On the evening of September 20th, 1978, a four-masted iron bark tall ship sat anchored in New York Harbor. Its masts strung with banners of red, gold, and purple silk. Its gangway lit by coral red paper lanterns. And its decks perfumed so heavily with a fragrance that had not yet been sold on American soil that guests could smell it before they stepped aboard.
2,000 white cattleya orchids flown in from Hawaii hung from every railing. A 1,000-lb bronze Buddha sat at the center of the main deck gazing over 800 guests who were drinking champagne, eating caviar, and below decks inhaling cocaine with the indifference of people who believed the 1970s would never end. At midnight, $30,000 worth of fireworks erupted above the water spelling two words in burning light across the sky.
The name of the designer and the name of the perfume. The designer was Yves Saint Laurent. The perfume was called Opium. Within weeks, a coalition of Chinese-Americans would call the name an insult to a century of suffering. Saint Laurent refused to apologize, refused to change the name, and watched Opium outsell Chanel No.
5 across Europe in its first year. In today’s episode of Old Money Allure, we trace how a bullied boy from colonial Algeria became the most celebrated fashion designer of the 20th century. How the party on that ship became the most provocative product launch in the history of luxury. And how a man who named a perfume after a narcotic spent the rest of his life consumed by the substances he had glamorized.
Leaving behind a $484 million art collection. And a legacy that fashion has never stopped arguing about. The night Yves Saint Laurent threw the most outrageous party in fashion history and got away with it. The Opium launch party aboard the Peking remains, nearly five decades later, the most expensive, most photographed, and most controversial fragrance debut ever staged.
A night so extravagant it turned a perfume into a cultural weapon and a designer into a figure that polite society could neither absorb nor ignore. Yves Saint Laurent, by 1978, was the undisputed emperor of French fashion, worth an estimated $600 million at the peak of his fortune, the architect of le smoking tuxedo that scandalized Paris, the creator of the Mondrian dress that rewired how the world thought about art and clothing, and the man who, with his partner Pierre Bergé, had assembled one of the great private art collections on Earth. Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi,
Mondrian, Eileen Gray furniture, Chinese bronzes and Renaissance sculptures spread across a Paris apartment on the Rue de Babylone, and multiple properties in Marrakech. If you enjoy this kind of deep investigation into the lives of fashion’s most fascinating and complicated figures, you might appreciate our free Substack newsletter, where we examine how the world’s most glamorous names built, protected, and sometimes destroyed their fortunes and legacies.
What made Saint Laurent dangerous, and therefore irresistible to the press, the public, and the 800 guests who climbed aboard that ship, was that he genuinely did not care whether the world approved of what he did. He had already put women in tuxedos when Vogue itself refused to photograph them. He had already opened a ready-to-wear boutique when the entire couture establishment told him it would destroy the mystique of high fashion.
He had already named his new fragrance after a drug that had been weaponized by colonial empires to devastate China. And when his own business partners at Squibb quietly suggested a name change, Saint Laurent’s response was five words long. “Opium or no perfume.” The 800 guests aboard the Peking that September night, Cher, Halston, Grace Jones, Diana Vreeland, Truman Capote, Donna Karan, Nan Kempner, Loulou de la Falaise, were not attending a product launch.
They were attending the coronation of a man who had decided that provocation was a legitimate business strategy, that outrage could be converted into revenue, and that the only more profitable than beauty was scandal. And the $30,000 worth of fireworks that spelled his name over New York Harbor were not a celebration.
They were a declaration of war against anyone who believed fashion should know its place. But before Yves Saint Laurent could burn his name into the sky above Manhattan, he first had to survive a childhood in colonial Algeria, in which everything about him, his sensitivity, his shyness, his obsession with sketching dresses, made him a target for the kind of cruelty that children reserve for anyone who refuses to be ordinary.
Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent was born on August 1st, 1936 at the Jardin Ciel clinic in Oran, Algeria, to a family of French pieds-noirs who had prospered in one of the most cosmopolitan colonial cities in North Africa. His father, Charles Mathieu Saint Laurent, was a lawyer and insurance broker who moved through the comfortable professional classes of French Algeria with a quiet assurance of a man whose family had been there for generations.
His mother, Lucienne Andrée, had a Spanish mother and a taste for elegance that her eldest son would absorb before he could articulate what elegance meant. He had two younger sisters, Michelle and Brigitte, for whom he designed dresses before he was a teenager, cutting fabric, constructing elaborate paper doll wardrobes, staging miniature theatrical productions in the family drawing room with the seriousness of a director who already understood that presentation was everything and substance was whatever you chose to put
inside the frame. Oran itself was a city of layered identities. French, Spanish, Arab, and Jewish communities stacked atop one another in a sun-soaked Mediterranean port. And it gave the boy a lifelong obsession with color, exoticism, and the lush sensory overload that would eventually define his aesthetic and inform every major collection from the Mondrian dresses to the Ballets Russes to the Chinese-inspired couture that would accompany the launch of Opium.
