The Yves Saint Laurent Bear witness Where Art and Fashion Collided
Models in The Mondrian Collection at Haagse Gemeente Museum, 1966Photography by Eric Koch
On the ceremony of Piet Mondrian'due south expiry, we look back to the 1965 YSL collection which took the creative person's geometric abstractions and put them on a dress
Few designers can claim such a profound influence on the way women dress every bit Yves Saint Laurent. The pieces he pioneered – the man'southward tuxedo, cut for a woman's body, the safari jacket, the trench coat – are now so congruous with women's wardrobes that they seem similar they have been in that location forever.
But across these pieces, the ones and so often linked to Saint Laurent's name, it is worth remembering that the designer worked under his eponymous label for over iv decades, with collections that ricocheted betwixt absurd, androgynous tailoring and the all-out opulence of 1980s Parisian haute couture, creating thousands of runway looks in the procedure. The stand up-out collections number too many to list, stretching from the haute baboushkas of his Russian-inspired 'folk-luxe' Ballets Russes collection, to his notorious evocation of 1940s excess for Jump 1971. (So controversial was that one, harking dorsum, as many in the fashion institution saw it, to Nazi-occupied Paris, that one critic deemed it "suicidal".)
That said, few of Saint Laurent'due south shows lodge in the commonage retentiveness quite like his Fall 1965 Couture collection, now simply known every bit 'The Mondrian Collection' for its evocation of the Dutch De Stijl creative person'south colourful geometric abstractions. It's partly a misnomer – simply six of the gowns actually contained reference to Mondrian's work, in a collection of over fourscore looks. But the name is a testament to their cultural power – the offset of a lifelong dialogue between fashion and fine art that would define Saint Laurent'southward career.
On first look, the dresses accept the deception of simplicity – cut in the popular 'shift' style of the 24-hour interval, their A-line shape, in wool jersey, allows an platonic field for Mondrian's blocks of colour. Merely, like the artist's paintings – in which the intricate brushstrokes are just revealed when you are close enough to see them catch the low-cal – look closely at its construction and Saint Laurent's gown is actually a feat of dressmaking, each cake set with invisible seams to agree the A-shaped line.
The Autumn 1965 Couture show came at a time when Yves Saint Laurent was, ostensibly at least, struggling to keep upwardly with the modernity of his contemporaries, especially the Space Age designs of André Courrèges, whose evocative 1964 collection ushered in the intergalactic look of clean, manmade fabrics and high hemlines – the kickoff iteration of the mini brim in haute couture, made for the mod woman who needed to move.
Saint Laurent was well enlightened of the need to break new ground. "I have changed my whole concept – everything is new – this collection is young, immature, young," he said on the mean solar day of the prove, following on from a collection earlier that year that had received trivial critical acclamation for its well-trodden ground of tailored tweed and patterned silks. Later, he would elaborate. "Mondrian was my terminal minute inspiration," he told France Dimanche. "Cipher was live, nothing was modern in my mind except an evening gown I had embroidered with paillettes like a Poliakoff painting. It wasn't until I opened a Mondrian book my mother had given me for Christmas that I hit on the primal idea."
The bear witness itself was an ode to fine art by and large – touching not just on the work of Mondrian and Serge Poliakoff, but also Russian Formalist Kazimir Malevich. That said, it was the Mondrian gowns that demanded the attention of the gathered. Styled simply, they were worn with a pair of single-buckled pilgrim shoes by Saint Laurent'south longtime accessories collaborator, Roger Vivier. Those shoes ended up being function fashion as indelible as the dress themselves – largely thanks to Catherine Deneuve, whose character in the seminal French film, Belle du Jour, famously wore them with a patent trench glaze.
Of the collection's many fans was legendary American Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, who gleefully alleged in the New York Times that this was, simply, "the best collection". The other publications of the day agreed – WWD declared him to be the "rex of Paris", whilst Harper's Bazaar said of the Mondrian apparel itself: "this is the dress of tomorrow – the assertive abstraction, a semaphore flag, perfectly proportioned to flatter your effigy".
The dress was so popular that it plant itself worn by several notable women of the twenty-four hour period, merely is perhaps epitomised best by the image of bug-eyed English model Moyra Swan on the September 1965 cover of Vogue Paris. There, like an advertisement for the Swinging Sixties, she is slanted across the cover with a Vidal Sassoon-style bob, wearing the Mondrian shift with its matching Roger Vivier shoes.
Over the next yr, Mondrian dresses, or their imitators (including British designer Mary Quant'due south Mondrian go-go boots) flooded the mode earth. Such was their ubiquity that poster girl of the age Jean Shrimpton (herself shot in the wearing apparel for the September 1965 edition of Harper's Bazaar past Richard Avedon) would declare the pattern, by the finish of that twelvemonth, "boringly popular".
It barely needs saying that since Saint Laurent, many a designer has dabbled in the world of high art. I such notable collection is Versace Spring 1991, for which Gianni Versace emblazoned gowns and bodysuits with the Pop Fine art images of Andy Warhol, a man who the designer claimed as a soulmate for his collective obsession with material civilisation. The business firm of Louis Vuitton has long thrived on artistic collaboration; their signature Damier cheque luggage has been given new life over the years by various artists, from the neon graffiti scrawls of Stephen Sprouse to the spots of Yayoi Kusuma. Art and fashion have criss-crossed too many times to list.
But the collection's influence goes beyond its appropriation of art – more potently, it marked the nascence of ready-to-vesture as we now know it. Such was the apparel' popularity that Saint Laurent became the first designer to create a pattern of a couture gown, bachelor for sale to the earth through Vogue Patterns and the reason why and then many Mondrian dresses now exist, fabricated not in Saint Laurent'southward Parisian atelier simply in women's homes, from the fabric they had available to them. It'due south why on some you lot will find the colours flipped or the pattern reversed, on others, blocks not of colour, only florals or stripes. It was perhaps the first fourth dimension that a atypical garment had and so explicitly influenced what women wanted to wear.
A year later, as a response of sorts, Saint Laurent opened Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche on Paris' Left Banking company, housing his own fix-to-vesture line. If people were to make money from non-couture versions, why shouldn't the original designer? It was the first time that a couturier had opened a ready-to-wear line in Paris – and remains the background for how fashion operates now.
All of which amounts to why, though Saint Laurent'south legacy remains tied to the elegant lines of Le Smoking, information technology is this collection that remains such a defining statement – a statement that a dress could exist injected with intellectual capital, that it could exist discussed like art, and that a single gown could excite a desire that radiated far beyond the walls of the gilded salons of Paris, and out into the globe.
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