Editorial: Marriage shouldn't be government's concern
An Orange County Register editorial
Perhaps because leaders on both sides of the issue urged supporters to avoid undue disruption, the first few days of legal same-sex marriages in California went reasonably smoothly. An expensive and potentially acrimonious political tussle may be brewing behind the scenes, but both the celebrations and protests so far have been relatively low-key.
The uncertainty looming on the horizon is a measure on the November ballot that would declare that the state recognizes only marriages between a man and a woman. Proposition 22, passed in 2000, declaring that marriage is only between a man and a woman, was a statute. The California Supreme Court decided in May that the law violated state constitutional provisions guaranteeing equal protection of the laws to all. The measure in November is a constitutional amendment, so it would nullify the court's decision.
Our preference would be for the government not to be involved in marriage, the most fundamental of institutions in a civil society. Why two people who want to be married should be required to get a license from the state is something of a mystery. Marriage existed long before the California or U.S. governments came into being and will continue long after they have been consigned to history. Whether a marriage is valid should be up to the people involved and the churches, synagogues, mosques or other religious institutions that choose to perform them or not.
As a practical matter, however, the government has so entwined itself into our daily lives that state recognition is important. Filing taxes as a married couple or as individuals makes a difference, as does the ability to own real estate, make end-of-life decisions or adopt children. Considering all this and the importance of equality before the law, the high court's decision was justified.
It is argued that allowing same-sex marriage will infringe on the religious freedom of people who have a religiously based objection to it. It is hard to see the validity. Church and state are correctly separate in this country, and the fact that the state recognizes a union as a marriage doesn't mean that a religious person or institution has to recognize it or approve of it. It's hard to imagine a minister, rabbi or imam who objects to same-sex marriages being forced to perform one, and we would be the first to object if anybody tried it.
Over time same-sex couples will find, as has been the case in Massachusetts, where such marriages have been legal for four years, (and as heterosexual couples know all too well) that marriage is not always easy. Married people disagree about all kinds of things, from money to recreational preferences, and have to find ways to work out their differences.
The relatively smooth transition to allowing same-sex marriages may be the calm before the storm. Still, it's nice that it has been calm so far.

Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic
By BRIAN STELTER
Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files.
For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.
One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of “Internet metering” in one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.
That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.
AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and that it was considering pricing based on data volume. “Based on current trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times over the next three years,” the company said in a statement.
All three companies say that placing caps on broadband use will ensure fair access for all users.
Internet metering is a throwback to the days of dial-up service, but at a time when video and interactive games are becoming popular, the experiments could have huge implications for the future of the Web.
Millions of people are moving online to watch movies and television shows, play multiplayer video games and talk over videoconference with family and friends. And media companies are trying to get people to spend more time online: the Disneys and NBCs of the world keep adding television shows and movies to their Web sites, giving consumers convenient entertainment that soaks up a lot of bandwidth.
Moreover, companies with physical storefronts, like Blockbuster, are moving toward digital delivery of entertainment. And new distributors of online content — think YouTube — are relying on an open data spigot to make their business plans work.
Critics of the bandwidth limits say that metering and capping network use could hold back the inevitable convergence of television, computers and the Internet.
The Internet “is how we deliver our shows,” said Jim Louderback, chief executive of Revision3, a three-year-old media company that runs what it calls a television network on the Web. “If all of a sudden our viewers are worried about some sort of a broadband cap, they may think twice about downloading or watching our shows.”
Even if the caps are far above the average users’ consumption, their mere existence could cause users to reduce their time online. Just ask people who carefully monitor their monthly allotments of cellphone minutes and text messages.
“As soon as you put serious uncertainty as to cost on the table, people’s feeling of freedom to predict cost dries up and so does innovation and trying new applications,” Vint Cerf, the chief Internet evangelist for Google who is often called the “father of the Internet,” said in an e-mail message.
But the companies imposing the caps say that their actions are only fair. People who use more network capacity should pay more, Time Warner argues. And Comcast says that people who use too much — like those who engage in file-sharing — should be forced to slow down.
