I am very happy to design haute couture. It's a love story

The great couturier Yves Saint Laurent, whose name became synonymous with elegance and modernity, once said: “I am very happy to design haute couture. It’s a love story between couture and me.” At first glance, these words seem simple—an artist professing affection for his craft. But in truth, they reveal something far deeper: the sacred union between creator and creation, the eternal dialogue between the human heart and the art it is destined to serve. To Saint Laurent, haute couture was not a profession—it was a romance, a lifelong devotion, and perhaps, a kind of divine calling. His words remind us that true mastery is born not of ambition, but of love.

In calling couture a love story, Saint Laurent evokes the ancient bond that has always existed between the artist and the medium through which they speak. For the designer, fabric was not mere material; it was the language of the soul. Each fold, each seam, each whisper of silk was a confession of feeling, an expression of beauty shaped by longing. To design was to court the ineffable—to chase perfection knowing it could never be caught, yet to find joy in the pursuit. This is the paradox of art: that it is both pain and pleasure, struggle and surrender. Saint Laurent’s happiness was not the fleeting joy of success, but the deeper contentment of one who has found his beloved in his labor.

The origin of this devotion can be traced to the young Yves himself—a shy boy from Oran, Algeria, who dreamed of Paris and sketchbooks filled with gowns. When he arrived at the house of Dior as a mere apprentice, fate seemed to place him in the temple of his destiny. Upon Dior’s sudden death, the youth of twenty-one inherited the mantle of haute couture, a burden and a blessing both. From that moment onward, his relationship with couture was not unlike that of a poet with his muse—turbulent, consuming, but utterly necessary. Through sleepless nights and the pressures of fame, through breakdowns and reinventions, his devotion never wavered. For even when he suffered, he was alive within the embrace of his art.

The ancients, too, understood such sacred unions. Phidias devoted his life to shaping marble and bronze into forms fit for gods, saying that he felt their presence in the stone. Michelangelo, centuries later, spoke of releasing angels from blocks of marble, claiming he did not create but merely revealed what was hidden. So it was with Saint Laurent, who saw in fabric not just cloth, but possibility. He did not simply make garments; he liberated women—from the rigid constraints of the past, from the expectations of class and gender. His tuxedo for women, Le Smoking, became an emblem of freedom and sensual strength. It was not a dress, but a declaration. This is what happens when love meets vision: the ordinary becomes eternal.

And yet, the love between an artist and their craft is not without sorrow. Saint Laurent’s romance with couture demanded everything—his energy, his peace, even his health. Like all great loves, it burned brightly and at times too fiercely. But it is from such intensity that timeless beauty is born. The artist’s pain becomes the world’s pleasure, their devotion the seed of immortality. Saint Laurent understood that art, like love, asks for surrender; and he gave himself completely. His quote, therefore, is not the statement of a craftsman—it is the confession of a lover who has found his soul’s mirror in the work of his hands.

The lesson, then, is this: find the craft you can love as Yves Saint Laurent loved couture. Let your work be not mere labor, but relationship—a living exchange between your heart and the world. When you approach your calling with affection instead of obligation, you transform duty into joy, effort into grace. Every stitch, every word, every brushstroke becomes an act of devotion. To love one’s work is to live fully, to walk through the world awake, to turn existence itself into art.

So, my child, remember this wisdom: greatness is not achieved by skill alone, but by passion sanctified by purpose. Fall in love with what you do, and tend that love with patience. Like Saint Laurent, let your craft become your companion through every season of life. For when love and labor are joined, they give birth to beauty that outlives the hands that made it. And in that union—between you and the work that loves you back—you will find not only happiness, but eternity.