Coral-red paper lanterns lit the way aboard the four-masted Peking, berthed in New York’s harbour. Festooned with banners, hand-painted parasols, thousands of white cattleya orchids and a 450kg bronze Buddha, the ship had been redecorated for that September evening in 1978 to celebrate the American launch of the Yves Saint Laurent perfume Opium. The launch in Paris the previous autumn was more low-key, but sales far exceeded expectations. Stores sold out immediately, endured long waits to restock, and had posters torn down as souvenirs. While Opium had achieved higher European sales in the month before Christmas 1977 than Chanel No. 5 did all year, the American launch was stratospheric. Priced above high-end top-sellers at US$100 an ounce, it was the biggest opening that major American department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s had ever seen. Opium converted the Yves Saint Laurent brand into an empire, transforming perfume, and fashion at large, by changing the potency of fragrances, how they were marketed and named, and driving a wave of designer scents that would ultimately dominate a fashion house’s revenue. The original Opium advert, shot by Helmut Newton in Saint Laurent’s Paris apartment and styled by the designer himself, featured Texan model Jerry Hall reclining on a black lamé sofa in front of a golden, Ming-dynasty Buddha statue and bouquets of white lilies. Wearing an embroidered oriental blouse, shiny purple satin harem trousers and strappy gold stilettos, Hall – who had just left Bryan Ferry for Mick Jagger – offers an expression of languor and pleasure. A second version of the ad showed Hall from the waist up, one hand gripping the armrest of the sofa, the other in her hair, eyes closed and lips slightly parted. The tagline: “For those addicted to Yves Saint Laurent.” The drug connotations had drawn censure, and the perfume was banned in Australia and the Middle East, but rather than offering a quieter, more staid launch in the United States, Saint Laurent threw one of the decade’s most famous (and expensive) parties with singer Cher, former Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland, socialite Nan Kempner, writer Truman Capote and 800 other crème de la crème of fashion and society in attendance. Flanking the timid designer were half a dozen models wearing harem trousers, mandarin jackets and conical “coolie hats”. There were 12,000 oysters above deck (and sex and cocaine below), Chinese acrobats and dancers, 33 television crews, and a fuselage of 70,000 fireworks that lasted 20 minutes and ended by scrawling YSL across the night sky, after which Saint Laurent and his entourage headed for an after-party at the recently opened Studio 54. Andy Warhol wrote in his diaries that being unavailable to attend was one of the greatest regrets of his life. Saint Laurent launched Opium to coincide with his 1977 autumn/winter “Les Chinoises” haute couture collection. The 132 designs paraded in Paris’ InterContinental hotel before 800 people were rich in silk, satins and velvets, plentiful in embroidery, and with magnificent woven fabrics that paid homage to Chinese weavers. Equally inspired by a heady, fantastical vision of Asia was the new perfume. “I wanted a lush, heavy, indolent fragrance,” Saint Laurent said with the American launch. “I wanted Opium to be captivating, and it’s a fragrance which evokes all the things I love – the refined Orient, Imperial China, exoticism.” Squibb, the then parent company of Yves Saint Laurent Beaute, was hesitant at the designer’s choice of Opium for a name, but Saint Laurent would not budge. He claimed the name related to Rimbaud, Baudelaire and 19th century poetry, to dreams, intrigue and sensuality. Opium, he wrote in the booklet accompanying the launch, quoting the French poet, artist and cineaste Jean Cocteau, was “the perfume of the marriage of the real and the unreal”. It is hard to imagine designers today getting away with such indulgences. In our social-media universe those well enough known could be a tweet or Instagram post away from being cancelled . But aside from matters of political correctness, the Chinese are now the main customers for most luxury fashion brands, accounting for two-thirds of the industry’s growth. As Dolce & Gabbana’s controversial 2018 advertisement showing a Chinese model eating pizza, spaghetti and cannoli with chopsticks demonstrates, the backlash from cultural slights can now be severe. Designers today focus on creating luxury for China rather than about China; engaging with it rather than plundering it for inspiration. “Squibb says the name is ‘evocative of the romance and mystery of the area’,” an American TV news anchor reported around the time of Opium’s launch. “But representatives of the Chinese-American community say they think it is evocative of half of the population of