UFO Info Week-End

Saint Laurent pointedly took pride of place at the unveiling of Slimane’s

Saint Laurent pointedly took pride of place at the unveiling of Slimane’s Dior Homme collection but failed to attend Ford’s debut YSL Rive Gauche menswear collection.All of this, however, should not now be allowed to detract from Yves Saint Laurent’s position as perhaps the most important designer of the 20th century. Born Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent on 1 August 1936 in Oran, Algeria, he was plagued with neuroses from an early age, taunted by his classmates, he says, for his homosexuality. But this fragility furnished him with an unswerving ambition to succeed. At 17, he won a prize in a competition for the International Wool Secretariat for a little black cocktail dress. Not long after that he was introduced to Christian Dior, then at the height of his fame in the heyday of the New Look.When Dior died suddenly, less than two years later, Saint Laurent, aged only 21, found himself presiding over France’s most high-profile fashion house He was, and remains, the world’s youngest couturier.

His first collection for Dior, featuring “trapeze line” dresses –- fitted to the waist then short and flared – earned him headlines that were hysterical even by fashion standards. “Saint Laurent has saved France” they bellowed.In 1962, Saint Laurent, in partnership with Berge, set up his own house and, since that time, has been almost singlehandedly responsible for the reinvention of the modern woman’s wardrobe.It is testimony to Yves Saint Laurent’s enduring status as the world’s most famous fashion designer that in 1999, the French government stamped the last franc coins minted before the introduction of the euro with his image. Small wonder, then, that despite the designer’s own misgivings over the monster designer fashion has by now become, fashion responded yesterday only by paying him tribute.The last word goes to Alexander McQueen, the young British designer who sold a 51 per cent stake in his business to Gucci just over a year ago and who is at the forefront of contemporary fashion today. Speaking from his London office, McQueen said simply: “Long live the king.”. When the Robert Mondavi winery in California decided, in the mid-Sixties, to ferment its wine in stainless steel barrels instead of wood, everyone thought the idea was nuts Stainless steel was for storing milk, the French scoffed “Why would we want to put our wine in there?” they asked.

“Why would we want to put our wine in there?” they asked.
For 35 years, Mondavi and other big Californian wineries have tried to impress on the world their scientific, highly mechanised, technologically innovative methods; in many places they have succeeded. In fact, the Mondavi family has concluded, the best way to produce quality wine is to make it the old-fashioned way, precisely as they have in the venerable vineyards of Europe for centuries.At Mondavi’s main property in Oakville, the family has just put the finishing touches to a $28m (£19.5m) project called To Kalon, to produce, as the ancient Greek name suggests, the best of the best, by sticking with near-religious zeal to Old World wine-making methods.Oak fermentation barrels are back in. Pumps are out as a means of moving pulp and liquid, replaced by the altogether simpler concept of gravity.Out in the fields, some of the most prized cabernet grapes are grown in tight rows, too close together for tractors to pass between. They hang on the vines three to four feet off the ground, markedly lower than most American grapes, forcing pickers to stoop uncomfortably, just like French peasants of old.Tim Mondavi, son of Robert and the prime mover behind the To Kalon project, calls this approach “moving forward to the past”. And his staff have taken to the idea with a missionary fervour. “We used to think that the more money you spent on a wine the better it got,” Dyson De Mara, one of his in-house wine experts, said “Nothing could be further from the truth. When you have the greatest ingredients you have to do virtually nothing.”This, clearly, has been a conversion of Pauline proportions.