Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé were friends of mine. To be more accurate, Yves was the king of fashion and in 1972 I became a member of Yves’s court. It had to do with Andy Warhol, and being young, and perhaps, not incidentally, being a producer’s daughter. I wore Yves’s clothes, and sometimes, if the court wasn’t watching, Karl Lagerfeld. It was a tight little court.

I was in awe of Yves and felt a certain affection for Pierre, whose intensity reminded me of my father. Pierre is as strong and compact as Yves was fragile and tall.

In 1977, when I was associate editor of the Observer magazine in London, I got engaged to the Observer’s star profile writer, John Heilpern, and decided it would be a very good idea if my fiancé wrote about Yves Saint Laurent.

Pierre said, “You do it.”

I said, “No.”

“Well, just make sure you’re there when they meet,” said Pierre. “But I’d rather it was you.”

Yves was always at the edge of a meltdown.

John and I went to Paris. I wanted him to meet the court, vet and be vetted, and also to understand, as my future husband, why so much of my money went to buy clothes at Yves’s Rive Gauche boutique — what it was about the velvet peasant skirt and the printed crepe blouses and the black blazers that made them so vital to my life. I wanted him to meet the man I considered a genius, since that’s what John usually wrote about: Peter Brook, Nureyev, John Gielgud, Graham Greene, David Hockney, Artur Rubinstein, Noel Coward, Henry Moore. I figured he would gauge and describe Yves better than I could, as I was permanently dazzled and made dumb by the clothes.

Joan Juliet Buck in Yves Saint Laurent scarf, jacket and gloves on a boat in Zurich, 1984

Yves’s fashion show that spring was, for once, at a horrible modern hotel at the Porte Maillot. It was the year of big peasant skirts and smocks. John and I went to Yves’s apartment on the Rue de Babylone. He was exhausted from the show, but sweet. And wary of this Englishman I had brought along. He sat way back on the couch in his library, surrounded by off-white paperback books and stools in the shape of woolly sheep by a husband and wife team of sculptors, the Lalannes. John put the tape on.

“Nice sheep,” he said, laconic, Northern British, hetero.

Yves gave a shy smile and looked away. The fiction was that I was there to translate. I knew I was there to protect Yves from himself.

We waded through some generalities.

Then John teased him: “What’s so clever about designing a peacoat that you can get at any army and navy store?” he asked. “Why spend thousands for one of yours?”