Jacques de Bascher

Brings back too many of then unknown horrors lurking just a few years in future.. This recent history is still being shaped and surely will be called the Gay Holocaust.

He kept a gynecologist's chair in his living room for parties.

In the recent “kept gay men thread” I mentioned that I think Jacques was absolutely beautiful. Does anyone else agree?

no r3, you're on your own with that one. But, then again, I expect you're quite used to being on your own.

j'adore the cocktail glass, there.

Was just reading about him. Something for the birds.

I think he's just average looking. I guess if you like that pouty French look you might find him attractive. But he's no Robert Redford or Michael Landon who were both stunningly beautiful as young men.

Jacques was handsome but not a great beauty. He was a fashion plate, chic. His face had good and bad angles, the best being full on because he had nice eyes and elegant thin lips. His face isn't that rare in France.

A bio published last year:

I just find big noses, angular faces, and good fashion sense beautiful on both men and women. Hence, why I also find the late Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy to be stunning.

You would have liked the Agnellis.

Sad

Now the Agnellis are more like it. They were real aristocrats of true refinement, not like that bourgeois wannabe Bascher. I always feel a ting of sadness when I see this Horst photo of Marella Agnelli with her favorite son Edoardo. Beautiful Edoardo was the heir to the Agnelli billions. He was also a serious scholar of religion. He decided to convert to Shi'a Islam and spent time in Iran with Ayatollah Khomeini. When he returned to Italy, he was murdered by some Jewish cousins who had married into the Agnelli family. They now have the family forune. Marella is still alive and still mourns for her dear lost son.

He died in 1989 when AIDS wasn't particularly scandalous in our sophisticated cities. On the contrary, there was a dreary routine of big memorials for our dead. So why no-one at his funeral? Was he finally disliked?

Beyond

Jesus, Sooooo hot.

R14, he may not have been a very nice person. He's a prominent character in Bertand Bonello's "Saint Laurent" (which I highly recommend even though it goes on forever); in it he is portrayed as very sexy, depraved, and opportunistic. Of course, that seems to have been catnip to Lagerfeld: Lagerfeld visited de Bascher every day in the hospital when he was dying, and has never really said a bad word about him since then. But plenty of Saint Laurent's friends really disliked him.

scroll back through the slide show at R15. TBM

Lagerfeld can be counted on for some Teutonic rectitude. He's often a class act without having to say that he is.

On a sidenote - Yves SL completely ignored that Bascher was sick and dying and of course never visited him in hospital. I guess he abhorred reality and was too horrified to deal with suffering and dying.

Karl Lagerfeld has said that he and Jacques never had sex, even though they were partners and that Jacques was the “love of his life”. Do we believe that?

It’s hard to image Lagerfeld sleeping with his current muse Gianbaconi, so perhaps he just like to lavish beautiful men with money, gifts, and attention?

R20, don't you realize that YSL was working on a COLLECTION? He couldn't risk any negative vibrations interfering with his creative process!

Bump for the beauty.