But the city also gave him something far less generous. He was, by every account, painfully shy, introverted, and bookish. And his classmates punished him for it with relentless cruelty. The kind of sustained, methodical bullying that teaches a child two things simultaneously. That the world is hostile and that the interior life of the imagination is the only safe country.
He drew relentlessly. Dresses, gowns, costumes, theatrical sets. Filling notebook after notebook with designs that grew more sophisticated each year. As if the pencil were the only instrument through which he could communicate with a world that otherwise frightened him. By his early teens, the sketches had become so accomplished that his mother and sisters wore his designs as if they were garments from a Parisian atelier.
And the family drawing room had become a private fashion house in miniature. Complete with fittings, critiques, and the kind of obsessive attention to detail that would later define his professional life. By 17, his confidence on paper had so thoroughly outpaced his confidence in person that his drawings spoke for him in situations where his voice could not.
And he submitted his sketches to the International Wool Secretariat Fashion Design Competition in 1953. He won first prize. Among the designers he defeated was a young Karl Lagerfeld, a name that would shadow and rival Saint Laurent for the next half century through collections, through awards, through lovers, and eventually through the kind of personal enmity that defines an entire industry.
That single competition would catapult the teenager from Oran directly into the orbit of Christian Dior himself. And the speed of his ascent would prove almost as dangerous as the years of torment that preceded it. So, after the Wool Secretariat victory, the young Saint Laurent traveled to Paris for the award ceremony in December 1953, where he met Michel De Brunhoff, the editor-in-chief of French Vogue, who was so astonished by the teenager’s sketches that he arranged an introduction to the most famous fashion designer alive,
Christian Dior, the creator of the new look that had single-handedly revived post-war French fashion, met the boy from Oran and hired him on the spot, recognizing in those drawings a fluency with fabric, proportion, and the female silhouette that most designers spent decades trying to develop. Saint Laurent enrolled briefly at the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, the most elite couture training school in Paris, but he barely lasted 3 months.
Dior wanted him on staff, not in a classroom. And by June 20th, 1955, he was officially employed at the House of Dior, initially decorating studios, designing accessories, and submitting sketches for consideration. Dior noticed the young man’s talent immediately. In August 1957, the 52-year-old couturier confided to Saint Laurent’s mother that he had chosen the 21-year-old as his successor.
A confidence so staggering in its implications that it effectively meant a teenager from colonial Algeria had been anointed as the future of the most prestigious fashion house in the world. Two months later, on October 24th, 1957, Christian Dior collapsed from a massive heart attack at a health spa in northern Italy and died.
The House of Dior, the most famous fashion institution in the world, the house that dressed the wives of presidents and the mistresses of kings, plunged into crisis. And the solution they reached was the most audacious appointment in the history of couture. The 21-year-old boy from Algeria would take the helm.
His debut collection, the Trapeze line of spring 1958, was a sensation. Narrow shoulders flaring out to a wide hem just above the knee, youthful, modern, elegant without being rigid. The collection was everything that Dior’s aging clientele feared and everything that a younger generation of women desired. Vogue called it brilliant.
And the international press responded with the kind of unanimous adulation that the fashion world reserves for moments when a designer appears to have intuited the future before anyone else has even sensed it arriving. The collection almost certainly saved the House of Dior from financial ruin.
And women in Paris and New York wanted to wear the Trapeze lines immediately, lining up at department stores to place orders before the fabric had been cut, treating the work of a 21-year-old as if it carried the authority of decades. Overnight, Yves Saint Laurent had become an international celebrity, the youngest head designer any major fashion house had ever appointed, the darling of every editor and buyer in the Western world.
And a name that women who had never heard of Oran now spoke with a reverence previously reserved for Dior himself. But the institution that had crowned him would within 2 years betray him in a manner so devastating that it would fracture his psyche for the rest of his life. In 1960, the French government conscripted Yves Saint Laurent into military service during the Algerian War.
And what followed in the next 20 days would define and in many ways permanently destroy everything that came after. The hazing was brutal and immediate. Fellow conscripts, unimpressed by his celebrity and repelled by his effeminacy, subjected him to relentless verbal and physical abuse. A sustained campaign of humiliation so systematic that within 3 weeks the most celebrated young designer in France suffered a complete mental breakdown.
