Brenna Walch
after twenty-one-year-old Yves Saint Laurent at Christian Dior’s Funeral, 1957
They buried his mentor in his own design. The appointed successor, a historic first: the youngest couturier head of a renowned fashion house; as young as les jeunes hommes sent to die in French trenches not long before, their bodies sewn into the living memories of families who clutched warfront letters mailed home.
What was there to say? His gaze downcast at designer shoes, hands shielded by the pockets of an haute couture coat. The savant of simple elegance: dead of a sudden heart attack. When news reached him, was he busy sketching the next line in Paris? No one will be dressed again by the hands of Dieu Himself—no, Dior himself, he means. The brand lives on under his guidance. He has no choice but to become a saint, worshipped by the fashion critics of the world, and later dismissed by them, too. Nominative determinism.
And whether or not he made those cerulean military jackets years after the funeral, modeled like the sky that day, it doesn’t quite matter. He is already thinking of legacy at his age; of the nurses’ uniforms’ thread counts at Val-de-Grâce where he will soon be committed; of the suit’s silhouette in which he will someday be buried.
Brenna Walch is an MFA student in Creative Writing: Fiction at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Her poetry has been published in Oddball Magazine and Bitter Melon Review, and her fiction has been published in Sky Island Journal, Jokes Literary Review, Another New Calligraphy, Corvus Review, and more. Brenna is currently working on a novel duology, two short fiction collections, and a one-act play.