their country being wiped out by a drug.” As one such representative explained on screen, “The word ‘opium’, to us, is the same as the word ‘Holocaust’ to the Jewish people. And to us it connotes everything which is ugly, bad and sick, that destroyed our country.” In a letter to Squibb, the ad hoc American Coalition Against ‘Opium’ and Drug Abuse wrote, “The use of negative Chinese images to market Opium is not at all unlike the use of negative black images to market a product named Heroin; or similarly, negative white images to market Valium.” Perfumer Jean Amic took more than 30 tries over two years to perfect the scent intended for “the Empress of China”. Opium evoked sensuality, mystery and opulence in its blend of mandarin and bergamot, with background notes of jasmine, rose, vanilla, lily of the valley, myrrh, sandalwood, amber and patchouli. Classified as a floral-spicy “Oriental” scent, it was different from the more dominant woodsy varieties of the time. Constructed with a much higher concentration of perfume than classic French fragrances, which were more subtle, Opium was bold, powerful and memorable. Once the scent was finished, there was the matter of packaging. “A perfume needs to attract the eye as much as the nose,” said the early-20th century industry pioneer François Coty. “It is an object before being a scent.” As Saint Laurent’s sketches show, he initially envisioned a bottle like those found in the souks of Marrakech, where he had a villa. Designer Pierre Dinand visited him in Morocco, and after discussing ideas, came up with some very different concepts. One was based on the inrô, a small case from ancient Japan used to carry salt, medicinal herbs and opium, hidden under the clothes, Dinand explained. Saint Laurent loved it, and had the flat flacon lacquered deep red and embossed in golden, flowering bamboo. A gold chain was looped around its neck and a fine black, tasselled chord threaded through the stopper. Now it needed a name. Rather than put his own on the bottle, as with his first scent (Y), or one of his brands, as with his second (Rive Gauche), he created a concept. According to Dinand, when Saint Laurent saw the bottle, he immediately knew the name. Squibb balked, but Saint Laurent insisted – Opium. Amid significant negative news coverage, calls for a boycott and demonstrations in front of Squibb in the late 1970s, the American Coalition Against ‘Opium’ and Drug Abuse demanded a change of the perfume’s name and that Saint Laurent personally apologise for “his insensitivity to Chinese history and Chinese-American concerns”. People wore “Kill ‘Opium’, Boycott Squibb” badges while stores put up signs that read: “We sell Opium here.” While the company subtly modified the advert tagline, softening the word “addiction” to read “For those who abandon themselves to Yves Saint Laurent”, the perfume held fast to its name. Scandal sells. And Opium sold very, very well, becoming a US$100-million-a-year product, with some US$25 million in profits. Opium was such an outstanding success that Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and about every other designer rushed out their own fragrances. It was a watershed moment for designer fragrances. In 1979, perfumes represented 70 per cent of annual revenues for many French designers. They accounted for 82 per cent of Yves Saint Laurent’s revenue by 1993. By 1998, sales of the growing Opium range topped US$500 million a year. Opium changed forever the way prestige fragrances are marketed and presented Women’s Wear Daily Opium also spawned imitators, and changed the smell of the perfume counter by ushering in spicy scents that had been out of vogue for decades. And it led a wave of big, heavy fragrances that dominated the 80s, along with big hair, padded shoulders and a brash attitude. It was for a woman who was in charge of her destiny and her sexuality. “Certain perfumes, as the first symbols of femininity, influence our whole life,” French Cosmopolitan recently reported. “This is the case with Opium, of Yves Saint Laurent, whose success has transformed the marketing of perfumery.” Scents turned edgier, riskier and more mysterious. Their names shifted. Miss Dior and Estée Lauder’s Youth Dew seemed quaint. Mystere by Rochas and Lancôme’s Magie Noire soon appeared, and in 1985 Calvin Klein launched Obsession, then Dior joined in with Poison. (Dior, in 2002, added Addict to its collection of perfumes.) “Opium changed forever the way prestige fragrances are marketed and presented,” reported Women’s Wear Daily 25 years after the perfume’s launch. “Before Opium, the fragrance industry was about French perfumers touting centuries of savoir faire, while post-Opium it was about a clearly articulated, story-driven product concept.” Behind Opium’s warmth and spiciness has always been the hint of scandal, and its promotions have been