The Hôtel Byblos and Les Caves du Roy: The Nightlife That Defined Saint-Tropez

Saint-Tropez was a fishing port and an artists' retreat before it was a resort. Its reputation as a place of summer nights belongs largely to the decade after 1956, and to a hotel that opened in 1967 with a nightclub beneath it.

The village and the film

In 1955 Roger Vadim filmed Et Dieu… créa la femme in and around Saint-Tropez, with Brigitte Bardot. The outdoor scenes were shot in the old quarter of La Ponche and at Pampelonne beach in Ramatuelle, where a hut used as the crew's canteen later became the Club 55. The film was released in 1956 and made Bardot an international star. In 1958 she bought La Madrague, a house on the shore outside the village, and her presence drew the press and the public to Saint-Tropez for the next decade.

The village already had its own small industries of summer dress. In 1927 Dominique Rondini began making handcrafted leather sandals there, and in 1933 Jacques Keklikian founded K.Jacques. Their flat sandals with leather straps on a thin sole, known as tropéziennes, became the local footwear of the resort and are still made in the town.

A hotel from Beirut

The Hôtel Byblos was the idea of Jean-Prosper Gay-Para, a Lebanese hotelier, who named it after the ancient port city of Lebanon and built it in a style that mixed Phoenician references with the forms of a Provençal village. Construction began in 1965, and the hotel opened on 27 May 1967. In July 1967 its nightclub, Les Caves du Roy, opened in the cellars. According to the hotel's history, it was a replica of a club of the same name at Gay-Para's Excelsior Hotel in Beirut.

The timing was difficult. After the Six-Day War of June 1967 Gay-Para sold the property within weeks to the French industrialist Sylvain Floirat, whose family still owns it.

The club

Les Caves du Roy gave Saint-Tropez a centre for its nights. Accounts of the club's early decades name among its regulars Jack Nicholson, Cher, Clint Eastwood, Romy Schneider and Elton John. It was a room in which film people, musicians and the rich met at close quarters, and where what they wore was seen, first of all, by one another.

A wedding in white

The best-documented fashion moment of the Byblos years took place in daylight. On 12 May 1971 Mick Jagger married Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías at the town hall of Saint-Tropez, followed by a religious ceremony in the chapel of Sainte-Anne. The couple and the Rolling Stones stayed at the Byblos.

Bianca Jagger wore a white Yves Saint Laurent jacket, cut like his Le Smoking, without a blouse, over a long bias-cut skirt, with a wide-brimmed white hat and veil. It was not, as often remembered, a trouser suit. The outfit has been revisited by brides and designers ever since, and it captured something about Saint-Tropez's style: the formal made relaxed, evening tailoring worn in the sun.

What Saint-Tropez wore

The resort's style joined the very local and the very international. On one side were the sandals made in the village, the beach and the port; on the other, Paris couture and its ready-to-wear worn by visitors whose photographs were published worldwide. The Byblos and its nightclub were where these met after dark.