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Then there is the man himself. If his clothes are sexy, so is he -- dark and sardonic, with a wicked smile, an outrageous wink and a laughing manner. "He looks like Brando; he is pantheroid, catlike," says Anne Hollander, author of the scholarly Seeing Through Clothes. "He is sexy in a way that is absolutely not effete, and his interest in women is utterly trustworthy. He doesn't give the impression of secretly loathing them."
Lacroix's is the art of excess, and it works in part because of the knowledge of vanished grandeur he acquired while studying the classics and art history in college. Says Caroline Rennolds Milbank, author of Couture: "Since he knows all the good things that have happened in history, when women lived to look beautiful, he has a bigger vocabulary than a normal contemporary couturier. Any one of them has available to him the best embroiderer or flowermaker, but Lacroix probably has a bigger sense of the possibilities from having directly studied the past."
Lacroix's billowing nostalgia envelops his own past. Not for nothing did he want to bring the sun and the sea right into his salon. His imagination is almost defiantly rooted in Arles and the rough Camargue area nearby. "I'm crazy about terra-cotta floors, primitive people, sun and rough times," he says. "This is my real side -- goat cheese and bread, elementary things." He warms to his subject. "I suppose that I am really double-faced. I am fascinated by Paris, its elegance, its women, even its artificiality; but with my heart and skin I love the South -- bullfighting, music, nature, the sea."
Lacroix was born in 1950 into a well-off bourgeois family of engineers, and home was, on the whole, a comfortable cocoon for a little boy who can remember sketching all day long when he was three. The designer-to-be was particularly impressed by his grandfather, whom he describes as "very arrogant, like an actor." It is now a secure part of fashion legend that one day the old man asked Christian what he would like to be when he grew up. "Christian Dior," he shot back.
Today Lacroix has a Proustian sense of his childhood. He was taken up by a little band of mini-aesthetes: "We were like dandies, snobbish and arrogant. We might show up in green velvet suits and pink shirts and read Wilde -- anything we thought was daring." Christian was taxed with designing costumes for their amateur shows. He traces his enduring preoccupation with the turn of the century to this early research; at one point he plotted out a season-by-season directory of changes in the minutiae of fin-de-siecle fashion.
He went to college in Montpellier (less than ten miles from his beloved sea) and stayed for three years, doing extensive hitchhiking and sketching -- women, costumes, architecture. Paris, he was certain, would be his ultimate destination, but "I knew it was a tough city, and I wasn't ready."
Ten days after finally arriving in the capital, he regretted his decision to ripen in the provinces. At a party he met a bubbly gamine named Francoise Rosensthiel. "It was a coup de foudre!" he recalls. "Right away I loved her skin, her way of wearing clothes, her hair, her big freedom, her sweet spirit. Once I was with Francoise, I felt I had wasted time in the South." They are still together, though they have never married.