The more time that you spend at the Lycée, the more you learn about the school’s many notable alumni. Susan Sontag’s son is a former student of the Lycée, as well as Danielle Steel, the romance writer who has sold over 800 million copies of her books. (It would be fun to interview Ms. Steel, honestly!) And so is Julian Casablancas, whose band, The Strokes, livened up the soundtrack of many of your teachers’ teenage years. One of our most intriguing alumnae, however, is a woman who only spent a brief amount of time at the Lycée. In the 1960s, she got expelled (yes, expelled!) for bad behavior. Then she ascended to become a major fashion icon. She was called Loulou de la Falaise.
Loulou de la Falaise (née Louise Vava Lucia Henriette Le Bailly de La Falaise, in 1948) was the child of aristocrats, and she went to lots of parties with the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. The New Yorker magazine once described her as “the quintessential Rive Gauche haute bohémienne” because she wore tuxedos and smoked cigarettes, and she even inspired Saint Laurent’s own women’s suit, Le Smoking. Before she arrived at our own Lycée, she got kicked out of a few boarding schools across England and Switzerland.
La Falaise modeled for Vogue, the magazine, for a while, and then, when she was 24, she joined Saint Laurent’s haute-couture firm in Paris, where she designed eccentric jewelry. She was brilliantly productive there until 2002, when Saint Laurent retired and La Falaise launched her own fashion business, which has been successful, too.
A lot of admirers have described La Falaise as Yves Saint Laurent’s “muse,” but in 2010 she objected to a reporter using the word. She argued, “For me, a muse is someone who looks glamorous but is quite passive, whereas I was very hard-working. I worked from 9am to sometimes 9pm, or even 2am. I certainly wasn’t passive.”
It is easy to believe she was not passive. La Falaise seems to have been possessed her whole life by an excess of beauty, ideas and energy. According to rumor she was even baptized, not with holy water, but with the designer perfume “Shocking.” (That would have been her mother’s doing: Maxime Birley, a society lady who dabbled in both fashion and in man-slaying.) Birley lost custody of Loulou in the 1950s due to her reckless love affairs, as well as being a kleptomaniac and unconscionably chaotic—but that is another story.
Loulou, despite the odds, emerged from her itinerant rich-kid childhood with the focus of a real artist. She was a real rare gem, one of the kinds of people who you are simply in awe that she spent any time at all with us here on planet Earth. She died in 2011.
If anybody wants to ogle at old photographs of Loulou de la Falaise, we are all doing it on the York Wing’s 6th floor.
About the Author :
Rachel Veroff joined the Lycée’s Communications team in 2018. She brings to the school her interest in storytelling and bilingual culture.