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W hat is a muse? For Yves Saint Laurent, it was a kindred spirit. The moment Laurent laid eyes on the Rio de Janeiro-born model Betty Catroux in 1967, he felt connected to her. The lanky, blond pair bore each other’s spitting image – a fact that Laurent seized upon, and he’d go on to often characterize her as his “double.”
Years later, Catroux would reflect on their instant bond. “For Yves it was love at first sight, physically. I was androgynous, asexual,” recalled Catroux on the occasion of a 2020 show at Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris. “Our resemblance was more than physical; we were alike spiritually, mentally, it was something incredible. And what was amazing about him is that he felt that I could be his soul mate, a kindred spirit.”
Her lithe, boyish figure, too, made the perfect frame on which to hang his iconic Le Smoking suit, revolutionary for its reinventing a menswear staple as a statement for female liberation. Not to mention prophetic in its blurring the aesthetic boundaries of gender conventions, being, after all, an open endorsement of androgynous dressing.
Now aged 80, Catroux spends her time in Paris. It’s the city where she grew up from the age of four onwards and later came into her own as a young adult and fashion model – and, in the same breath, the city where she and Laurent enjoyed countless, drug-fueled nights in the late 1960s and 1970s. Others might imagine a muse as docile or coquettish; Catroux, filled with blunt opinions and hedonistic tendencies, was anything but.
Indeed, for Laurent, it was her wildness, her taste for the subversive and flirtatious, lusting nature that so compelled him. Neither had many misgivings as their partying descended to a place too dark for any semblance of stability; eventually, thanks to the intervention of Catroux’s husband, interior designer François Catroux, and Laurent’s partner, Pierre Bergé, the pair’s mutually enabling period of euphoric self-destruction would culminate with a stint in rehab, which they of course attended together.
Still, reading back on the breathless accounts of how they described one another, it’s not hard to imagine how, in the midst of all that dancing, clubbing and drinking, it was being in the other’s presence that was most intoxicating of all.
Though Catroux moved through this life as inspiration embodied to one of the greatest fashion visionaries of all time, she’s claimed to hate the word used as shorthand for the role she filled – “muse.” Whatever its negative implications in her mind, no one can argue that Catroux didn’t make the part her own, unique to her, incomparable.
And being at Laurent’s side for decades – on top of the taste one acquires being married to an interior designer to Europe’s highest social echelons – no doubt brought her singular insights when it comes to the vast troves of manmade beauty to be discovered in the world.
It was the whole of a life well-lived that came into play as she stepped up to guest curate Sotheby’s upcoming Important Design auction on 20 May, pulling from the collection of Bernard Laurent.
Highlights include a series of vases designed by Swiss-French painter Jean Dunand, a rug bearing a design after a Pablo Picasso, and a sideboard by the French architect Paul Dupré-Lafon. Also on offer is François-Xavier Lalanne’s charming Bar aux Autruches – a functional bar cart held up by two ostrich sculptures.
In recognition of the occasion, Catroux reveals more of her fascinating mind and nuanced legacy through a Proust questionnaire.
My favorite virtue:
Loyalty
The quality I prefer in a man:
Ambiguity
The quality I prefer in a woman:
Courage
What I most value in my friends:
Exclusivity
My main default:
Indifference
My favorite occupation:
Dancing, drinking
My dream of happiness:
Freedom
What would be my greatest misfortune:
Illness
What I would like to be:
Me at my best
The country I would like to live:
Paris, France
My favorite color:
Black
My favorite flower:
Thistle
My favorite bird:
?
My favorite poets:
Arthur Rimbaud
My heroes in fiction:
None
My heroines in fiction:
None
My favorite composers:
Miles Davis, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Frédéric Chopin
My favorite painters:
Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko
My heroes in real life:
My two children, my chosen family
My heroines in history:
None
What I hate most of all:
The norm
The gift of nature that I would like to have:
An artistic gift
How I would like to die:
Asleep under anesthesia
Current state of mind:
Passionate
Faults that I find most forgiving:
Stupidity
My motto:
Timelessness is an art
My favorite designers:
Hedi Slimane