Time Warner also frames the issue in financial terms: the broadband infrastructure needs to be improved, it says, and maybe metering could pay for the upgrades. So far its trial is limited to new subscribers in Beaumont, Tex., a city of roughly 110,000.
In that trial, new customers can buy plans with a 5-gigabyte cap, a 20-gigabyte cap or a 40-gigabyte cap. Prices for those plans range from $30 to $50. Above the cap, customers pay $1 a gigabyte. Plans with higher caps come with faster service.
“Average customers are way below the caps,” said Kevin Leddy, executive vice president for advanced technology at Time Warner Cable. “These caps give them years’ worth of growth before they’d ever pay any surcharges.”
Casual Internet users who merely send e-mail messages, check movie times and read the news are not likely to exceed the caps. But people who watch television shows on Hulu.com, rent movies on iTunes or play the multiplayer game Halo on Xbox may start to exceed the limits — and millions of people are already doing those things.
Streaming an hour of video on Hulu, which shows programs like “Saturday Night Live,” “Family Guy” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” consumes about 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte. A higher-quality hour of the same content bought through Apple’s iTunes store can use about 500 megabytes, or half a gigabyte.
A high-definition episode of “Survivor” on CBS.com can use up to a gigabyte, and a DVD-quality movie through Netflix’s new online service can eat up about five gigabytes. One Netflix download alone, in fact, could bring a user to the limit on the cheapest plan in Time Warner’s trial in Beaumont.
Even services like Skype and Vonage that use the Internet to transmit phone calls could help put users over the monthly limits.
Time Warner would not reveal how many gigabytes an average customer uses, saying only that 95 percent of customers use under 40 gigabytes each in a month.
That means that 5 percent of customers use more than 50 percent of the network’s overall capacity, the company said, and many of those people are assumed to be sharing copyrighted video and music files illegally.
The Time Warner plan has the potential to bring Internet use full circle, back to the days when pay-as-you-go pricing held back the Web’s popularity. In the early days of dial-up access, America Online and other providers offered tiered pricing, in part because audio and video were barely viable online. Consumers feared going over their allotted time and bristled at the idea that access to cyberspace was billed by the hour.
In 1996, when AOL started offering unlimited access plans, Internet use took off and the online world started moving to the center of people’s daily lives. Today most Internet packages provide a seemingly unlimited amount of capacity, at least from the consumer’s perspective.
But like water and electricity, even digital resources are finite. Last year Comcast disclosed that it was temporarily turning off the connections of customers who used file-sharing services like BitTorrent, arguing that they were slowing things down for everyone else. The people who got cut off complained and asked how much broadband use was too much; the company did not have a ready answer.
Thus, like Time Warner, Comcast is considering a form of Internet metering that would apply to all online activity.
The goal, says Mitch Bowling, a senior vice president at Comcast, is “ensuring that a small number of users don’t impact the experience for everyone else.”
Last year Comcast was sued when it was disclosed that the company had singled out BitTorrent users.
In February, Comcast departed from that approach and started collaborating with the company that runs BitTorrent. Now it has shifted to what it calls a “platform agnostic” approach to managing its network, meaning that it slows down the connection of any customer who uses too much bandwidth at congested times.
Mr. Bowling said that “typical Internet usage” would not be affected. But on the Internet, “typical” use is constantly being redefined.
“The definitions of low and high usage today are meaningless, because the Internet’s going to grow, and nothing’s going to stop that,” said Eric Klinker, the chief technology officer of BitTorrent.
As the technology company Cisco put it in a recent report, “today’s ‘bandwidth hog’ is tomorrow’s average user.”
One result of these experiments is a tug-of-war between the Internet providers and media companies, which are monitoring the Time Warner experiment with trepidation.
“We hate it,” said a senior executive at a major media company, who requested anonymity because his company, like all broadcasters, must play nice with the same cable operators that are imposing the limits. Now that some television shows are viewed millions of times online, the executive said, any impediment would hurt the advertising model for online video streaming.
Mr. Leddy of Time Warner said that the media companies’ fears were overblown. If the company were to try to stop Web video, “we would not succeed,” he said. “We know how much capacity they’re going to need in the future, and we know what it’s going to cost. And today’s business model doesn’t pay for it very well.”

