on the side of the artists, the oppressed, and minorities. In Pierre Bergé a guide, an activist, disappeared; a memory of the century." Although succinct, this is a perfect summary of a truly sans pareil figure who was always more than the man behind Yves Saint Laurent: Pierre Bergé represented both the highest echelons of culture as well as the continued pursuit of social justice, no matter the price. In a sense, Pierre Bergé was France.
To say that Pierre Bergé is the former partner of Yves Saint Laurent is to state the obvious but miss the point. Yes, the 86-year-old industrialist was indeed the lover, the companion, and the corporate strategist of the legendary designer, who died in 2008. Personally and professionally, Bergé lingered in the shadows behind Saint Laurent for decades, transforming the unknown apprentice of Christian Dior into a worldwide sensation and standing by a tortured genius throughout his fatal descent into drug and alcohol addiction.
The two technically separated in the late 1970s, but they were never really apart, even joining in a civil union just days before Saint Laurent’s death, as same-sex marriage was not yet legal in France. As Bergé said in a tearful eulogy at the designer’s funeral, in the presence of everyone who was anyone in France, “The divorce was inevitable, but the love never stopped.”
In the years that followed, this is how most people have come to know Pierre Bergé: as a protagonist, or maybe even as the best supporting actor, in one of the 20th century’s most profound sagas of all-consuming and “crazy love,” to quote the title of the 2011 documentary made about the famous couple.
But this is not at all the Bergé known in France, where the collector and businessman is a towering, even totemic, figure. You could argue, and many have, that there would never have been an Yves Saint Laurent without Pierre Bergé—but you could never argue the opposite.
Bergé, who has since remarried, exchanging vows in May with a longtime friend, the American celebrity gardener Madison Cox, has presided over the intersection of French politics and culture for decades, befriending presidents, running magazines, and exerting the kind of influence that makes Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s role in New York seem like that of your basic Junior Leaguer.
In other words, the question is not whether there would have been an Yves Saint Laurent without Pierre Bergé. The question is whether there would be the France we know today.
There are those in Paris who will tell you—without any irony whatsoever—that the story of Pierre Bergé is the story of France in the second half of the 20th century: often incorrigible, sometimes truculent, always ascendant. This is perhaps a bit of an overstatement, as an octogenarian multimillionaire may not be the best guide to decolonization and its discontents. Nevertheless, there is something to the association, however grandiose.
Bergé is that rare thing, a conduit between what France used to be and what it is still becoming. Having known well the likes of Louis Aragon, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Cocteau—all of whom he recalled in his memoir—he is among the last living relics of a long vanished and quasi-Proustian world of salons and dinners and vernissages.
But he also ranks among the first public faces of France’s decidedly modern progressive politics. Says Bernard-Henri Lévy, his longtime friend and erstwhile collaborator, “It’s rare that someone who was such an embodiment of high society then became such an embodiment of the modern left, but this is what characterizes Pierre Bergé.”
Bergé either currently sits, or at some point has sat, on the board of every important French cultural institution, and he has made—and even bankrolled—political careers. Through Globe, a magazine he co-founded with Lévy in the mid-1980s, Bergé was hugely influential in reelecting François Mitterrand, France’s struggling Socialist president, in 1988; last year he was among the first to support and take seriously the candidacy of a political unknown called Emmanuel Macron, who went on to win the Elysée Palace in a landslide in May.
In 2010, Bergé saved Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, from extinction when he put up the cash with two other investors to become a majority shareholder. And throughout he has arguably been France’s most prominent advocate for same-sex equality.
Unsurprisingly, these activities have earned Bergé his share of enemies. Throughout France’s highly contentious 2017 presidential election, for instance, he loomed in the background, the very embodiment, for Marine Le Pen and her aides, of the so-called “system” they so desperately sought to destroy.
In late March, Le Pen said she would file a formal complaint against Le Monde for publishing details about her spending scandal, in which, as a deputy in the European Parliament, she was accused of siphoning off EU funds to pay her own campaign bills. The revelations were to be ignored, she insisted, because Le Monde is “directed by Pierre Bergé, who is at the same time a supporter of Emmanuel Macron.”
Then, in the campaign’s final debate, Le Pen had this to say to her opponent: “In your society, Mr. Macron, everything is for sale—first the bellies, as Pierre Bergé said!” Televised into millions of French living rooms, the comment was meant to remind viewers of a remark Bergé had made years before, campaigning for surrogate parenthood rights for French same-sex couples. “Rent her belly to make a baby or rent her arms to work in a factory—what’s the difference?” he asked in 2013.
Nevertheless, French voters—even as many remain culturally Catholic—rejected her appeal, opting instead to preserve…well, the France of Pierre Bergé.
As Le Pen can attest, what happens to those who dare to cross the aging impresario is never an enviable fate. To hear the designer Tom Ford tell it, “misery” and “vitriol” are the principal punishments for any number of unknown crimes.