He was admitted to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, the French Army’s principal psychiatric facility, where the treatment he received was arguably worse than what had put him there. Doctors administered heavy doses of sedatives and psychoactive drugs. They subjected him to electroshock therapy. Saint Laurent later recalled the experience in terms that still carry the weight of genuine horror.
He said that in 2 and 1/2 months he was so terrified that he only went to the toilets once. That by the end he had lost 35 kilos. And that he suffered what he called disturbances in his brain. He would trace the origins of his lifelong mental illness, his addictions, and his psychological fragility directly to that military hospital.
The place where he believed something fundamental broke inside him and never fully healed. Where the shy boy who had found refuge in sketching was subjected to a regime of pharmaceutical violence that left scars no couture collection could conceal. And while he lay sedated in Val de Grâce, unable to defend himself or even comprehend what was happening to his career, the House of Dior quietly replaced him with Marc Bohan, a safer, more conservative designer who would not embarrass the institution by being fragile, famous, and openly vulnerable
in an industry that worshipped composure above all other qualities. Saint Laurent was released in November 1960, thinner by 35 kilos, chemically altered in ways that neither he nor his doctors fully understood, and professionally unemployed for the first time since he was 17. He sued the House of Dior for breach of contract, and he won.
But the legal settlement meant nothing compared to the damage that had been done to his mind. The sedatives, the electroshock, the terror of the barracks, and the betrayal of an institution that had called him its future, and then discarded him while he lay in a hospital bed, unable to object or even fully comprehend that he was being erased.
The only person who seemed to understand the full catastrophic dimensions of what had been lost and what might still be built from the wreckage was a sharp-tongued bohemian from a small Atlantic island who had fallen in love with him 20 months earlier and had no intention of letting the world forget his name.
Pierre Vital Georges Bergé was born on November 14th, 1930, on the Atlantic island of Île d’Oléron, 6 years older than Saint Laurent, the son of a tax official and a progressive Montessori method teacher, and a man whose temperament was in almost every respect the opposite of the fragile genius he would spend his life protecting.
He arrived in Paris as a teenager, A bohemian autodidact who moved through leftist intellectual circles, befriended Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, dated the painter Bernard Buffet, and dealt in books with the confident aggression of someone who had decided early that the world owed him a seat at any table he chose to approach.
He was not, by his own admission, a fashion person. He later said he had a little scorn for fashion, but he was a close personal friend of Christian Dior, and out of respect for the dead couturier, he attended the first show at the house of Dior in January 1958. That is where he first glimpsed the young Saint Laurent, who had just electrified the fashion world with his trapeze collection.
A few days later, on February 3rd, 1958, the Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Marie-Louise Bousquet, organized a dinner in Saint Laurent’s honor, and Bergé attended. They fell in love. Bergé later recalled the simplicity of it. He said that he just loved him, that Yves just loved him, and that it was very easy.
Within 6 months, they were living together, and when Saint Laurent collapsed in the military hospital in 1960, Bergé was at his bedside, delivering the crushing news that Dior had replaced him, and then, in almost the same breath, proposing that they open their own couture house. Bergé later described standing alone in the courtyard of the hospital after making that promise, saying to himself, “My God, what can I do?” But he did it.
He became, in his own words, a businessman for Yves, to help him, to save him, to give him back his place. Their roles were rigidly defined from the very first day, and never shifted in 40 years. Saint Laurent was the creative genius, and Bergé was everything else, the CEO, the protector, the fixer, the buffer against the outside world, the business strategist, the gatekeeper.
And as the decades wore on, the caretaker of a man who was slowly and publicly destroying himself. Bergé described the arrangement as a Berlin Wall between them. He never interfered with the creative design for commercial reasons, and Saint Laurent never came to him to talk about money, ever. They separated as romantic partners in 1976, but remained business partners and intimate friends for the rest of Saint Laurent’s life, and the fashion house they built together from a hospital room promise would soon force the entire
industry to reconsider what a designer could be, what a designer could sell, and who a designer was permitted to dress. Armed with a breach of contract settlement from the House of Dior, and fresh funding from American millionaire J. Mack Robinson, an Atlanta-based businessman who happened to own a European insurance company, and cosmetics firm Charles of the Ritz, Saint Laurent and Bergé founded Yves Saint Laurent Couture in 1961.
The house opened at 30 bis rue Spontini in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, and the iconic interlocking YSL logo was designed by the French graphic artist Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, known as Cassandre. Three letters so elegantly fused that they would become one of the most recognized symbols in the history of fashion.
The first official collection debuted on January 29th, 1962, and Life magazine called it the most beautiful collection since Chanel. A comparison that announced to the fashion establishment that the boy from Oran had not been diminished by his ordeal. He had been sharpened by it. Robinson eventually sold his 80% stake in the mid-1960s for approximately $1 million, a decision he later described as the worst business mistake of his life.
