But it was too late: Executives at Dior replaced Saint Laurent with couturier Marc Bohan. Bergé decided that Saint Laurent should open his own house and raised the money to do so from a wealthy American from Atlanta. On January 29, 1962, Saint Laurent showed his first eponymous collection, and a brand and legend were born.

 
More importantly, Saint Laurent created a new vocabulary for fashion, one that is constantly referenced today. How many designers have told me during my 20 years of covering fashion that the inspiration for their collection was the strong, sexy wardrobe Saint Laurent created for Catherine Deneuve's character as a bourgeois housewife turned prostitute in Luis Buñuel's masterpiece Belle de jour? Or that they based their designs on Helmut Newton's photos of women done up like men, dressed in sharp Saint Laurent pantsuits, lurking in the dark cobblestone streets of Paris?
 
Sadly, while his clothes revolutionized fashion, with each success, Saint Laurent died a little bit more. He took drugs. He drank a lot. He continued to suffer emotional collapses so often that Bergé famously remarked that Saint Laurent was born with a nervous breakdown. Things grew so fraught for Saint Laurent that in the late 1980s, he was unable to complete a collection, and the show was cancelled at the last minute—an unheard of occurrence in fashion.
 
During the last 10 years of his career, the fashion community would gather twice a year at the Hotel Inter-Continental to watch yet another collection of what seemed like retreads of former glories on the runway, and at the end, Saint Laurent would come teetering out, bloated, with stringy hair dyed a strange hue of orange. We feared he might tumble off the catwalk. He'd slur his words as he accepted kudos from his admirers backstage. Was he drugged? Had he suffered a stroke? We kept wondering: Is this the last time we'll see him?
 
In 1999, Bergé pulled off the ultimate business coup, selling the Saint Laurent ready-to-wear brand Rive Gauche to financier François Pinault for $1 billion. Rive Gauche became the cornerstone for the newly formed Gucci Group, Tom Ford took over designing, Bergé shuttered the couture arm of the company, and in January 2002, Saint Laurent took his last bow at a runway show at the Centre Pompidou.
 
I found it apt that Saint Laurent's farewell was staged in Paris' contemporary art museum: Saint Laurent himself was a great collector and a friend of contemporary artists, and he introduced contemporary art into fashion, like when he commissioned Claude Lalanne to create sculpted gold busts for gowns. I saw the gems themselves, not drably hanging on plastic mannequins in dimly lit museum cases, but alive, walking, moving, twirling. The geometric Mondrian dress. The Pop Art dresses. The African wooden-bead dresses. The tuxedos for women. Those Lalanne gowns. None of them looked dated. It was like attending a master class on fashion.
 
Two years ago, I went to Saint Laurent’s office to interview him about Bergé’s latest project, the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, a private gallery space in the remodeled Saint Laurent headquarters on the avenue Marceau. I waited in the room next to Saint Laurent's office as he wrapped up a meeting with a couple who wanted to do a doll version of Saint Laurent cartoon character La Vilaine Lulu (or the Mean Lulu), a wicked little girl in a proper suit that Saint Laurent used to doodle and eventually turned into a book.
 
When the couple left, Saint Laurent's assistant went in to announce I was waiting. He was gone. He'd put on his coat and went out the back door. He still couldn't face the press, the publicity, the fame.