Yves Saint Laurent & Betty Catroux: The Woman Who Became His Feminine Double

Yves Saint Laurent & Betty Catroux: The Woman Who Became His Feminine Double

There are fashion muses who pose for photographs, muse over sketches, attend premieres and understand perfectly well that they are participating in the machinery of fashion. Then there was Betty Catroux. She did almost the opposite. She disliked modelling, had little interest in building a fashion career, and seemed far more interested in dancing until dawn than in discussing clothes. Yet for Yves Saint Laurent, she became something much more intimate than a professional muse. She was his "feminine double," his twin, his physical and psychological counterpart. When they met in Paris in 1967, Saint Laurent saw in Catroux an androgynous image that reflected something he had already been searching for in his work: a woman who could borrow from the masculine wardrobe without surrendering her sensuality. Their friendship would last until his death in 2008, and somewhere between the nightclub, the couture salon and the after-hours party, Catroux became inseparable from the story of modern Saint Laurent style.

Early Life: Betty Saint Before Yves Saint Laurent

Betty Catroux was born Betty Saint in Rio de Janeiro in 1945. She was the only child of Carmen Saint, a Brazilian-born French socialite, and American diplomat Elim O'Shaughnessy. She spent her first four years in Brazil before moving to Paris with her mother, where she grew up in the affluent social world of postwar Paris.

It was a privileged environment, but Catroux never developed the reverence for fashion that might have been expected from someone raised so close to Parisian society. At sixteen, through her mother's social connections, she met Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel and began modelling for the house on Rue Cambon. She stayed for approximately two years.

The experience did not turn her into a conventional fashion girl. Quite the opposite.