Given that in 1999, the company would sell for an estimated $1 billion. Then came the Mondrian collection of 1965, cocktail dresses inspired by Piet Mondrian’s abstract geometric paintings. Stark black lines dividing blocks of primary color, simple, sleeveless, collarless. So widely copied in the United States and across Europe that they contributed to Mondrian’s posthumous fame and became the most photographed fashion pieces of the entire decade.
Saint Laurent had drawn inspiration from a book his mother gave him for Christmas. Piet Mondrian, Sa Vie et Son Oeuvre by Michel Seuphor. And the dresses became the proof that fashion could function as art criticism, translating a Dutch painter’s geometric abstractions into something a woman could wear to a cocktail party.
Then came Le Smoking in 1966, a women’s tuxedo suit, tailored jacket over slim black trousers inspired by Marlene Dietrich’s androgynous photographs from 1933. And Vogue initially refused to feature it. Restaurants in Paris and New York refused to admit women wearing it. And Saint Laurent responded by including a version in every single collection from that year until his retirement in 2002.
Then, on September 26th, 1966, he opened the first Rive Gauche boutique at 21 Rue de Tournon on the Left Bank, the first time a couturier had successfully launched a ready-to-wear line in France. And the first customer through the door was actress Catherine Deneuve, who would remain his muse for decades.
Customers waited up to 3 hours to buy, and within weeks, Rive Gauche had become the sanctum of Paris youth culture. Saint Laurent had effectively invented designer ready-to-wear, the business model that would later define every major luxury brand on the planet. And he was still only 30 years old with the most dangerous decade of his life about to begin.
The 1970s would become the decade that cemented Yves Saint Laurent as the single most influential fashion designer of the 20th century. And it would also become the decade that nearly killed him. In July 1976, he unveiled the Ballets Russes collection, widely considered his creative masterpiece, an opulent theatrical explosion of embroidered coats and robes inspired by the Russian Imperial Ballet, presented on a raised catwalk that transformed the fashion show itself into a form of performance art, a precedent that every major
designer would eventually follow. But his creative life had become inseparable from a private world of escalating recklessness that grew more destructive with each passing season. He and Bergé had bought their Paris apartment at 55 Rue de Babylone in 1970, and it became the setting for some of the most celebrated private gatherings in the fashion world.
A vast wood-paneled 1920s salon, a white-walled book-lined library, a rich red hallway, and a mirrored den where guests dressed in couture drank champagne before moving on to Club Sept or Le Palace, the premier nightclubs of the era. The art collection was growing with astonishing speed and ambition. Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Brancusi, Léger, de Chirico, Duchamp, Géricault, Klee, and Ingres.
Canvas after canvas, sculpture after sculpture, Eileen Gray furniture, Chinese bronzes, Renaissance sculptures, and thousands of objets de vertu, amassed with the relentless appetite of two men who understood instinctively that beauty could be owned and curated as an extension of the self. In Marrakech, where they had first traveled together in 1966, they acquired Dar Es Saada in 1974, a pink mansion whose interiors were redesigned by the American expat architect Bill Willis.
And Saint Laurent discovered kief, Moroccan hashish, smoking it with his muse Loulou de la Falaise while sketching in the garden. He said that everything was black before Marrakech and that he learned color from that city. But the color came laced with something darker, specifically, a 6-month affair beginning in 1973 with Jacques de Bascher, the dandy gigolo and social provocateur who was Karl Lagerfeld’s long-time partner.
Bergé blamed de Bascher for drawing Saint Laurent into hard drugs and sadomasochism. And he forcibly ended the affair. But the damage had already been done. The addiction had deepened. The enmity between the Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent camps had crystallized into something permanent.
And the designer who had once been content to channel his darkness into fabric was now channeling it into his veins. By 1977, Saint Laurent was the most decorated, most wealthy, and most self-destructive designer alive. And he had decided that his next creation would be a fragrance so deliberately provocative it could either make him immortal or destroy everything he and Bergé had built.
The perfume was conceived to coincide with his autumn-winter 1977 haute couture collection, which drew on Chinese and broadly Asian imagery and iconography. And Saint Laurent was involved in every aspect of its creation. The scent itself, the bottle design, the press kit he wrote personally, and the advertising campaign that would turn a fragrance launch into a cultural confrontation.
The scent, an oriental spicy blend created by perfumers Jean Amic and Jean Louis Sieuzac, was deliberately heavy, languid, and overwhelming. Mandarin orange, plum, clove, coriander, and pepper at the top, with amber, patchouli, myrrh, vanilla, and jasmine at the base. A composition designed to linger in rooms long after the woman wearing it had left.
