Pierre Bergé, the French fashion tycoon, philanthropist and art collector who was the driving force behind the creation of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house, has died at the age of 86 following a long illness, reports The Guardian.
Bergé was one of the most influential business figures on the French cultural scene, known for his very public long-term personal and business relationship with the designer Saint Laurent, which captured the public imagination and inspired a series books and films.
From 1961, when the two men founded the fashion house, the tough Bergé led the business side, while the shy Saint Laurent created the designs that would shape French style throughout the 60s and 70s.
Bergé was a passionate bibliophile and art collector, amassing two of the world’s top private art and rare books collections with Saint Laurent. He also campaigned for gay rights and donated a large part of his fortune to Aids research. In 2010, he was part of a group of business figures who took over the struggling daily French newspaper Le Monde, and was chairman of the supervisory board at the newspaper.
The former socialist French culture minister, Jack Lang, led tributes on Friday, calling Bergé a “true prince of the arts and culture”.
Always politically engaged, Bergé was an important backer and confidant of the late French Socialist president François Mitterrand and later backed other Socialist presidential candidates including François Hollande. In January this year, he threw his weight behind the centrist newcomer, Emmanuel Macron, who went on to win the presidency in May. Although backing Macron “wholeheartedly”, Bergé at the same time lamented the decline of the Socialist Party.
“A whole part of our collective citizen and artistic memory dies with Pierre Bergé,” Macron said in a statement, praising Bergé’s genius for creating “beauty and excellence” wherever he could.
Hollande described Bergé as “an exceptional man of conviction who defended the idea of equal rights for all”.
The leftwing MP Jean-Luc Mélenchon praised Bergé’s contributions to the fight against racism, to Aids research and to supporting the arts, lauding him as someone who “did not devote his life to his money”.
Bergé was born on the Île d’Oléron in the west of France, the son of a tax official and teacher. As a rebellious teenager in La Rochelle, he left school early intent on seeking his fortune in the cultural world of the capital. His story was an extraordinary saga of a self-made man who, from a modest start, ended up holding one of the world’s most valuable art and books collections. Shortly after arriving in Paris he was walking on the Champs Élysées when the poet Jacques Prévert fell from a window and nearly landed on top of him.
“He fell. Comme ça!” Bergé told The Observer in 2009. “They took him to the hospital. I didn’t know it was Jacques Prévert. I learnt later from the newspaper.”
Bergé took this strange and surreal fall as a sign that the city was his natural place to be. He began working in antique books, scouring bookstalls along the Seine for treasures, built up a network of influential friends and worked in art promotion.