Yves Saint Laurent: the death of a fashion king

Yves Saint Laurent was the Sixties' most flamboyant fashion king whose creations caught the spirit of the decade. He died at the age of 71 from brain cancer.

Yves Saint Laurent's great moment of ascendancy came in 1968 when, in a television interview, Coco Chanel anointed him her spiritual heir. The reaction of the maestro, who died this week of brain cancer aged 71, was laced with a typical foreboding, says The New Yorker. "So they crowned me king," he remarked. "Look what happened to all the other kings of France."

As former lover and lifelong business partner Pierre Berg once said, Saint Laurent was "born with a nervous breakdown". Yet despite his fragile physical and emotional health, Saint Laurent's muse never deserted him. "He always did it first and he always did it with panache," says The Daily Telegraph.

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