The bottle was designed by Pierre Dinand and modeled on a Japanese inro, a small lacquered case traditionally worn hanging from an obi used to hold herbs, medicines, and perfumes, encased in red lacquer that caught light like a jewel. He named it Opium. He knew exactly what he was doing. The word carried a specific and devastating historical resonance.
The Opium Wars of 1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860 had been conflicts in which Britain and France forcibly compelled China to legalize the importation of opium, weaponizing drug addiction as an instrument of imperial policy, killing hundreds of thousands, and imposing unequal treaties that remain a foundational national humiliation in Chinese historical memory to this day.
Saint Laurent defended the name by saying that he thought of poetry, of the exotic, of Rimbaud, of Baudelaire, of beauty, sensuality, and dreams. The advertising campaign, shot by Helmut Newton in Saint Laurent’s own Paris apartment, featured Texan model Jerry Hall, who had recently left Bryan Ferry for Mick Jagger, reclining on a black lamé sofa in front of a golden Ming Dynasty Buddha, wearing embroidered oriental silk, shiny purple satin harem trousers, and strappy gold stilettos.
Her eyes closed, her lips parted, looking unmistakably as if she were under the influence of something extremely pleasurable. The original tagline, “For those addicted to Yves Saint Laurent”, made no attempt to be subtle. The The perfume was priced deliberately above Chanel No. 5, the undisputed queen of the fragrance market, as a calculated act of commercial aggression.
And when it launched in France in the autumn of 1977, stores sold out within days. Advertising posters were torn down as souvenirs. Tourists flew to Paris specifically to buy a bottle. And in the month before Christmas, Opium out sold Chanel No. 5 across Europe for the entire year. Now, all that remained was to bring the fragrance to America.
And for that launch, Saint Laurent wanted something so outrageous that every newspaper, every gossip column, and every society photographer in New York would have no choice but to make Opium the only word on their lips. The venue chosen for the American launch was the Peking, a four-masted iron bark tall ship dating to 1911, one of the last great iron sailing vessels ever built, normally berthed at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York’s East Harbor.
And for the night of September 20th, 1978, the ship was rented from the museum, moved into the harbor, and transformed into something that existed somewhere between an Imperial Chinese fantasy and a fever dream rendered in silk and fire. Coral red paper lanterns lit the gangway as guests ascended from the dock.
2,000 white cattleya orchids, flown in that morning from Hawaii, festooned every surface of the ship, the railings, the masts, the cabins, the passageways, an extravagance of tropical flowers that must have cost a fortune in freight charges alone. A 1,000 lb bronze Buddha sat at the center of the main deck, gazing with serene indifference at the most fashionable crowd in the Western Hemisphere.
Hand-painted Chinese parasols lined the passageways. Banners of red, gold, and purple silk hung from the masts and billowed in the harbor wind. Chinese lanterns glowed from every beam and railing. The entire ship was saturated with the scent of opium, pumped into the air so aggressively that guests later recalled being enveloped by the fragrance before they had climbed halfway up the gangway.
The perfume mixing with the salt air off the harbor and the faint diesel smell of the waterfront to produce something intoxicating and slightly nauseating in equal measure. Approximately 800 guests arrived in evening dress. Cher was there and Halston, America’s leading fashion designer and Studio 54 fixture, and Grace Jones, and Diana Vreeland, the legendary former editor of Vogue and fashion’s reigning high priestess, a woman whose single raised eyebrow could make or destroy a collection.
Nan Kempner came, the New York socialite who had devoted her life and her closet to Yves Saint Laurent with a dedication that bordered on the religious. Loulou de la Falaise was there, his muse and jewelry designer, the woman who had introduced him to Moroccan hashish, and who understood his creative instincts better than anyone except Bergé.
Donna Karan arrived and Zandra Rhodes and the model Alva Chinn. And presiding over all of it from the ship’s helm, positioned there like a grotesque figurehead, sat Truman Capote, novelist, socialite, Studio 54 regular, and the most notorious party animal in New York, serving as a kind of debauched master of ceremonies for an evening that was already spiraling beyond the control of anyone who had imagined this would be merely a product launch.
As the night reached its zenith, $30,000 worth of fireworks erupted above the harbor, choreographed to spell two words in burning light above the water, Yves Saint Laurent and Opium. The sky over Manhattan had become the most expensive fragrance advertisement in history, and the after-party had not even begun. After the fireworks faded over the harbor, the entire gathering migrated to Studio 54, which had been specially decorated for the occasion to resemble an opium den.