The Democrats' Reagan

By Bob Beckel
Question: Name the presidential candidate described below.
An unpopular incumbent president sits in the Oval Office. His party's brand is badly tarnished. The economy is in shambles, unemployment on the rise. The housing market is in crisis. Gasoline has become a major issue.America is enmeshed in a protracted crisis in the Middle East with no end in sight. We are near war footing with Iran. The reputation of the United States is diminished world wide. In historically high numbers, voters believe the country is on the wrong track.
The opposition party has nominated a charismatic candidate for president whose oratorical skills are compared to JFK, perhaps better. He had been introduced to the majority of Americans by way of a spellbinding keynote speech at a previous national party convention.
He has a fervent core of supporters and has emerged as the leader of his party through an insurgency that challenged and ultimately defeated his party's establishment. He runs against Washington and the special interests that control the Capitol. His message is change and hope.
If ever the public demanded change in Washington, it is in this presidential year. It could not be a better political environment for the party out of power. Yet with all the stars aligned perfectly for a party change in the White House, national polls show the opposition candidate barely ties, and often trails, his opponent.
There is little doubt about the voter's desire for change, but there is plenty of doubt about this candidate who pledges to deliver it. Who is the candidate?
Answer; A) Barack Obama B) Ronald Reagan C) Both
The correct answer is C.
Barack Obama's current political circumstance is eerily similar to that of Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign for president. Both Obama and Reagan, from the beginning of their insurgent campaigns, were viewed as transformative political figures. Both enjoyed passionate grassroots support.
Both men had defeated centrist establishment candidates for their party's nomination. Reagan defeated George H.W. Bush, who was viewed by the growing conservative base of the Republican Party as too moderate. Obama beat Hilary Clinton whose husband had been elected twice by moving away from his party's traditional progressive roots and running as a centrist, a path Clinton herself followed (at least at the beginning of her campaign).
In 1980 most conventional political observers failed to recognize the growing grassroots power of the rock solid conservative activists who propelled Reagan to his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential campaign supporters of Hillary Clinton failed to recognize the growing assertiveness of the Democrats progressive base, especially over the Iraq war which she initially supported and Obama opposed.
The failures of the Bush Administration convinced many progressives that the conservative cycle, deep into its third decade, had run its course. These activists believed the country was ready to tack back toward more progressive and transparent government. Barack Obama recognized and embraced this growing progressive movement.
Obama's message that it was time to "turn the page" on politics as usual (a not very subtle reference to both the Bush and Clinton years) resonated with progressives. That message coupled with his message of post-partisan, anti-polarization politics, so attractive to independent voters, provided Obama with a core of progressive activists along with a solid base of black voters and young voters energized by his youth and oratorical gifts.
But insurgency campaigns by definition run counter to the established order. Even in years when voters clamor for change, insurgent candidates must prove that neither they nor the change they offer is perceived as too far from the mainstream. It is this potential fear that opponents of insurgent candidates seek to exploit.
For most of the general election in 1980 Democrats succeeded in raising doubts about Reagan's brand of conservatism. They charged that he was too far right, and questioned his past conservative associations with the John Birch Society which, like Reagan; had been strong supporters of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Democrats argued that Reagan's brand of virulent anti-Communism coupled with his lack of foreign-policy experience was a dangerous mixture for the man whose finger would be on the proverbial "button."
For most of the 1980 general election the attacks on Reagan raised enough doubt about him to neutralize the public's strong desire for change. I was managing Carter's campaign in Texas that fall, and even in that conservative bastion, Carter led Reagan in the polls until mid-October. Our strategy was simple: On a risk scale of 1 to 10 (one being no risk, 10 being far too risky) we had managed to keep Reagan in the 7 to 8 range. Then came the only Carter/Reagan debate and the flood gates opened.
On stage with the President of the United States, Reagan did not come across as a threatening mad bomber. He was collegial, surefooted, and calm. His performance shattered expectations that he was a risk, which allowed Reagan, at the end of the debate, to pivot to the state of the economy with his devastating question, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Reagan was elected in a landslide and proceeded to transform politics in America well beyond his two terms.
