Wild, Child

Have the kids ever been alright? According to Jean Cocteau's 1929 novel Les enfants terribles, the answer is a resounding... no.

I was seventeen years old when I was blackballed by the co-founder of the house of Yves Saint Laurent. 

It was 2011, and I was about to fly to Paris for a big interview I had scheduled with Pierre Bergé, the life and business partner of Mr. Saint Laurent – and executor of Jean Cocteau’s estate. I was a baby academic, budding collector of vintage fashion, and very excited to ask the notoriously gruff Frenchman about the connections between Saint Laurent and Cocteau. 

I’d wiggled my way out of calculus to take a phone call from his assistant. 

“And remind me, Mlle. Cassens – what is the focus of your thesis?” he asked. 

“The influence of Jean Cocteau on the life and work of Mr. Saint Laurent,” I responded. 

“I thought so. Well, you see, that is not tenable. I have to inform you that you are not welcome at the YSL museum and archives, and Mr. Bergé will not be speaking with you,” said he, and that was that. 

To add insult to injury, he followed up with an email: “Mr. Bergé informs you that YSL was influenced by nobody.” 

It was a patently false, blatantly untrue, and enormously unrealistic statement to make of a designer who once sent a look titled “Hommage à Jean Cocteau” down the runway. I later directly refuted his argument in the thesis (and cited the email, MLA-style). 

It was to be my first (but not my last) brush against authoritative and seemingly domineering older men – and my first time being treated as the very archetype I was exploring in that thesis: the Coctelian enfant terrible.