A Necklace After Yves Saint Laurent’s Own Heart

First of Its Kind, Last of Its Kind tells the story of one exceptional accessory and the archival piece that inspired it.

Born in 1936, Yves Saint Laurent grew up in a house overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in Oran, Algeria, where his father managed an insurance company and owned a handful of cinemas. As a teenager, Saint Laurent became fascinated with the theater — even creating a miniature stage set with a wooden crate and cardboard characters in costumes that he designed himself using fabric snipped from his mother’s dresses. In 1954, at age 18, he moved to Paris and studied fashion design at the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. Less than a year later, he met Christian Dior, who hired him on the spot as a studio assistant. After Dior’s sudden death in 1957, Saint Laurent, then 21, became the world’s youngest couturier. In 1960, he was fired from the house but, with the help of his partner, the industrialist Pierre Bergé, he opened his own couture salon the following year in an airy townhouse in the 16th Arrondissement. Despite their meticulous construction, Saint Laurent’s garments — a peacoat, for instance, inspired by a sailor’s jacket and worn over white shantung pants — liberated the female form. Beginning with his spring 1962 show, and appearing in nearly every collection between fall 1979 and his final presentation in 2002, he’d dress one model (often his favorite that season) in a heart-shaped necklace created by Roger Scemama. Saint Laurent was so fond of the coeur fétiche, as the original and its subsequent iterations were known — variations on an asymmetrical pendant encrusted in smoky gray diamonds, red crystals and pearl teardrop cabochons — that he kept one of them in his own apartment on the Rue de Babylone.

Now, for fall 2024, Saint Laurent’s creative director, Anthony Vaccarello, has revived that archival showstopper. Made from colored rhinestones and oxidized silver-toned metal, the new version of the necklace, which cascaded down a model’s back at the brand’s Paris Fashion Week show this past February, offered a dazzling counterpoint to the sheer caramel and ocher blouses and pencil skirts that appeared on the runway. “What could be more beautiful for a woman than to tie passion around her neck in the form of a heart?” Saint Laurent once wrote. Vaccarello’s answer: this tender necklace, which can also be worn as a brooch.

Photo assistant: Christopher Thomas Linn