Ford served as the creative director of Yves Saint Laurent in the early 2000s, after Bergé sold the label, producing designs that allegedly appalled both Bergé and the couturier. The brand’s namesake said of his young successor, “The poor guy does what he can.”
By the same token, if Bergé likes you, his approval can make all the difference. Olivier Gabet, director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the fashion and design museum located in the Louvre’s western wing, recalls being stunned during the interview for his current job, in 2013, when he appeared before a steering committee chaired, naturally, by Bergé. “Are you going to run this museum like a commercial Kunsthaus?” Gabet remembers being asked.
In the years since, he and Bergé have become close. “If you connect with him,” Gabet says, “he will ask you all the right and demanding questions, which is itself a form of generosity.”
Not unlike Charles de Gaulle, Bergé appears to be animated by “une certaine idée de la France,” the notion that, in a nation forever obsessed with its own decline, there exists an attainable ideal of perfection—in the glorious past but also in the unknown future. This is the red thread that seems to unite the otherwise disparate elements of his many engagements: financial, cultural, and political.
“The great thing about France is that you can believe there is a common context of education and culture,” says Joan Juliet Buck, who was editor in chief of French Vogue for much of the 1990s and who has known Bergé for years. “Pierre has really made that all the more real.”
If Bergé has never held elected office, that has never been his aim. What he is and has been is France’s unofficial curator, the figure in public life most engaged in sculpting the nation into an image of cultural refinement on the one hand and political progressivism on the other. This has always been a Sisyphean struggle, but Bergé has yet to give up.
In the twilight of his life, the figurative curator is now a literal one, planning in painstaking detail recreations of what was once and never will be again. In the fall of 2017 he will open two museums dedicated to the designs and inspirations of Yves Saint Laurent. One will be in Paris—at 5 Avenue Marceau, the former site of the couture house in which Saint Laurent worked for nearly 30 years. The other will open in the couple’s beloved Marrakech, an homage to the Berber aesthetic that informed so much of what became the YSL signature.
If the museums are likely his final public intervention, Bergé insists they are not just material love letters to the man he made famous. “Art is not a dress,” he says. “Fashion is not an art, but it takes an artist to make.” This is the museums’ purpose: to present the mind of an artist at work, in a world of transience and instant gratification, where, for Bergé, few true artists can survive.
When I step into his office, the elderly man asks me my age and tells me that once upon a time there existed a certain “art of living.” As a 27-year-old wearing a jacket but not a tie, I suspect there is little doubt in his mind that I am incontrovertible evidence of civilization’s inevitable and inexorable decline.
“Take you, for example. Never, 20 years ago, would you have come to see me without a tie. And I find it very well that you come without a tie,” Bergé is quick to add, with a wry smile. “I find you very well. But. The art of living has changed.”
This could have been nostalgia, snobbery, or even philosophy. There are traces of each, after all, in the vernacular spoken by a certain type of octogenarian accustomed to living among bronzes by Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. “Fashion today is houses that I do not know, where I have no action. It’s Zara, it’s H&M, it’s Uniqlo, and that’s how fashion is going to be today.” C'est noté.
We’re ensconced in Bergé’s foundation on the Avenue Marceau, in the tony 16th Arrondissement; the oak-paneled walls behind us display a monumental Warhol silkscreen of Saint Laurent in profile, chin on fist in the style of Rodin’s Penseur.
“People do not understand,” Bergé says. “Haute couture is not an art, but it has accompanied an art of living. And the art of living has disappeared.” Fashion, he continues, is ephemeral, and this is why it can never be seen as art, which is supposed to endure as an end in and of itself. Fashion, by contrast, is a means to an end, he says.
“You can illuminate it as you like, but a dress really only exists when it is worn by a living woman who moves with it, who sits with it, who lives with it.”
Yves Saint Laurent was a fashion designer, perhaps even the designer. Along with Coco Chanel and Christian Dior, his mentor, Saint Laurent was the key visionary of the postwar aesthetic, arguably the couturier most responsible for the era’s unique blend of psychedelic splendor and subdued sexiness. In the 1960s and ’70s his designs (Le Smoking most of all, his inimitably sleek and suggestive tuxedos for women) revolutionized the boundaries of acceptability, heralding sensuality, scandal, and transgression.
Bergé, soon after Saint Laurent’s death, put it this way when interviewed on French public radio: “Chanel gave women freedom. Yves Saint Laurent gave them power.”
In any case, all of this was irrelevant to Saint Laurent’s stature as an artist, Bergé tells me. As powerful as they were, his designs were as ephemeral as the rest. After all, who today wears the Mondrian cocktail dress? Those pieces mostly sit in museums—in the Costume Institute of the Met, in New York (where Saint Laurent became, in 1983, the first living artist to be featured in an exhibition), as well as in the forthcoming museums Bergé has planned.
“All fashion designers today take themselves for artists, but they are not,” he says. So what makes Saint Laurent different?
