Yves Saint Laurent Condoms?! His Namesake Saint Might Have Approved
This week fashion house Yves Saint Laurent announced the arrival of their latest product: Saint Laurent condoms. Packaged in shiny gold, leopard print, and black-white-racing-check packaging, each luxury prophylactic comes “adorned with the Saint Laurent” name and retails for $2.20 a piece. While most people (and certainly the product development team) will associate the branding with the luxury fashion company, one cannot help but wonder what the company’s namesake, St. Lawrence, would think of all of this. Even though Lawrence was roasted alive in the third century, there’s no information on the website about whether or not the condoms are flammable.
Saint Laurent fashion was founded in 1961 by the French Designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé. Clearly, Yves intended to name the company after himself, not the Catholic, Eastern orthodox, and Anglican saint. But the fact of the matter is that it is Lawrence’s name that adorns the condoms. To members of the Roman Catholic church, which prohibits the use of contraception, this might all seem to be in poor taste. But once you look into it perhaps Lawrence wasn’t such a bad choice after all.
According to tradition St. Lawrence was one of seven deacons working in Rome in the middle of the third century. He was rumored to be from northeast Spain and lived there until he ran into the future Pope Sixtus II and followed him to Rome. When Sixtus became Pope in 257 A.D. he ordained Lawrence as a deacon and appointed him as one of the seven “archdeacons” of the church.