Velvet drapes, burning incense, oriental lanterns, and clouds of opium perfume pumped through the ventilation system until the air itself felt thick enough to chew. Studio 54 had opened in April 1977 and would close in February 1980, lasting just 33 months. But in that compressed window, it had become the epicenter of the most hedonistic era in modern American history.
Co-owned by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, patronized nightly by Halston, Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Liza Minnelli, Calvin Klein, Diana Ross, Mick Jagger, Elton John, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Nicholson, and literally every fashion designer, editor, and socialite of consequence in the Western world. Cocaine was the drug of choice.
It was everywhere. Openly consumed, considered glamorous, passed around with the casualness of after-dinner mints, and still not widely understood to be the catastrophically addictive substance it would later prove to be. Below the decks of the Peking earlier that evening, people had been doing cocaine with the unselfconscious ease of guests reaching for hors d’oeuvres.
And now at Studio 54, the same crowd continued in a venue whose own staff would later describe the atmosphere as being like the chicest opium den of the time. Saint Laurent himself stood on the Studio 54 balcony that night, watching his guests below on the dance floor, observing what one writer described as his very own Sodom and Gomorrah, The the designer elevated above his creation, surveying the decadence he had orchestrated with the detached gaze of a man who understood that spectacle was the highest form of commerce.
Truman Capote was photographed sleeping on the balcony while Kate Harrington and Gloria Swanson chatted above him, undisturbed by the unconscious novelist sprawled at their feet in what may have been the most perfectly composed image of late ’70s excess ever accidentally captured on film. Pat Cleveland danced.
Multicolored feathers fell from the ceiling. The Donna Summer era was in full swing, and the after-party pulsed with the specific energy of late 1970s New York, a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate eruption of pleasure-seeking that was simultaneously avant-garde and self-destructive, a city determined to celebrate itself into oblivion before the hangover arrived.
Into this world, Saint Laurent launched a perfume named after a narcotic, advertised it as something you get addicted to, and celebrated its American arrival with a tall ship, a Buddha, orchids flown from Hawaii, $30,000 in fireworks spelling the word opium over Manhattan, and an after-party in a nightclub decorated as a drug den. By morning, every society page in New York carried the story.
Every photograph showed the orchids and the Buddha and the silk banners, exactly as he had intended. But the audience that read those pages was far broader than the one he had invited aboard the Peking, and not everyone who saw the photographs found them charming. Within weeks of the September 20th party, as photographs of the Peking’s orchid-draped decks and the fireworks spelling opium over New York Harbor saturated every society page and fashion column in the country.
A group of Chinese Americans organized a formal response to what they considered an act of breathtaking historical callousness. They called themselves the American Coalition Against Opium and Drug Abuse. Their demands were specific and non-negotiable. A public apology from Yves Saint Laurent for what they described as his insensitivity to Chinese history and Chinese-American concerns and a complete name change for the fragrance.
They argued that the word opium represented a menace that destroyed many lives in China and the argument carried substantial weight because the Opium Wars were not ancient or abstract history but a wound that remained central to Chinese national identity. A period in which European empires had forcibly addicted an entire population to a narcotic as a tool of colonial domination then compelled the Chinese government at gunpoint to accept treaties so humiliating they were still referred to a century and a half later as the
unequal treaties. For a French luxury brand to launch a perfume called Opium decorated with oriental imagery, advertised with a tagline about addiction and celebrated aboard a ship dressed in Chinese lanterns and silk banners while a bronze Buddha watched from the deck. The insult to those who understood the history was not subtle.
And the coalition intended to make sure the rest of America understood it, too. The company that owned the YSL fragrance division at the time was Squibb through its subsidiary Charles of the Ritz. And Squibb received formal appeals from Americans requesting a name change. They considered it seriously.
The investment was enormous. The protests were generating damaging press and the fragrance had not yet had time to prove itself in the American market. But Saint Laurent himself would not negotiate. His reported response was absolute. Opium or no perfume. The coalition achieved one partial victory. The slogan was changed from for those who are addicted to Yves Saint Laurent to the somewhat less incendiary for those who adore Yves Saint Laurent.
The Middle East banned the fragrance entirely, removing it from shelves across the Gulf states. Australia banned it in one state. The People’s Republic of China banned it outright, declaring it an offensive reminder of the Opium Wars and spiritual pollution for the younger generation. Language that carried the weight of a government that had not forgotten what European commerce had done to its people a century earlier.
YSL offered no apology, no explanation, no concession beyond the altered slogan. Saint Laurent himself said only that he had thought of poetry, of Rimbaud, of Baudelaire, and watched the controversy generate exactly the kind of forbidden mystique that transforms a luxury product from something people want into something they feel compelled to possess.