The Republicans are employing the same "risk" strategy against Barack Obama in 2008. McCain and company have used Obama's willingness to meet with avowed enemies of the United States like Iran as a sign of naiveté and weakness. Republican operatives and their radio talk show allies have sought to tie Obama to the anti-American rants of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright and his neighbor William Ayers, a former '60s radical.
Republicans have even dragged Obama's wife Michelle into the fight. They cite her Princeton senior thesis, selected campaign comments, and Obama's failure to wear an American flag lapel pin as evidence of passive patriotism.
Democrats in 1980 charged that Reagan would rip apart the social safety net for the poor, while Republicans in 2008 accuse Obama of inciting class warfare and suggest as president he will undertake a classic liberal redistribution of wealth by increasing taxes on wealthy Americans and profitable US corporations.
It is incumbent on Obama to diffuse the "risk" issue. In some ways his will be an easier job than Reagan's. Reagan ran against an incumbent president, always a difficult race, while Obama faces a 71-year-old Senate veteran. (McCain turns 72 on Aug. 29.) Reagan faced a president preoccupied with 52 American hostages in Iran while Obama's opponent supports an unpopular war in Iraq that has already cost over 4000 American lives.
The "risk" factor for insurgents can best be addressed in direct candidate to candidate debates. Insurgents tend to have low expectations in these matchups, and hence a greater upside potential. Ronald Reagan had only one debate opportunity to counter his "risk" problem. Obama is likely to have a minimum of three encounters with John McCain and potentially several other town hall joint appearances.
John McCain will not be irrelevant in these face-offs, but only Barack Obama can confront the question of risk. It is an enviable position for Barack Obama Only he can win the race for the White House, and only he can lose it.
If Obama has proved one thing in his short political career, it is that he is far more likely to win than to lose.
Bob Beckel managed Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign. He is a senior political analyst for the Fox News Channel and a columnist for USA Today. Beckel is the co-author with Cal Thomas of the book "Common Ground."
Copyright 2008, Real Clear PoliticsPage Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/06/the_democrats_reagan.html at June 11,

How Gene McCarthy's response to Bobby Kennedy's murder crippled the Democrats.

By David Greenberg (Slate)
Forty years ago, Robert F. Kennedy was murdered on the very night he defeated his fellow anti-war insurgent Eugene McCarthy in the California Democratic presidential primary. This week the news media are full of remembrances of RFK, rehearsing how his assassination, echoing his brother's five years earlier, dashed a generation's hopes for a new era of liberalism. But in a political season that resembles 1968, another aspect of the assassination is also worth considering, especially with the Democratic Party now seeking to unify its ranks. For in 1968, the persistence of intra-party divisions—which helped usher in the presidency of Richard M. Nixon—stemmed not just from the tragedy of Kennedy's murder but also from McCarthy's own subsequent failure of leadership. McCarthy's refusal to extend a hand to disoriented Kennedy supporters after June 6 left the party sundered, directionless, and ripe for defeat.
Eugene McCarthy never liked the Kennedys. At least since 1960, when he had placed Adlai Stevenson's name in nomination at the Democratic convention that chose JFK for president, the high-minded Minnesota senator had resented the hardball style and political success of the whole family. Understandably, he begrudged RFK's entry into the 1968 race. After all, back in November 1967, McCarthy had courageously challenged Lyndon B. Johnson, a sitting president, for the Democratic nomination, arguing that it was time to bring home the half-million Americans fighting in Vietnam. McCarthy's close second-place finish in the March 12 New Hampshire primary exposed Johnson's profound vulnerabilities. Only then did Kennedy—after some perfunctory soundings about a joint anti-war effort with McCarthy—throw his hat in the ring, quickly earning him treatment as a more plausible pretender to the nomination. McCarthy, who later claimed RFK had promised him he wouldn't run, was livid.
Two weeks later, LBJ forswore a second term. Anti-war Democrats rushed to align with one insurgent or the other. McCarthy won the intellectuals, the professionals, and the young, who, distancing themselves from their long-haired contemporaries, vowed to get "Clean for Gene." Kennedy attracted blue-collar, Hispanic, and black support. He complained that McCarthy got the "A" students, and he got the "B" students.
