Betty Catroux Gets Comfortable
Consider this a paean to the accomplishments of a woman who, by her own account, has never accomplished a thing. “I’m the laziest person in the world,” Betty Catroux says, a statement as accurate as not and yet one that is, at its core, strategic.
It is certainly true that, owing to luck—of birth, class, genes, and fate—Catroux largely escaped the usual indignities of making a living. Yet this is not to diminish how strenuously, if stealthily, she has sung for her supper for the better part of her 79 years. That we know Betty Catroux at all owes to her having been linked to the designer Yves Saint Laurent throughout his life, and beyond. In fashion shorthand, she was his muse.
“I hate that word,” Catroux tells me when we meet recently in her handsome and serene garden apartment on the Left Bank. “And I couldn’t care less about his dresses.”
That, however, did not prevent her from permitting Saint Laurent to dress her for decades, to treat the tall, lissome blonde as a live paper doll, the perfect embodiment of the post-gender femininity he helped pioneer, beginning with his storied safari suit and the so-called Le Smoking.
Through the years Saint Laurent presented Catroux with so many of his clothes that when, in 2018, she donated most of them to the foundation of the late designer and his partner Pierre Bergé, there were more than enough items (180 haute couture creations, many of them runway prototypes, along with hats, shoes, handbags, and 138 ready-to-wear garments instantly recognizable to the social media hordes devoted to the cult of Betty) to pack an exhibition curated by the current Saint Laurent creative director, Anthony Vaccarello.
“Everything that makes up the house’s aura—an allure, a mystique, an almost scandalous aspect, an elusive yet enticing brush with danger—finds its powerful expression in Betty,” Vaccarello says.
As we chat over large glasses of cold chablis, she brusquely deflects the assessment. “I was happy to give the clothes away,” she says dryly. Today her lank blond hair is cut in bangs that fall over her oversize sunglasses. She is thin as a rail and dressed all in black: jacket, lace-up boots, skinny jeans. “I never paid any attention to fashion.”
The lodgings Catroux has occupied for decades are set at the rear of an interior courtyard. They’re reached through a pair of imposing carriage doors facing onto the stylish Rue de Lille. The place is as quiet as a grave. Like her, it is icy and chic. To a degree you could say that Catroux is at home in tombs; she was, after all, a regular for decades at Saint Laurent’s storied and treasure-filled duplex on the Rue de Babylone.
There aren’t many domestic spaces more intensely fetishized than that one, filled with so many layers of historic references and artistic treasures: paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, and Klee; a Goya portrait now at the Louvre; a treasury’s worth of early German Hanover chalices; 15 ornate Art Nouveau–style mirrors designed by Claude Lalanne; an enormous Senufo bird that tended, in humid weather, to exude what is known as “aroma boma.” (The bird was Laurent and Bergé’s first acquisition together, and the only piece not for sale.) When Christie’s auctioned off the estate in 2009, in the so-called “sale of the century,” the contents fetched a record-breaking $485 million.
What is hardly ever mentioned is how like a crypt the place was, a series of hushed pharaonic chambers devised, constantly augmented, and subject to rearrangement by a protean but profoundly drug- and alcohol-addicted genius. Anyone who ever spent five minutes there was aware of the hovering presence of death. To a large extent, friendship with Yves Saint Laurent required an ability to sustain the designer’s always tenuous interest in remaining alive.
They met at a gay nightclub when Saint Laurent was at the height of his early fame and she was nominally a model. What was more important, it is easy to see now, is that she was a projection of the zeitgeist, a glacial blond beauty who, if largely devoid of the bosomy sex appeal that characterized the female ideal of a previous generation, offered something more prophetic. She was nonbinary avant la lettre. Though she was married (to the famous society decorator François Catroux) and the mother of two daughters, and ostensibly heterosexual, she was an avatar of a post-gender world. Possibly that is why the best designers have always loved her.
When Tom Ford debuted his first Saint Laurent Rive Gauche collection, in 2000, he dedicated it to Catroux. When Hedi Slimane began designing menswear, it was Catroux he referred to as his inspiration. When Vaccarello, among the most compelling designers now working, joined Saint Laurent, he immediately cast Catroux, then in her mid-seventies, in an ad campaign. When you look at almost any runway today, the traditional markers of masculine and feminine identities are mutable, to say the least. What you are seeing is a shadow of Betty Catroux.
“I don’t know why people are interested in me,” she says flatly. “I have no qualities. I’m not stupid, mind you, but my gift, if I have one, is to attract people, and I do seem to attract the right ones.”
She stands up to fetch the wine and refill our glasses, and as she does so I think of something Vaccarello said. Catroux is one of those beings, virtually unheard of in fashion, who have little need to bother about the effect they have. “You think you know everything about her: her allure, that strand of bright blond hair falling over dark glasses, that long, lean silhouette that’s slightly boyish yet very feminine at the same time,” Vaccarello says. “In fact, she is all that and something else, too: a woman who moves, thinks, laughs, and embodies the spirit of Saint Laurent—just like that, without any great fanfare.”
If you happen to catch sight of her, in the front row or crossing the street, you are immediately aware of seeing something rare. “Maybe what people are attracted to is the fact that I’m not a woman,” Catroux declares. I point out the absurdity of the assertion. She is a woman, in fact.
“All right, yes, but it’s so boring, this thing of gender,” she says before pausing. “What is the point of being a boy or a girl when you can be both?”
This story appears in the March 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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