And the sales figures, when they arrived, would confirm that his refusal to yield had been the single most profitable decision of his career. The protests, the bans, and the global outrage did exactly what controversy always does when it attaches itself to a luxury product that people already desire. They made Opium irresistible, transforming a French fragrance into a forbidden object that carried the thrill of transgression in every spritz.
European sales in the first full year reached 30 million dollars. In France alone, the first 9 months had generated 3 million dollars in 1977 currency. And stores from Paris to Lyon to Marseille could not keep bottles on their shelves for more than a few hours before they were purchased. Clients paid a year in advance to guarantee themselves a bottle, placing deposits on a perfume the way other people place deposits on automobiles or apartments, treating a fragrance as an investment rather than an indulgence.
In the month before Christmas 1977, Opium’s European sales exceeded Chanel No. 5’s total annual sales across the entire continent. A feat so staggering in its commercial implications that it effectively announced a new hierarchy in the fragrance world, one in which the house of Yves Saint Laurent had displaced the house of Coco Chanel at the very summit.
The North American launch, from September 1978 through June 1979, generated $3 million and was declared the best fragrance launch of the year, with Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s both reporting the biggest opening day sales figures they had ever recorded for a perfume. At $100 per ounce, Opium was positioned as the most expensive mainstream fragrance on the American market.
And it sold faster than competitors at half the price because the controversy had made the name itself an accessory, a signal of sophistication, daring, and cultural literacy that the wearer carried on her skin. Nearly five decades later, Opium remains one of the 10 best-selling perfumes in the world. And along with Chanel No.
5, it is the only fragrance to have maintained that status continuously since the 1970s. It remains the best-selling product in the entire YSL portfolio. The fragrance converted Yves Saint Laurent from a fashion house into an empire, changing how perfumes were marketed, how luxury brands alchemized scandal into sales, and how a deliberately transgressive name could be worth more than any advertising budget.
Every provocative fragrance launch of the 1980s, every scent that traded on sex, danger, or the allure of the forbidden, owed a direct and traceable debt to what happened aboard the Peking and inside Studio 54 on that September night in 1978. Saint Laurent had wagered that the world would reward audacity over sensitivity, that scandal could be alchemized into desire, and that a name everyone told him to change would become the very reason people reached for the bottle.
The sales figures confirmed the bet in the coldest possible arithmetic. But the man who had named a perfume after a narcotic, who had turned intoxication into a brand and addiction into a tagline, was already losing himself to the substances he had so profitably glamorized. The arc of Yves Saint Laurent’s private life is among the most devastatingly self-destructive in the history of fashion, and neither he nor Pierre Bergé ever attempted to conceal it from the world.
The list of substances was staggering in its breadth and its duration. Cocaine, which he described as his primary drug during the Marrakech years of the late 1960s and ’70s, hashish, introduced to him by Loulou de la Falaise in Morocco, heroin, documented in later years, actual opium, the drug itself, in an irony too bleak to be called coincidence, Valium and other sedatives prescribed by doctors who understood they were treating symptoms rather than causes, whiskey consumed by the liter, according to biographer Marie Dominique Lelièvre,
amphetamines, and 150 Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes per day, a number confirmed by Bergé himself. His manic depression, his own diagnosis confirmed by Bergé, created cycles of euphoria and blackness that fed the addiction and were fed by it in return. A closed loop of suffering that no amount of professional success could interrupt.
Bergé described watching a man who, even after producing a wonderful collection, was a very unhappy guy. More than unhappy, really. And said that he just tried to help from time to time, that he never complained, and that it was an illness, nothing else, just an illness. By the early 1990s, the deterioration was visible to every editor, journalist, and buyer in the fashion world.
Saint Laurent was sluggish from sedatives, his reflexes dulled, his speech slower than it had been even a few years earlier. He had swollen physically from drinking 25 cans of Coca-Cola daily, a substitute for alcohol prescribed after liver concerns, and the transformation of his body was as legible as a medical chart.
Bergé sometimes had to physically support him to walk onto the runway after shows, gripping his elbow, guiding him through the applause while the audience tried not to stare at the evidence of what the designer had done to himself. Observers noted that they attended the shows as much to examine his visible decline as to evaluate his creations.
The designer himself had become the spectacle, a man disintegrating in public view while his partner steered him toward the cameras with the grim tenderness of someone who had long since stopped believing that recovery was possible. Saint Laurent said it plainly in his own words.
