If costuming a film is hard, costuming one about a preeminent fashion designer seems herculean. Fortunately for Madeline Fontaine, the costume designer tasked to outfit the new Yves Saint Laurent biopic, the world-famous house was on her side.
“We were lucky to have free access to all the archives,” Fontaine tells The Post. “The drawings, the pictures . . . Normally we have to collect all that, [but for this] it was all together in the archives of the [Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent] Foundation.”
That foundation is supervised by Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s longtime business partner, who lent Fontaine some 77 original pieces from a veritable fashion treasury for Jalil Lespert’s “Yves Saint Laurent,” a lush ode to the late couturier’s life opening Wednesday at Film Forum.
Despite the favorable circumstances, Fontaine, who also conceived Audrey Tautou’s look for the Oscar-winning “Amélie,” had to recreate almost as many costumes from scratch, presenting some tricky blanks to fill.
“[The foundation has] a kind of museum with the pieces they’ve kept from the collections,” she says. “But they start very late, from about ’72. From the oldest collections there are very few.”
For a movie that begins in 1957 — when the 21-year-old Christian Dior protégé took over the house following his mentor’s sudden death — that meant often using one-dimensional pictures as the only reference point for reconstructing iconic pieces.
“When you see something [in a photo] it’s difficult to imagine how [the designer] would make it,” Fontaine explains of the early collection vêtements, including the Saint Laurent-designed Dior dress Dovima modeled astride elephants in a famed 1955 Richard Avedon photo.
The Dior dress, fitted on Saint Laurent muse Victoire Doutreleau (Charlotte Le Bon), steals the first major scene in the film; other ensembles do the same throughout. Intermixed with scenes of sex, drugs and depression-fueled interdependency, the movie flows somewhat jarringly through the designer’s greatest hits — the smashing Mondrian dresses of 1965, the scandalous “Le Smoking” pantsuits, the 1976 collection inspired by the Ballets Russes – with little effort to explain the profound impact the designer had on the fashion industry and the world at large.
Thankfully, the film never falters on style. Fontaine and her small team worked steadfastly for two-and-a-half months before filming began to ensure visual coherence between the archival and the newly sewn. On that front, the film soars. If the tumultuous relationship between Saint Laurent (Pierre Niney) and Bergé (Guillaume Gallienne) offers a shaky narrative arc, the clothes, reflecting Fontaine’s skill and the fabled designer’s genius, provide a strong resolution.
“I always found he was very talented,” Fontaine admits. “[Although] I’m not very fond of fashion, I’m very interested in the way people can create and renew clothing for such a long time,” she adds.
“It’s really something.”