The primary battles were brutal, producing at least as much bad feeling as this year's. Against a backdrop of violent campus protests and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., McCarthy and Kennedy squared off in Indiana, Nebraska, Oregon, and California. (Not until 1972 did primaries become the dominant method of delegate selection.) Playing to his upscale base, McCarthy blasted Kennedy for having wiretapped King while attorney general. RFK, for his part, catered to the concerns of his new base—stressing, for example, his former credentials as "the chief law enforcement officer of the United States" in front of audiences worried about rising crime and urban riots. He also assailed McCarthy's previous opposition to a minimum-wage law and his allegedly weak civil rights record—enduring charges of being "ruthless" and dishonest in distorting his rival's record.
Even as McCarthy styled himself the clean politician, however, he dished it out, too. He mocked Kennedy and his supporters. A major gaffe occurred in Oregon, when McCarthy sniffed that Kennedy supporters were "less intelligent" than his own and belittled Indiana (which had by then gone for Kennedy) for lacking a poet of the stature of Robert Lowell—a friend of McCarthy's who often traveled with him. McCarthy also took swipes at Kennedy for chasing after black and white working-class votes.
More negativity infused a debate before the California primary. McCarthy made two ill-considered statements: that he would accept a coalition government that included Communists in Saigon and that only the relocation of inner-city blacks would solve the urban problem. Kennedy pounced, portraying the former idea as soft on communism and the latter diagnosis as a scheme to bus tens of thousands of ghetto residents into white, conservative Orange County. Angered at these characterizations, McCarthy resolved not to support Kennedy if he became the nominee.
By the time of Kennedy's murder, there was no love lost between the two men. Still, McCarthy's reaction to the assassination was singularly hardhearted. One aide recalled him sneering about his fallen rival, "Demagoguing to the last." Another heard him say that Kennedy "brought it on himself"—implying, by perverse logic, that because Kennedy had promised military support to the state of Israel, he had somehow provoked Sirhan Sirhan, the Arab-American gunman who killed him. (In fact, Sirhan had long planned to commit the murder on the first anniversary of the Six-Day War.)
Kennedy's death, of course, did not leave McCarthy alone in the race. All along, many party regulars had preferred Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who announced his candidacy in April but sat out the primaries, instead building his delegate base in states without primaries—which back then constituted a majority. Indeed, with Kennedy's assassination, many observers thought that front-runner status had devolved not to McCarthy but to Humphrey. Yet while McCarthy formally suspended his campaign in recognition of Kennedy's death, and although he proceeded to engage in various acts of willful self-sabotage, he nonetheless won a big victory in the June 18 New York primary and swept around the country in search of uncommitted delegates. Yet, stubbornly, he refused to make any gestures of reconciliation toward Kennedy's inner circle or his millions of supporters.
A few key Kennedy aides soon prevailed on McGovern to join the race as a kind of placeholder at the upcoming Chicago convention—a possible nominee but also a candidate for Kennedy's delegates to rally behind until a deal could be struck. The move, of course, also made clear to McCarthy that they hadn't forgiven his various digs at RFK during the primary season. Meanwhile, others started an informal "Draft Ted" movement to get the youngest Kennedy brother, then 36, to pick up the standard. Both ploys reflected a recognition that Humphrey, for all his delegates, still wasn't the inevitable nominee and that McCarthy's cache of several hundred delegates, when coupled with Kennedy's, might still produce an anti-war nominee.
For a moment it looked possible. In Chicago, Richard Goodwin—the former JFK aide who'd gone to work for McCarthy, switched to RFK, then returned to the McCarthy camp after the assassination—sent word to friends in the Kennedy camp that McCarthy wanted to talk. Privately, the senator told Kennedy in-law Steve Smith that he would be willing to step aside in favor of Ted. But even in concession, McCarthy couldn't be gracious. He told Smith that he would take such a step for Ted, but he wouldn't have done it for Bobby. The gratuitous jab killed any prospect of a deal. In his conversations with Humphrey, meanwhile, McCarthy insisted that he not choose Ted Kennedy as his running mate.
