The French fashion tycoon Pierre Berge - the business brains behind the Yves Saint Laurent empire - died on Friday aged 86. Berge, the longtime partner of the late designer Yves Saint Laurent, died in his sleep at his country home at Saint-Remy-de-Provence in southern France, his foundation said. The couple - Berge the hard-headed foil to Saint Laurent's mercurial genius - turned the fashion world on its head when they set up their own label in 1961 after the fragile designer had fallen foul of Dior.
A passionate philanthropist and art collector, Berge was also a tireless campaigner for gay rights and donated a large slice of his fortune to AIDS research. Politically engaged to the end, he was an important backer and confidant of the late French leader Francois Mitterrand, and this year threw his weight behind Emmanuel Macron's successful campaign for the presidency.
Born on November 14, 1930 on the Ile d'Oleron off France's west coast, Berge was a particularly French self-made man, as passionate about culture as he was about making money. Indeed, the son of a teacher and a tax inspector made his first few francs as a student bibliophile in down-at-heel postwar Paris by buying and selling secondhand books. In later years Berge ran an auction house and a theatre, staged concerts, headed the Paris Opera, worked as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador and helped Chinese pro-democracy protesters. He married the American garden designer Madison Cox, 58, in March, who will now replace him at the head of the Berge-Saint Laurent Foundation.
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