Stefano Pilati

Though Stefano Pilati spent most of 2005 mentally steeling himself for his 40th birthday in December, he still found himself profoundly fearful on the actual day. It was an odd sensation for a man who, as a boy, couldn’t wait to get old, who grew a beard as soon as he could to reject his childhood. “I always wanted to be a man, and to be a man was to have a beard,” Pilati says over oysters at the Relais de Plaza in Paris, the city where he has lived for the last five years while he designed for Yves Saint Laurent.

More than the average male’s mid-life meltdown, Pilati’s doubts about such a masculine milestone as the big 4-0 reflected the enduring ambiguity of his relationship with his own gender. If that sounds like the subject of a psychiatrist’s thesis, it’s not far from the truth. Pilati spent eight years in therapy, followed by another three in heavy analysis, trying to make peace with himself. When he first moved to Paris in 2000, he carried around with him a list of local therapists affiliated with his shrink in Milan. It was like his security blanket.

You could see the loucheness in the leopard print Moroccan slippers that were paired with many of the outfits in the spring show last July; in the over-size knitwear, in the seductive but slightly off-colour scheme; in the general attitude reflecting the show’s guiding spirit, the American author Paul Bowles, who spent his life in self-imposed exile in Tangiers. But of course, it was all Pilati – and not just because the bag he is carrying when we meet for lunch is a piece of brightly coloured woven tat from Essaouira that doesn’t so much clash with as slam into his suit. “When you tell me my collections seem very personal, I’m the only man I can think about when I’m designing,” he says. In a way, you wish there was more “him”, more of the turmoil, more of the paradoxes. He has the mien of a Renaissance prince, with his sandy beard and hawkish beak (though it looks like the by-product of a boyhood sporting accident, it’s what nature blessed him with), but the dandy in the three-piece suit is actually a tattooed surf pagan under the cloth.

summer. Though his lifelong dream has been a move to New York, Pilati’s new favourite place is Hawaii. He’s had a board made by the world’s best-known surfboard maker (nine feet long, black with ivory polka dots on one side, marble red on the other). It’s the distillation of one of his fantasies of escape – selling surfboards in a tropical idyll with Mr. Right. “But if he came today, I’d maybe ask him to wait a year, till I felt like I’d accomplished something.”

The image makes such a spectacular contrast with Pilati’s current status that it’s practically schizophrenic. “I don’t even feel like it’s two sides,” he says. “I love clothes as I love the sea.” But as a thinking man, he wants everything he does to be meaningful, which means he sometimes finds it hard to take fashion seriously. “What you do comes from a passion, but on the other hand, you feel very shallow,” he muses. “I mean, who cares about clothes, who cares about fashion?”

It may be that sentiment that contributes to the curious inner life of the clothes he designs. Pilati’s inspirations – such as Paul Bowles – tend to be completely outside fashion. Outsiders appeal to him, perhaps because he’s always been one himself. “I’ve always had a sense of escape within myself since I was a child, and escape can be seen as a sort of isolation. I create the most when I’m by myself. I’ve felt that way forever.” He grew up with women – his mother and two much older sisters. His schoolfriends were girls. And he would change his clothes up to five times a day as a child, way above and beyond the civic duty of most Italians to be wardrobe-conscious at all times. Still, he insists he wasn’t a sissy. Hockey, baseball, swimming – they all soaked up his spare time. But it was always female psychology that interested him. Men were a much tougher idea to wrap his head around.

His late teens were a time of great personal confusion for him, coinciding with his realisation that he had a talent for fashion. With so much emotional turmoil, it’s probably no surprise that Pilati turned to drugs. They occupied his mind throughout his twenties, though they didn’t interfere with his professional rise. “That’s probably what I regret the most: I spent too much time using drugs,” he says, almost to himself. “I wish my life had been more happy.” Given Saint Laurent’s notorious drug use, Pilati is very careful when he talks about this phase in his life, wary of stirring up any neuralgic analogies with his predecessor. This is where the therapy and analysis helped. Now he has the physical fitness fervour of the reformed roué. He rides his bike for hours when he’s in Tuscany, where he bought a cottage in Cinque Terre (though he’s decided to sell because he just doesn’t get there often enough).

And yet Pilati is probably much more like Saint Laurent than he would care to think, especially when he says something like, “You become a bit decadent when you realise your limits and explore them.” That way lies obsession, another point of contact between the two designers. “You never lose your obsessions, they always live with you,” says Pilati. “But what I learned from Francis Bacon’s biography is you can work out your obsessions in your work. That’s what I’m doing. It makes me feel comfortable with my obsessions instead of seeing them act against me. Being obsessed with sex destroyed me, the sense of guilt that came after was a disaster.” Presumably, the other obsessions he notes – beauty, an intimate awareness of female psychology – were a little easier on his psyche.

Pilati worked for Prada from 1995 until 2000, during which time he designed the men’s and women’s collections for the Miu Miu label. He describes working with Miuccia as “a freaky trip.” “I was completely devoted to her because she was such an interesting person. Somehow I was helped to love her because I had a lot of affinities with her. I understood things no one else understood.”

In 2000, Pilati was hired by Tom Ford as women’s design director for YSL ready-to-wear, an experience which paradoxically helped him know men a little better. “What has been interesting about my life is I grew up in a women’s environment, but because of my job I was surrounded mostly by men. The experience of working with Tom and his American colleagues gave me a very precise idea of how certain male environments surrounded by power and money and competition work. It was very interesting to observe that.”

Contrary to statements he’s made in the past, he now claims Saint Laurent didn’t mean a lot to him when he was growing up. Milanese giants like Armani, Versace and, especially, Ferré in the Eighties were far more relevant. But Miuccia was wild about Yves, and that sparked Pilati’s interest. “Then I ended up here. Four years with Tom allowed me to study Saint Laurent’s archives. I met suppliers that used to work with him, I went through archives of fabrics. I probably had the biggest university ever on Saint Laurent.” Still, all of that applied to womenswear. There was no particular menswear archive to draw on. In the old days, it was always Saint Laurent himself who embodied the style of the YSL man. Pilati vaguely remembers photos of Yves in Italian magazines, sporting the look for the next season. Paradoxically, the enduring image of Saint Laurent menswear was the Jeanloup Sieff photo of the designer himself, posing naked except for his glasses to promote his perfume.

Of course, there was the Hedi Slimane interregnum, but – much as Pilati loves what he does – Slimane’s focus on youth made that direction untenable for him. “When you’re young, you eat and you spit it out so nothing remains, and I didn’t want to focus my energy on something like that. I wanted to focus it on someone who could feel it.”

That’s a distinct possibility. There are real affinities between Saint Laurent’s and Pilati’s respective aesthetics. Their formality, for one. Pilati went looking for love in all the wrong places in his cashmere coat, after all. “Formality is probably something that links us,” he agrees. “You have to be bourgeois to be anti-bourgeois. But I think the formality is neither me nor him, it’s a mix. And it’s also a trend. I find classicism more interesting and provocative today than a skirt for men.”