McCarthy made almost no efforts on his own behalf at the convention. In a debate with Humphrey and McGovern before the California delegation, he refused to state his position on the war, saying, "The people know my position." He didn't even speak during the convention's debate over what the platform would say about Vietnam. But when Humphrey got the nod, McCarthy suggested that, as the winner of the most primary votes, he had been robbed of the nomination. He didn't endorse Humphrey until Oct. 29, and even then he took swipes at the vice president for his stands on the war and the draft. Humphrey lost to Nixon by 0.7 percent of the popular vote, although Nixon took 301 electoral votes to Humphrey's 191.
Whether Robert Kennedy could have beaten Humphrey for the nomination is impossible to say. Certainly, it would have been hard. But following Kennedy's death, Gene McCarthy's willful aloofness and inability to bring unity to a party cleaved during a hard-fought primary season amounted to a second tragedy for the Democrats.

Yves Saint Laurent, Giant of Couture, Dies at 71
By ANNE-MARIE SCHIRO NY Times
Yves Saint Laurent, who exploded on the fashion scene in 1958 as the boy-wonder successor to Christian Dior and endured as one of the best-known and most influential couturiers of the second half of the 20th century, died on Sunday at his apartment in Paris. He was 71.
His death was confirmed by Dominique Deroche, a spokeswoman for the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation.
During a career that ran from 1957 to 2002 he was largely responsible for changing the way modern women dress, putting them into pants both day and night, into peacoats and safari jackets, into “le smoking” (as the French call a man’s tuxedo jacket), and into leopard prints, trench coats and, for a time in the 1970s, peasant-inspired clothing in rich fabrics.
Mr. Saint Laurent often sought inspiration on the streets, bringing the Parisian beatnik style to couture runways and adapting the sailors’ peacoats he found in Army-Navy stores in New York into jackets that found their way into fashionable women’s wardrobes around the world. His glamorous evening clothes were often adorned with appliqués and beadwork inspired by artists like Picasso, Miró and Matisse. Above all, he was a master colorist, able to mix green, blue, rose and yellow in one outfit to achieve an effect that was artistic and never garish.
Among the women of style who wore his clothes were Catherine Deneuve, Paloma Picasso, Nan Kempner, Lauren Bacall, Marella Agnelli and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild.
Mr. Saint Laurent achieved instant fame in 1958 at the age of 21 when he showed his Trapeze collection, his first for Christian Dior following the master’s death. But unlike many overnight sensations, Mr. Saint Laurent managed to remain at the top of his profession as fashion changed from an emphasis on formal, custom-made haute couture to casual sportswear.
For many years after he opened his own couture house, in 1962, his collections were eagerly anticipated by fashion enthusiasts, who considered his the final word on that season’s style. His influence was at its height during the 1960s and ’70s, when it was still normal for couturiers to change silhouettes and hemlines drastically every six months.
Among his greatest successes were his Mondrian collection in 1965, based on the Dutch artist’s gridlike paintings, and the “rich peasant” collection of 1976, which stirred so much interest that the Paris show was restaged in New York for his American admirers. “The clothes incorporated all my dreams,” he said after the show, “all my heroines in the novels, the operas, the paintings. It was my heart — everything I love that I gave to this collection.”
Originally a maverick and a generator of controversy — in 1968, his suggestion that women wear pants as an everyday uniform was considered revolutionary — Mr. Saint Laurent developed into a more conservative designer, a believer in evolution rather than revolution. He often said that all a woman needed to be fashionable was a pair of pants, a sweater and a raincoat.
“My small job as a couturier,” he once said, “is to make clothes that reflect our times. I’m convinced women want to wear pants.”
A Rare Retrospective
By 1983, when he was 47, his work was recognized by fashion scholars as so fundamentally important to women’s dress that a retrospective of his designs was held at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first time the museum had honored a living designer. Diana Vreeland, the legendary magazine editor and the doyenne of the Costume Institute, who masterminded the exhibition, called him “a living genius” and “the Pied Piper of fashion.”
