Pierre Bergé, the French fashion tycoon, philanthropist and art collector who was the driving force behind the creation of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house, has died at the age of 86 following a long illness.
Bergé was one of the most influential business figures on the French cultural scene, known for his very public long-term personal and business relationship with the designer Saint Laurent, which captured the public imagination and inspired a series books and films.
From 1961, when the two men founded the fashion house, the tough Bergé led the business side, while the shy Saint Laurent created the designs that would shape French style throughout the 60s and 70s.
Bergé was a passionate bibliophile and art collector, amassing two of the world’s top private art and rare books collections with Saint Laurent. He also campaigned for gay rights and donated a large part of his fortune to Aids research. In 2010, he was part of a group of business figures who took over the struggling daily French newspaper Le Monde, and was chairman of the supervisory board at the newspaper.
The former Socialist French culture minister, Jack Lang, led tributes on Friday, calling Bergé a “true prince of the arts and culture”.
Always politically engaged, Bergé was an important backer and confidant of the late French Socialist president François Mitterrand and later backed other Socialist presidential candidates including François Hollande. In January this year, he threw his weight behind the centrist newcomer, Emmanuel Macron, who went on to win the presidency in May. Although backing Macron “wholeheartedly”, Bergé at the same time lamented the decline of the Socialist party.
“A whole part of our collective citizen and artistic memory dies with Pierre Bergé,” Macron said in a statement, praising Bergé’s genius for creating “beauty and excellence” wherever he could.
Hollande described Bergé as “an exceptional man of conviction who defended the idea of equal rights for all”.
The leftwing MP Jean-Luc Mélenchon praised Bergé’s contributions to the fight against racism, to Aids research and to supporting the arts, lauding him as someone who “did not devote his life to his money”.
Bergé was born on the Île d’Oléron in the west of France, the son of a tax official and teacher. As a rebellious teenager in La Rochelle, he left school early intent on seeking his fortune in the cultural world of the capital. His story was an extraordinary saga of a self-made man who, from a modest start, ended up holding one of the world’s most valuable art and books collections. Shortly after arriving in Paris he was walking on the Champs Élysées when the poet Jacques Prévert fell from a window and nearly landed on top of him.
“He fell. Comme ça!” Bergé told the Observer in 2009. “They took him to the hospital. I didn’t know it was Jacques Prévert. I learnt later from the newspaper.”
Bergé took this strange and surreal fall as a sign that the city was his natural place to be. He began working in antique books, scouring bookstalls along the Seine for treasures, built up a network of influential friends and worked in art promotion.
In 1958, the 28-year-old Bergé met Saint Laurent, who was six years younger. They began an intense relationship that would last the rest of their lives, morphing into a friendship, business partnership and joint ownership of an art and books collection. When Bergé met Saint Laurent, the talented young artist and designer had taken over as head designer at the house of Dior. Saint Laurent’s spring collection had made him a star, but when Dior let Saint Laurent go shortly afterwards, Bergé decided they should set up their own label and turn it into an empire.
Saint Laurent, who was as shy as Bergé was outspoken, suffered periods of depression and Bergé became a driving force, organising the business and caring for him. Bergé became known as the imposing figure who “took care of everything”.
Saint Laurent said of Bergé in 2001: “Everything I didn’t have, he had. His strength meant I could rest on him when I was out of breath.” Bergé and Saint Laurent were joined in a civil union a few days before the designer died of a brain tumour in 2008 aged 71.
In recent years, Bergé decided to sell his and Saint Laurent’s vast book collection and part of their art collection, donating large sums to Aids research and the two men’s charitable foundation.
Two museums dedicated to the life and work of Saint Laurent, financed by the foundation that the two men founded, are to open in Paris and Morocco this year.
In March 2017, Bergé married the American garden designer Madison Cox, vice-president of the Bergé-Saint Laurent foundation.