consistently attention grabbing. The most notorious was in 2000, with a naked Sophie Dahl lying supine, her back arched in the throes of ecstasy. It was one of the most complained about adverts ever for the British advertising regulator. In 2011, an ad for Belle d’Opium – a version aimed at a younger audience – that showed a woman tapping her arm in a clear reference to taking heroin was banned. When asked what she thought of the perfume during Opium’s New York launch party in 1978, Vreeland famously responded, “I like the smell of money.” Born in French-ruled Algeria in 1936 and captivated by fashion at an early age, Saint Laurent moved to Paris at 18 to study at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. Nine months later, he met Christian Dior, who hired him on the spot as an assistant. When Dior died suddenly in 1957, the skinny, shy, precocious Saint Laurent was handed the design mantle of the House of Dior. The protégé was just 21. Dior’s first collection, in 1947, after the severities of World War II, had celebrated femininity as well as opulence, with rounded shoulders on snug jackets, petit waists and full, A-line skirts. It was called the New Look. Saint Laurent offered a softer approach, with trapeze dresses that flared from narrow shoulders to a wide hem. He created six collections before being drafted into the French army in 1960, and suffered a breakdown soon after. When discharged, he found himself unwelcome at Dior. With his partner, Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent launched his eponymous label on a shoestring in 1961, and showed the first collection under his own name the following year. Including a peacoat and wide-leg trouser combination, Life magazine hailed it as “the best collection of suits since Chanel”. For four decades, he blurred the line between men’s and women’s fashion, making the functional fashionable and adapting traditionally men’s items to womenswear. His revolutionary take offered exquisitely tailored women’s trouser suits, tuxedos, safari jackets and transparent black silk chiffon tops, Mondrian dresses and the military-style clothes Catherine Deneuve’s character wore in Belle de Jour (1967). The clothes were well cut and feminine, celebrating a woman’s sexuality without turning her into a sex object. If Chanel liberated women, Bergé liked to quip, then Saint Laurent gave them power. Fashion is like a party. Getting dressed is preparing to play a role Yves Saint Laurent In 1966, he launched his Rive Gauche label and became the first couturier to offer a dedicated ready-to-wear line. With collections at more affordable prices and sold in a global chain of boutiques, it was a resounding success. But it also meant he was creating four collections a year. In 1976, the 40-year-old designer told Vogue he was at the peak of his creativity. But he was also exhausted, and sought reprieve in drugs and alcohol. Having suffered another breakdown, he created most of his 1976 autumn/winter collection in hospital. Lush, colourful and with the opulence of a Verdi opera, “Opéras – Ballets Russes” was triumphant. The New York Times ran a front-page story that began, “Yves Saint Laurent presented a fall couture collection today that will change the course of fashion around the world.” While the newspaper hailed it as “revolutionary”, other designers – Lauren and Geoffrey Beene among them – felt the pieces were indulgent and irrelevant to modern life. That was part of the point, according to biographer Alice Rawsthorn. Saint Laurent believed he had created a collection that transcended the traditional concept of fashion. “Yet by creating costumes, rather than clothes, Yves was tacitly acknowledging that haute couture no longer had a place in women’s daily lives,” says Rawsthorn. Couture had become fantasy and escape – theatre. “Fashion is like a party,” Saint Laurent once said. “Getting dressed is preparing to play a role.” For the following autumn/winter couture collection, he drew on a place with much deeper personal influence. The red floral prints, dragon-scale motifs, silk-brocade jackets and gowns inspired by Imperial China came less than a year after Mao Zedong’s death . The collection was considered one of Saint Laurent’s greatest. “Even more than a couturier,” Le Figaro stated, “today he has demonstrated himself to be a lyric poet.” In 1983, the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted a Saint Laurent retrospective. It was the first show at the Met devoted to a living designer, and cemented his reputation as the world’s greatest couturier. (In 1985, the exhibition spent two months at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Beijing, where it received 600,000 visitors.) In 1999, the Gucci Group took control of Yves Saint Laurent, and over the years a number of top designers have produced collections for the