The city intimidated her and, wanting to pass for a Parisienne, she arrived at his atelier subdued in an old grey uniform skirt: 'He had told everyone his eccentric friend was coming, then I turned up looking like a 15–year–old from a strict boarding school.' The next year, he invited her to Paris to work for him, role unspecified. When his harsh, tarty collection of 1971 was loathed on and off the catwalk, he sent her its kelly-green-dyed fox fur coats as gifts, and she wore them blithely. Saint Laurent loved her style, boldness and wit. (Loulou claimed that she and Berry had discovered Robert Mapplethorpe as a painter, before the photographs.) Loulou was wild, a mixer of haut vintage and cheap ethnic, happy to splurge unexpected cash earnings of $1,000 on orange leather fringed hotpants, and then dance them to shreds.

Loulou was then 21, a divorcee on the razzle in London and in New York with her mother's mates among Andy Warhol's Factory crowd, designing fabrics for Halston, hanging out with Schiaparelli's granddaughters, Marisa and Berry Berenson. When he opened a sequel in London, in 1969, he was flanked by the woman he called his 'twin sister', Betty Catroux, and by Loulou, both dressed by him to emphasise their independent shoulders and bangle-shaking wrists. We got into a fit of giggles.' On the advice of his partner, Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent had gone into ready-to-wear and opened a prêt-à-porter boutique, Rive Gauche. Wherever it was, she said: 'We hit it off straight away because he had a very silly sense of humour. Actual posing, as opposed to being snapped at a party, bored her, so Loulou fled to London, where she worked for Queen magazine, and married, aged 18, the art historian and Irish aristocrat Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, though Maxime warned her that she would be more at home with the tinkers than in his castle.Īccounts, including her own, vary of her first meeting with Saint Laurent, in 1968: the most romantic locates it in Carnaby Street ('The younger you were in London then, the more authority you had,' she recalled), the most reliable at a tea party. Maxime was encountering the New York scene at the time of the last expulsion, and Loulou did not need looking after once the editor of American Vogue, Diana Vreeland, discovered her interminable legs, red-blonde hair and gypsy style, and had her model for Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.

Loulou de la Falaise, right, with Yves Saint Laurent, centre, and Betty Catroux, left, outside his Rive Gauche boutique in 1969. Muses swanned about being inspirational, while Loulou nannied Saint Laurent, led him astray and put in years of graft in his, and later her own, fashion business. Which she did: Loulou, who has died aged 63 after a long illness, was a Parisian landmark for more than 40 years, her slap-happy style – clacking, clanking and chinking with the jewellery she designed – much-imitated, but never equalled.įor much of that time she was fixer, friend and supportive shoulder to the couturier Yves Saint Laurent she did not much care for the term 'muse'. But Maxime, who knew Elsa Schiaparelli and later modelled for her house, certainly wanted her Anglo-Irish-French daughter to grow up fashionable and a free spirit. That might not have been literally true – Loulou was born in severely austere postwar Britain (in Sussex), to which her mother, the bohemian Maxime de la Falaise, had returned briefly from Paris. The way Loulou de la Falaise told it, she had been baptised by her mother with a dab of the Schiaparelli perfume Shocking in lieu of water or even bathed in the scent at birth.

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