Bergé (Pierre)

Chairman of Sidaction since 1994

Close to Cocteau, Aragon and Giono, this son of a civil servant and an amateur soprano exercised his talents as an impresario for the first time with painter Bernard Buffet. He managed his career for eight years. But it was his meeting with Yves Saint Laurent that established him as a legend. He was the couturier’s alter ego and measured Yves Saint Laurent’s genius with the presentation of his collection Trapèze (1958). Although he supposedly knew nothing about fashion, he convinced the young designer to set up his own fashion house, Yves Saint Laurent (1962), which gave birth to Saint Laurent Rive Gauche (1966), a luxury women’s ready-to-wear label. He sold YSL to Gucci in 1998. In parallel,  this left-wing supporter of François Mitterrand and Ségolène Royal carried out other projects with fanatic determination. He created the magazines Globe and Têtu, directed the Opera Bastille, etc. With Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Bergé put together an impressive art collection. The collection was presented at the Grand Palais in February 2009, and was auctioned at Christie’s for €374,000 million. Part of the proceeds will go to the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent foundation, and another part will go to medical research, into AIDS in particular.