“Whatever he does,” she said, “women of all ages, from all over the world, follow.” That exhibition was followed by retrospectives in Paris, Beijing, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tokyo and Sydney, Australia.
But the New York exhibition could be considered the peak of Mr. Saint Laurent’s career, for after that he settled into a classical mode of reinterpreting his earlier successes. The boy wonder had turned into the elder statesman. He said in an interview in 1983: “A woman’s wardrobe shouldn’t change every six months. You should be able to use the pieces you already own and add to them. Because they are like timeless classics.”
Yet because so many of his early designs seeped into the public domain of fashion (and into many other designers’ collections), he managed to retain his stellar position in the world of fashion through his retirement in 2002.
Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent came a long way from Oran, Algeria, where he was born on Aug. 1, 1936, to Charles and Lucienne Andrée Mathieu-Saint-Laurent. His father was a lawyer and insurance broker, his mother a woman of great personal style. He grew up in a villa by the Mediterranean with his two younger sisters, Michelle and Brigitte.
His mother and sisters, all of Paris, survive him.
The young Yves was said to be a quiet and retiring child (and as an adult was also often described as quiet and retiring), who avoided all sports except swimming and developed a love for fashion and the theater at an early age. After seeing a play by Molière when he was 11, he recreated the play in miniature, pasting the costumes together. As a teenager, he designed clothes for his mother, who had them whipped up by a local seamstress. (His mother became his greatest fan, sitting in the front row at all his shows and wearing no one else’s designs.)
Although his parents wanted him to study law, Mr. Saint Laurent — lanky and brown-haired, his blue eyes framed by glasses — went to Paris when he was 17 to try his luck in theatrical and fashion design. He briefly studied design at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, leaving because he said he was bored. Shortly thereafter, he won first prize in an International Wool Secretariat design competition for his sketch of a cocktail dress. This led to an interview with Christian Dior, who noted an uncanny resemblance between Mr. Saint Laurent’s cocktail dress and one he himself was working on. Recognizing the young designer’s talent, Dior hired him on the spot as his assistant.
Dior’s Protégé
For three years, Mr. Saint Laurent worked closely with Dior, who called him “my dauphin” and “my right arm.” After Dior died suddenly in 1957, shocking the fashion world, the House of Dior named Mr. Saint Laurent its head designer. At 21, he found himself at the head of a $20-million-a-year fashion empire, succeeding a legend, the man who had radically changed the way women dressed in 1947 with the wasp-waisted New Look.
Mr. Saint Laurent’s first collection in his new position, shown on Jan. 30, 1958, was based on the trapeze, a youthful silhouette that started with narrow shoulders and a raised waistline, then flared out gently to a wide hemline. The collection was received with great enthusiasm, and Mr. Saint Laurent’s name was well on its way to becoming a household word across Europe and America.
He was credited by many with rejuvenating French fashion and securing his country’s pre-eminent position in the world of haute couture. Newsboys shouted his triumph across the streets of Paris while he waved to the crowds below the balcony of the House of Dior on the Avenue Montaigne. The dauphin was crowned king.
His last collection for Dior, in July 1960, was based on a “chic beatnik” look of knitted turtlenecks and black leather jackets. It was less warmly received, though eventually the style became the uniform of the avant-garde.
In September of that year, Mr. Saint Laurent was called up for 27 months of compulsory military service during the war France was then fighting in Algeria. He had previously been given deferments because 2,000 jobs depended on his talent.
About three weeks after his induction, he was hospitalized for a nervous collapse. In October 1960, the House of Dior gave his job to Marc Bohan, his former assistant. In November, Mr. Saint Laurent was discharged from the army and entered a private clinic near Paris. In later years, he suffered from depression and a dependency on alcohol and drugs, a dependency he attributed to the drugs he was given in a military psychiatric hospital. But he almost always recovered in time to take the ritual walk down the runway, however unsteadily, at the finale of his shows.
In January 1961, Mr. Bohan’s collection for Dior was a huge success. Mr. Saint Laurent sued Dior for severance pay and damages after the house refused to reinstate him after his army discharge. He was awarded 680,000 francs by the court, then about $140,000.