label, including Alber Elbaz , Tom Ford and Hedi Slimane , who axed “Yves” from the brand’s name. Saint Laurent retired in 2002, and died from a brain tumour in 2008, aged 71. In 2009, during a three-day auction at Christie’s Paris, Bergé sold the art collection that he and Saint Laurent had built up, the “sale of the century” earning more than US$480 million, making it the most valuable private collection ever sold at auction. Some of the proceeds went to the Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent Foundation. Among its projects was a pair of museums dedicated to the designer , one in Marrakech, the other in his former Paris atelier, with 5,000 garments and hundreds of thousands of sketches held in their collections. Both museums opened in 2017. The first temporary exhibition in Paris was “Yves Saint Laurent: Dreams of the Orient”. China, Japan and India were creative wellsprings for the couturier, who drew upon their colours and materials for his dazzling flights of fashion. With an interest verging on obsession, he collected art from China and filled his library shelves with tomes on its textiles, architecture and traditions. “He had never travelled to China, but traces of Chinese culture and heritage had inspired him to create what became some of the most daring designs in the history of fashion,” Hong Kong-based Vivienne Chow, former staff reporter with the South China Morning Post , wrote in Quartz. “It was that distance that gave Yves Saint Laurent room to imagine things that no one had thought of.” “Saint Laurent always saw the world through a prism,” noted the exhibition catalogue, “following his passions and desires and producing a version of it that was never a reproduction but a representation, in both senses of the word, of a dreamlike vision of foreign places.” When he finally went to China, in 1985, for his retrospective, he said, “The China that I had so often interpreted in my designs was exactly as I had imagined it. All I need for my imagination to blend into a place or a landscape is a picture book […] I don’t feel any need to go there. I have already dreamt about it so much.” Saint Laurent was not the only designer to use China for inspiration, as the Met’s 2015 blockbuster exhibition “China: Through the Looking Glass” amply demonstrated. Focusing on Western designers and their interpretation of Chinese aesthetics, it showed 140 pieces of haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear alongside Chinese art and films (Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai was the exhibition’s artistic director) that acted as source material for the 40-plus designers on display. In The First Monday in May , a 2016 documentary about the exhibition and the glamorous party that accompanied its opening, its curator Andrew Bolton says, “It’s quite easy to dismiss a fashion designer’s engagement with China as being inauthentic. But I want to focus on these works of art that are extraordinary examples of a designer’s imagination.” To illustrate, he pointed to Saint Laurent’s Les Chinoises collection. Along with Saint Laurent’s red silk coat with gold brocade and a glossy black evening jacket adorned with a red medallion recalling the rank badges worn in Imperial China, were pieces by Chanel, Dior and Balenciaga, an Alexander McQueen bodice with fragments of blue-and-white porcelain sewn onto it. Interest was unprecedented, with more than 800,000 visitors in its four-month summer run, making it the most visited show at the Costume Institute, and the Met’s fifth most popular show ever. The title’s reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland intimates the imaginary universe that inspired the garments on display. It looked at the way Western fashion once reflected distorted conceptions of China. “In this world, everything is topsy-turvy and back to front,” Bolton said at the opening. “Like Alice’s make-believe world, the China reflected in the fashions in the exhibition is a fiction, a fabulous invention offering an alternative reality with a dreamlike nature. The show is not about China per se, but about a reflected fantasy of China.” As John Galliano, whose dramatic gowns for the House of Dior were featured in the collection, tells Bolton in the documentary, “I don’t think I set out to recreate China. As you can see, I certainly didn’t achieve it. So it was a fantasised vision of China.” The use, or appropriation, of another culture is a hot-button issue today. Aware that such fantasy entails misconceptions, misinterpretations and misappropriations, designers now work with more sensitivity and largely steer clear of anything that smacks of exoticising Asian cultures. Around the time of the 2015 Met exhibition, Chinese shoppers accounted for half of the global luxury market, and several high-profile brands – Prada, Coach, L’Occitane – had chosen