If it is possible for such an event to seem intimate, then the funeral of Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent was just that. The flowers, as one would expect of an event organised by those with a fashion eye, were spectacular (Saint Laurent’s shows had always been conducted through archways and carpets flowers), almost overwhelming.

There were 800 mourners inside the church, and there were also hundreds of onlookers outside — some passing gawpers no doubt, but many there out of genuine respect.

A number of Saint Laurent’s peers, if it can be conceded that he had peers, were there, including Jean Paul Gaultier, who told The Times this week: “I idolised Yves. He really understood the social changes at the end of the Sixties and gave freedom to women”.

Sonia Rykiel, that other emblem of modern Left Bank chic in the 1970s was also there, along with Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent’s former lover, business partner and life-time prop, and Christian Lacroix, who, at one point in the late 1980s was pitched as the new pretender to Saint Laurent’s throne as Greatest Living French Designer.

The mourners also included the designers Valentino and Karl Lagerfeld, who descended in Paris at much the same time as Saint Laurent arrived there from Algeria, in the early 1950s. For a brief period the beauteous, narcissistic, hedonistic trio hung out together, although personal and professional rivalries later caused inevitable frictions and fractures — Lagerfeld was, notoriously, to come third in the International Wool Secretariat competition that Saint Laurent won in 1954; while Saint Laurent shone at Dior, and later at his own house, Lagerfeld’s career was at that point on a slower burn, although he more than made up for that in the 1980s when he took over at what was then the almost moribund house of Chanel. This was at the point when YSL’s career began its slow decline.

Funeral comparisons are invidious, but one instinctively thinks back to Gianni Versace’s funeral in 1997, most memorable perhaps, for that iconic shot of a visibly distressed Sir Elton John being supported by the Princess of Wales, herself dead a year later. That was a funeral at which glamour and violence (Versace had been brutally murdered outside his home in Miami) collided with operatic force: supermodels, rock stars, fashion editors and the unfolding family drama of The Will (Versace left a majority share of his company to his beloved niece who was then a child . . . different country, different mores).

Saint Laurent’s funeral was less high voltage perhaps, in terms of paparazzi fodder, although Naomi Campbell, Laetitia Caster and Claudia Schiffer, all three models with whom Saint Laurent had long, professional relationships, were there, all wearing YSL, naturally. The flame-haired Regine, former queen of Paris’s nightclubs (a corporeal ghost from Saint Laurent’s Beautiful and Damned period in the 1970s) paid her respects. Catherine Deneuve carried an enormous bunch of wheatsheaves (a symbol of Victorian mourning, they were also scattered over the shroud covering the coffin) and wore updated versions of the buckled Roger Vivier shoes she wore in Belle du Jour, the Buñuel film for which Saint Laurent designed costumes.

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