For Bergé, the answer was his painstaking process, a French finesse that today is nowhere to be found. “I watched him work for 40 years, even 50 years,” he says of his late partner. “I saw the rigor he had. I’ve rarely seen someone who had that drive, that absolute necessity for detail, for accomplishment.” These days, he laments, “there are not many French artists,” a painful reality in a country that was once the most fertile soil for European cultural production in all its forms.
The project of the Saint Laurent museums, Bergé says, is to show not only a process but a pursuit, an essence. This is why, for instance, the exhibition will avoid items purchased by clients. “What is a client?” Bergé asks. “It’s a woman who doesn’t like the dress in blue and who wants it in green, who doesn’t want her collar to be there but here,” he says, gesturing to different points on his neck.
“This is very different from the original model,” he says, which is what will be on display. “We have conserved here the items made by Yves, designed by Yves, and placed on mannequins as Yves himself made them.” These are not commodities, he says; these are masterpieces. “You see what I mean?”
In the end, this is Bergé’s contradiction: a total obsession with preserving the past, coupled with an equal and opposite obsession with shaping the future. He is a perfectionist, a nostalgic, but also an optimist.
“I do not like the past,” he makes sure to tell me. “I do not cry for the past. Contrary to what people say, I find that it is better today than yesterday. I think it will be better tomorrow.” On the surface, words like these can sound like platitudes, but when pronounced by Pierre Bergé they are convincing, because his entire working life has been spent advocating for a more equitable and tolerant society.
This was first apparent in Bergé’s longtime association with Mitterrand, who was president from 1981 to ’95, and especially in his role in Mitterrand’s “grands projets.” These were vast initiatives to bring culture to the masses and monuments symbolizing progressive modernity to the luxurious but staid Parisian landscape. Bergé served as the director of one of these projects, the Opéra Bastille, from 1988 to ’93.
The opera still stands today, a concrete and glass ziggurat in the most symbolic of Paris’s squares, decorated with sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle. Many, especially people in Bergé’s circle, criticized grands projets the as pseudo-utopian absurdities that were ersatz and ugly (another was the glass pyramid designed by I.M. Pei outside the Louvre). Many still love to hate them. “But me,” Bergé says, “I don’t like the picturesque merely for the picturesque. I like real life and liberty. I’m a man of the left. And Paris today is a Paris far more free than when I first knew it.”
Nowhere has Bergé’s influence in French life been stronger than in defending and normalizing homosexuality in a nominally secular but culturally Catholic country. In fact, this is the area where he earned his status not only as a man of influence but as a moral consciousness unafraid to defend society’s weakest members—whatever the cost.
“In French history, he remains the most important gay patron,” says Frédéric Martel, France’s preeminent historian of homosexuality and the author of Global Gay, soon to appear in English. “One can consider Pierre the grandfather of the French gay movement of the last 30 years.”
The AIDS epidemic was more severe in France than it was in the rest of Western Europe, but there was almost no attention paid to what was then referred to merely as the “gay cancer.” Bergé wasted no time in taking action, immediately donating to what few medical research initiatives existed in those years and founding nonprofit organizations to lobby the government—by then under the control of his friend Mitterrand—for more assistance.
“Pierre is not an abstract fighter,” says Thomas Doustaly, a reporter for Le Monde who worked for 10 years as the editor of Têtu, an LGBT magazine Bergé bought in the mid-’90s that ultimately became a major vehicle for its owner’s activism. “He actually gives money and pays for the causes he supports. That’s not the French way at all—it’s a very American approach to philanthropy.”
The fight has continued long after the AIDS crisis. Bergé was among the most vocal advocates of legalizing same-sex marriage, which passed in the French parliament in 2013. It was in this campaign that he put his recent discovery of Twitter to use, setting off minor explosions in 140 characters. In March 2013 he retweeted: “If a bomb explodes on the Champs Elysees because of the #laManifPourTous, I won’t be the one crying.”
The Manif Pour Tous (“Demonstration for All”) is the anti–gay marriage lobby, whose leadership immediately accused him of inciting terrorism. Bergé still tweets, and clearly with a certain delight in trolling those who opposed the cause.
The New Yorker, in 1994, concluded a rather unflattering profile of Bergé with the line, “Pierre Bergé is going out of style.” This has not turned out to be true, as he has continued reinventing himself as an essential presence in French life over the decades that have followed. But for a man like Bergé, nearing the end of his life, the struggle is not so much against time as against irrelevance. I ask him if this isn’t another purpose of the museums, which will—in the most literal sense imaginable—solidify his legacy on the face of the city he loves.
Bergé says that the Saint Laurent museums are about preserving items “for researchers.” As he puts it, “We look for the plans of Roman houses we discover; we want to know how the Celts lived. This is the same thing.” I press him a little. Aren’t the museums also about control? Not necessarily of any particular narrative but of a world entirely of his own design. He fingers a wooden Santibelli statuette on his desk, one in a collection that he tells me consists of nearly 150.
“Of controlling in a way that we can’t control our lives?” he asks. “Maybe. I haven’t reflected on that.”