Hong Kong for an initial public offering. Along with China’s consumer muscle invoking a more self-reflective attitude, there is a growing recognition of Chinese designers, who, until relatively recently, didn’t have runways to showcase their visions of their own culture to the world. That has changed, as Shanghai Fashion Week highlights. Founded nearly two decades ago, it is one of the pre-eminent events outside the Big Four: Paris, Milan, New York and London. Guo Pei has led the charge, at home and abroad. A guest member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture – the first Chinese to be invited by the elite institution – her catwalks are a highlight of the Paris show. “Guo Pei inhabits a creative universe all her own,” Vogue reported after her spring/summer 2020 “Himalaya” couture collection, “where unbridled imagination meets arcane symbology in clothing that is both sumptuously opulent and theatrical.” Women’s Wear Daily said, “Nobody can forget Guo Pei’s collections. Each of them is an invitation to travel through exceptional universes imbued with poetry, history, or fantasy.” Guo garnered global renown when singer Rihanna wore a luxuriously indulgent creation that took 50,000 hours to sew to the 2015 Met Ball, the glittering annual fundraiser that opened the Met’s China exhibition, where two of her works were on display. The imperial-yellow cape trimmed in fur, embroidered with scrolls of flora and with a flowing train that took three assistants to carry was the red carpet favourite (and popular Twitter meme), and cover star of Vogue ’s Met Ball special edition. “The focus and the attention paid to this dress will make it remembered by the world – I want to make them remember,” the designer told New York magazine’s The Cut that year. “It is my responsibility to let the world know China’s tradition and past, and to give the splendour of China a new expression.” Saint Laurent’s version of such splendour reflects a time when such liberties could be taken by Western designers. But how, the media wondered aloud during his “Dreams of the Orient” exhibition, are we supposed to view these collections in a more culturally conscious age? Was it an homage or appropriation by a European designer who had never even been to China at that point? The curator denied it was appropriation, telling The Guardian in 2018, “He didn’t want to copy China. He wanted to find the spirit of the culture and it’s a legacy and a tribute to these cultures.” West-on-East exploitation runs deep, wrote The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter of the Met China exhibition, noting we are still living with the fallout. “How can fashion, and fashion shows, get around this? By getting beyond is one way.” He used Galliano’s 2003 collection for Dior as an example, though he could have equally pointed to Saint Laurent’s designs. “They’re so avidly inventive that ‘Chinese’ has cooked off: They’re raiments of a whole new ethnicity.” Saint Laurent’s 1977 Les Chinoises collection was the peak of Orientalist influence on the designer. It also marked a tide turning against the term, which began to take on racist connotations when Edward Said published his book Orientalism the following year. “The Orient was almost a European invention,” Said wrote, “and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.” As with his couture collection, Saint Laurent sought to evoke the sensuality, refinement and exoticism that he associated with China in his fragrance. “In Europe, Opium is not considered a negative concept in relation to the development of Orientalism as a school of thought,” he told legendary fashion editor André Leon Talley, for the American launch in 1978. “Nineteenth-century aesthetes, poets and writers knew and understood the very release of imagination, dreams and mystery it evokes […] Byron, Delacroix, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, they all understood the exotic beauty of the Orient without having travelled there. If you don’t have the power of imagination, you don’t have anything.” For decades the power of the scent to shock and anger lingered, finally reaching mainland China itself. In 1995, nearly two decades after its global launch, Opium went on sale in China. It was popular and cost about 80 yuan for a 100ml bottle – more than it cost in Los Angeles and roughly a month’s wages for the average Chinese city dweller. But the controversy of its name trailed the scent. In 2000, the Chinese government ordered it off the shelves for encouraging “spiritual pollution” and reminding people of the humiliating opium wars of the 19th century. As a line that French adverts for Opium have repeated over the years runs, Jamais parfum n’a provoqué une telle émotion . “Never has perfume aroused such emotion.” And nor has one, for decades, had so many imitators. Or had such success.