He said he had known fear and the terrors of solitude, that he had known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. The man who had glamorized intoxication with a red lacquer bottle and a 1,000-lb Buddha on a ship was being consumed by the very forces he had converted into a brand. And the only thing standing between him and total collapse was the same man who had stood in the courtyard of Val de Grâce nearly four decades earlier and asked himself, “My God, what can I do?” On January 7th, 2002, at his house at 5 Avenue Marceau in Paris,
Yves Saint Laurent announced his retirement from fashion at the age of 65. And the speech he delivered was one of the most extraordinary public confessions in the history of any creative industry. He said that in many ways he felt he had created the wardrobe of the contemporary woman, that he had participated in the transformation of his times, and that he had long believed fashion was supposed not only to make women beautiful, but to reassure them, to give them confidence, and to enable them to assert themselves.
Then he said something that no designer of his stature had ever admitted to an audience of press and colleagues. He said he had known fear and the terrors of solitude, that he had known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs, and that he had been able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober.
He invoked Marcel Proust, saying that Proust had taught him that the magnificent and pitiful family of the hypersensitive are the salt of the earth, and that he, without knowing it, had been a part of that family. He departed without taking questions. The final haute couture show was held on January 22nd, 2002, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a retrospective of his entire 40-year career.
And Jerry Hall walked the runway in a feathered coat over a satin gown, and Claudia Schiffer appeared, and Katoucha shimmered in gold and leopard print. And the audience understood they were watching the closing of an era that had begun with a teenager’s sketches in a Mediterranean villa in Oran. Five years later, in April 2007, Saint Laurent was diagnosed with brain cancer.
His doctors and Bergé made the decision to withhold the terminal prognosis from him, protecting him one final time from a truth they judged too cruel to deliver. On Sunday, June 1st, 2008, Yves Saint Laurent died at his Paris residence at the age of 71. Pierre Bergé was at his side, and he closed his eyes. Days before the end, they had entered into a PACS, France’s civil solidarity pact for same-sex couples, the closest thing to marriage available in French law at the time.
The funeral was held on June 5th at the Église Saint-Roch in Paris, attended by Nicolas Sarkozy, Carla Bruni, Farah Pahlavi, Bernadette Chirac, and Catherine Deneuve. His ashes were scattered in the Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech, where a Roman pillar bearing his name was erected among the cobalt blue walls and the palms he had loved since his first afternoon there.
And Bergé, delivering the eulogy, made a promise. I also know that I will never forget what I owe you, and that one day I will join you under the Moroccan palms. The auction of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé took place at the Grand Palais in Paris on February 23rd, 24th, and 25th of 2009, and it was the largest and most valuable private art collection ever sold at public auction.
Over 30,000 visitors came to the pre-sale exhibition in 3 days, filing past the Matisses and the Mondrians and the Brancusis that had hung for decades on the walls of two men who built a life around beauty and the compulsive acquisition of master works. Then the bidding began. When it ended, the total realized was 373,935,500 euros, approximately 483,835,144 dollars, a world record for a private collection at auction, the highest grossing sale in European history, and a simultaneous record for Impressionist art, 20th century
decorative arts, and old master paintings. 95.5% of lots sold. A 1911 Matisse, Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose, fetched 35.9 million euros, or 46.4 million dollars, setting a world record for the artist. A Brancusi portrait brought 29.1 million euros. An Eileen Gray Dragons armchair, dating from approximately 1917 to 1919, sold for 21.9 million euros, 28.
3 million dollars, a world record for any 20th century decorative art object. A Mondrian composition realized 21.5 million euros. Additional world records fell for Marcel Duchamp, de Chirico, Paul Klee, James Ensor, Gericault, and Ingres. Name after name, record after record, the accumulated taste of five decades converted into a cascade of figures that no auction house had ever witnessed.
Bergé used the proceeds to endow the Fondation Pierre Bergé Yves Saint Laurent and to fund two museums, one in Paris and one in Marrakech. A 43,000 square foot building designed by Studio KO that opened in October 2017 beside the Jardin Majorelle, the garden they had rescued from demolition nearly four decades earlier.
Bergé did not live to see the Marrakech museum open. On September 8th, 2017, just weeks before the inauguration, he died in his sleep at his home in Saint Rémy de Provence at the age of 86 from the myopathy he had publicly disclosed in 2009. The garden draws 800,000 visitors a year and the street outside bears the name Rue Yves Saint Laurent.
And the perfume that started all of it, the one with the forbidden name, the one launched on a ship with orchids and a bronze Buddha and fireworks that wrote a designer’s name across the Manhattan sky, still sits on department store shelves around the world nearly half a century later.
Proof that Yves Saint Laurent understood something the protesters, the governments, and the moralists never quite grasped, that the most dangerous luxury is the one people are told they should not want. Closing comment. Before this video, had you heard the story of the Opium launch party on the Peking?
