Word: saint
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...bursting with lavish clothes: swift little contemporary silhouettes; magnificent ball gowns seemingly from a grander, more inert age; fantastical garments of no recognizable provenance. A few are so ugly that the eye looks away; many more are heartbreakingly lovely. They are all the work of one man: Yves Saint Laurent, 47, the most famous and influential clothing designer in the world, the king of fashion...
...Saint Laurent is the first person to be honored with a Metropolitan retrospective while he is still active. (The only other couturier to have been the subject of a one-man show at the Met: the Spanish designer Cristobal Balenciaga, in 1973.) The choice was made by the museum's director and by the Costume Institute's special consultant, Diana Vreeland, whose judgment it reflects. Says the legendary former editor of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, with the certitude and gusto that she has retained into her eighth decade: "Saint Laurent has been built into the history...
...under his own name: "As a pseudonym, a name I always use when tramping etc. is P.S. Burton, but if you don't think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, H. Lewis Allways. I rather favor George Orwell." George, the patron saint of England, plus Orwell, a river that Eric Blair had known when young: the choice suggested the buried patriotism of a disaffected subject...
First the murdered President became saint and martyr. But then the '60s arrived in earnest. In a study of tragedy, Critic George Steiner wrote, "The fall of great personages from high places (casus virorum illustrium) gave to medieval politics their festive and brutal character." The real '60s began on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, and they turned festive and brutal too. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out. His assassination became the prototype in a series of public murders: Malcolm...
...Frontiersman who became a minor patron saint of the Kennedy revisionists was Chester Bowles, the career diplomat. He thought that he had located a central problem with the Kennedy Administration. He feared that it deliberately, almost scornfully, detached pragmatic considerations from a larger moral context. To discuss the morality of actions was evidence of softness, and intellectuals with power in their hands cannot bear to be thought soft. Everyone carried the Munich model around in his head. One talked in laconic codes, a masculine shorthand; one did not, like Adlai Stevenson, deliver fluty soliloquies about the morality...