Ever since watching the documentary L’Amour Fou, I have had an obsession with Yves Saint Laurent. Happily a new French biopic about the designer has been made.

These images from the movie are photographed by Thibault Grabherr and Anouchka de Williencourt.

The film stars actor Pierre Niney who looks strikingly like the designer and portrays him as a nervous wreck, fiddling anxiously and exploding into tantrums.

Such was Niney’s devotion to the part that he is said to have obsessively watched old television interviews of the designer, spent hours with an illustrator who worked closely with Saint Laurent, took lessons in design, sewing and drawing and sifted through the archives at the Fondation Pierre Bergé -Yves Saint Laurent, which holds 8,000 outfits created by designer.

Director Jalil Lespert had extensive access to the fondation archive, and was also able to film at Saint Laurent and Bergé’s stunning home in Morocco.

The costume designer, Madeline Fontaine, apparently had to work under incredibly strict rules. Fontaine had to wear white gloves to handle the clothes & was told that the pieces for the show scenes could not be altered. Instead, she had to cast models to fit the existing dresses.

The cast also includes a young Karl Lagerfeld (played brilliantly by Nikolai Kinski), Yves models & long-time muses Betty Catroux (Marie de Villepin) & Loulou De La Falaise (Laura Smet).