Original drawing signed in black and red felt-tip pen by Yves Saint Laurent, inscribed “Pour Gilles Bernard un souvenir amical / Yves Saint Laurent”. Single leaf mounted on card, with minor undulations. A dampstain not affecting the drawing, and a small restoration in the margin.

We also include the first edition of this infamous album of cartoons (La Vilaine Lulu, Claude Tchou, 1967) as well as the large-format and illustrated subscription slip for the album.

An exceedingly rare portrait of Yves Saint Laurent’s own mean girl: “La Vilaine Lulu”, heroine of the great couturier’s only graphic novel.

The original drawings from the published comic strip are today in the Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image and the Fondation Pierre Bergé — Yves Saint Laurent. To our knowledge, no other drawings are recorded outside these two institutions.

In 1956, the young Yves Saint Laurent, then assistant to Christian Dior, playfully sketched a comic-strip heroine unlike any other: the Vilaine Lulu. The inspiration had sprung from a dressing-up scene among young couturiers in the master’s ateliers: the designer Jean-Pierre Frère had placed a straw boater on his head and had donned a red tulle tutu. That same year, Christian Dior twice inscribed Saint Laurent’s copy of his autobiography Christian Dior et moi : first to Lulu “as dark as the pages of this book are bright”, then to Yves “whose future in this profession looks bright”. From the very outset, Lulu was conceived as her creator’s inverted double, his shadow self.

Portrait of an outlaw heroine

Squat and perverse, la Vilaine Lulu appears to the outside world as an ordinary little girl, yet harbours a monstrous nature behind closed doors. Saint Laurent himself described her as a “tale for prodigal or sadistic children”. She poisons her classmates at Easter, locks them in a barn before setting it alight, plies infants with wine, abducts babies, and commits murders with disconcerting glee. The present drawing displays all of Lulu’s characteristic traits: straight black hair with a gondolier’s hat tied with a red ribbon, an impish smile, and black stockings. In homage to the theatre director Gilles Bernard,

Saint Laurent places this Lulu upon the stage, playing the lyre and draped in a dramatic red toga — a variation on the red tutu skirt she so often wears. Gilles Bernard moved in the circles of stage artists, costume designers, and scenographers through the Parisian theatre world, where he held key positions, and through the Galerie Proscenium, which he directed with his friend Paul Payen: he exhibited Yves Saint Laurent’s theatrical costume designs and maquettes on several occasions during the 1970s, and also showed the artworks of Erté, Leonor Fini, and Pierre Clayette.

Another Lulu with a lyre, closely related to the present artwork (the ”Lulumuse”) appears in ”Les métamorphoses de la vilaine Lulu”, used as the pastedown and flyleaf illustration of the comic strip album published in 1967. After more than a decade spent in the shadows, solely known within the couturier’s intimate circle, Lulu at last appeared in a unique comic-strip portfolio. The provocative writer Françoise Sagan had persuaded the couturier to publish his cartoons. Saint Laurent threw a party at New Jimmy’s for the occasion, whereupon the Tout-Paris immediately began searching for themselves between the lines. Saint Laurent indeed mocked André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne. Lulu herself declares (in a metal dress): “I’m a sausage. But a Rabanne sausage.”

Reflection of a tormented soul

Well aware that every reader would see in Lulu a self-portrait, Saint Laurent wrote a disclaimer at the beginning of the

book: “The author warns that any attempt to psychoanalyse him through his heroine would be entirely futile. Unlike Gustave Flaubert, who famously declared ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi!’, he is at pains to make clear that under no circumstances will he be saying, in turn: ‘La vilaine Lulu, c’est moi.’” A brilliant disclaimer, yet hardly a convincing one, for the parallels are striking. Lulu suffers from nervous depression and narcissistic tendencies: she is caught gazing at her reflection in a pond, murmuring “Quel bel enfant !”. She aspires to luxury with absolute conviction, abandons bohemian life the moment “the lack of luxury destabilises her”, and concludes her final adventure alongside the elderly aristocrat Gontran de Pontchartrain on a note of quintessential melancholy: “She understood then she would always be sad”. Alicia Drake records the testimony of someone close to the couturier: “If you’ve read La Vilaine Lulu, I mean, there is a great similarity, you know, all those pranks and childish things in the book which would amuse him enormously.” (The Beautiful Fall, Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris, 2012).

The present drawing frees his character from the confines of the comic strip, and distinguishes itself further still by the finished quality lent by the felt-tip medium, in contrast to the comic sketches in graphite and coloured pencil.

A rare drawing of La Vilaine Lulu, a genuine fragment of Yves Saint Laurent’s hidden self who revealed in red and black ink what fashion alone could never say.