A toast to Yves for 'le smoking'

'I feel pleased - and proud," said Yves Saint Laurent, looking at the tuxedo suits arranged on plinths like pieces on a chess board, with a vast image of the designer with Catherine Deneuve on the lacquered black wall. As if by magic, the coal black pantsuits seemed to move around. They were not mannequins coming to life, but the guests invited to the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent to celebrate "Smoking Forever." It is not, as the title suggests, permission to light up. Although, this being France, cigarettes were being puffed between elegantly manicured fingers by the time the couturier's close friends had moved from the rigorous exhibition, with its checkerboard floor, modernist white columns and shiny black grand piano, to the gilded dining room. There, with the curvaceous and vivacious Deneuve between Saint Laurent and the culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, le tout Paris raised glasses of vodka to "Yves," as caviar arrived in individual dishes molded out of ice from Prunier - Bergé's restaurant. "I don't remember my first tuxedo - but I know I have always worn one with nothing underneath," said Betty Catroux, after eyeing the opening exhibit: a 1966 tux with a froth of white blouse underneath and a delicate sketch of the outfit from the master's hand. "I like le smoking because that was the moment when Yves empowered women," said Bergé, who was sitting between Monique Lang, wife of the former culture minister Jack Lang and June Newton, whose late husband Helmut gave a sexual charge to the tux with his iconic nude/dressed images in a dark alley in 1975. "The thing about a tuxedo is that it is virile and feminine at the same time," said Deneuve. I don't remember my first one - I think it was in the early 1980s when the picture was taken - double-breasted and very severe. It really does make you feel different as a woman, it changes the gestures." The men - including François-Henri Pinault, chief executive of PPR, the parent company of Yves Saint Laurent - naturally wore tuxedos. But so did every single woman in the room - except for Corinne Ricard of the liquor dynasty in a cream Gaultier pantsuit. Pauline Smith, sitting with her husband Paul and Loulou de la Falaise, wore the very last couture tux made in the house in 2002, before Saint Laurent retired. "My first memory is a photo of Jean Shrimpton in a 'smoking,' said Falaise, referring to the gangly legged model of the 1960s. "I like a tuxedo because it is so easy. Seven minutes is all it takes to get ready to go out!" "Smoking Forever," at 5 avenue Marceau until April 23, is curated by Christophe Martin, who received a resounding cheer at dinner - not least from his mentor, the metteur en scene Bob Wilson. Martin has managed, in just two rooms of the rather too small exhibition space, to recreate a moment in fashion and social history where women stood shoulder to padded shoulder with men - or even strode ahead. "It was a transfer of power and I wanted the mannequins to look like soldiers, warriors - that is why it is like a game of chess with the women in command," said Martin of the first room. The display shows different aspects of the tux, from chic all-in-one overalls from 1975 to the lush velvet coat with a satin edge from 1984. Throughout the exhibition you can see how Saint Laurent treated black as a color, using grain de poudre with the texture of coal against gleaming jet beads and sparkles of crystal. The accessories, taken from the YSL archives, are all the original partners for the clothes. The second room, where Saint Laurent's timid, smoky voice can be heard on the soundtrack, is devoted to the romance, rather the sobriety, of a tuxedo. With the curving grand piano as its centerpiece, offset by the white pillars, Martin has shown the more feminine side of le smoking, as in a 1983 dress draped on a curve with a bow at the front. The accompanying catalogue, with reproductions of the original sketches as well as photographs, has a page written in Saint Laurent's handwriting where he defines a tuxedo in his own words: "For a woman, le smoking is an indispensable garment with which she finds herself continually in fashion, because it is about style, not fashion. Fashion's come and go, but style is forever."