In September 1961, Mr. Saint Laurent announced plans to open his own haute couture house in partnership with his lover, Pierre Bergé. Mr. Bergé remained his lifelong business partner and was responsible for the company’s financial success, although they split up as a couple in the early 1980s. The fledgling house was backed by J. Mack Robinson, an Atlanta businessman, who later said his confidence was based on the excitement Mr. Saint Laurent had created when he replaced Dior.
His Own Collection
The first Yves Saint Laurent collection was shown on Jan. 19, 1962. It was the beginning of a success story that led eventually to a ready-to-wear line sold in the designer’s own Rive Gauche boutiques around the world; to hundreds of licenses for scarves, jewelry, furs, shoes, men’s wear, cosmetics and perfumes, and even cigarettes; to set and costume designs for the ballet, theater and movies (most notably, for Catherine Deneuve in “Belle de Jour” in 1967); to a listing on the Paris Bourse, and to a host of awards, including the French Legion of Honor in 1985.
The House of Saint Laurent had various owners over the years, including Lanvin-Charles of the Ritz and Squibb-Beech Nut. In 1993, in a $636 million transaction, it became part of the state-owned French pharmaceuticals conglomerate Elf Sanofi, but 43 percent of the fashion group remained in the hands of Mr. Bergé and Mr. Saint Laurent. In 2000, Gucci Group bought the ready-to-wear and fragrance divisions of the company, while Mr. Bergé and Mr. Saint Laurent retained the haute couture business until the designer’s retirement. Under Gucci, to Mr. Saint Laurent’s vocal displeasure, the YSL ready-to-wear line was designed by the American fashion star Tom Ford.
“The poor guy does what he can,” Mr. Saint Laurent said of his successor.
Mr. Ford, who simultaneously designed the Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent collections with an overtly racy and sexualized aesthetic during those years, left the company in 2003; the Yves Saint Laurent collections have since been designed by one of Mr. Ford’s former assistants, Stefano Pilati.
In January 2002, Mr. Saint Laurent announced his retirement in Paris at a press conference at his couture house at 5 Avenue Marceau, where many fashion editors and teary-eyed friends of the house considered the possibility that Mr. Saint Laurent had felt pressured to resign. He and Mr. Bergé denied that, and a week later announced plans to turn the house into a museum, which has since displayed exhibitions of Mr. Saint Laurent’s tuxedo jackets and the clothes he designed for Ms. Kempner.
‘Opium’ Wars
The designer, of course, managed several times to create controversy during his career with, of all things, his fragrances. In 1971, he appeared nude in an advertisement for his men’s cologne YSL. Then, in 1977, he named one of his women’s perfumes Opium, which led to charges that he was glamorizing drug use and trivializing the 19th-century Opium Wars in China. Its slogan was “Opium, for those who are addicted to Yves Saint Laurent.” In 1992, his plans to call another perfume Champagne prompted a lawsuit by French wine makers (the Saint Laurent company lost).
In another legal battle, Mr. Saint Laurent won a 1994 suit in the French courts against Ralph Lauren, whom he accused of copying the design for his tuxedo dress (a style Mr. Saint Laurent reinterpreted many times over the years).
In 1992, a celebration at the Bastille Opera in Paris of the 30th anniversary of the House of Saint Laurent was attended by 2,750 admirers who applauded as 100 models took to the stage in clothes from the three decades. Writing about the event in The New York Times, Bernadine Morris said, “What was wondrous about these clothes, besides their breathtaking beauty, was that nothing looked dated.”
As befitted his success, Mr. Saint Laurent lived elegantly. All his homes — including famous ones in Deauville, France, and Marrakech, Morocco — which he shared with a succession of French bulldogs, always named Moujik, were lavishly decorated and filled with antiques and artwork by his favorite artists, who included Picasso, Cocteau, Braque and Christian Bérard. He often said that Bérard was one of the greatest influences on his designs, particularly in the use of color.
“Every man needs aesthetic phantoms in order to exist,” Mr. Saint Laurent said at the announcement of his retirement. “I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day, I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober.”