Exhibition catalogue: Yves Saint Laurent Style
Abrams, 258 pp, 50 euros
Sold at the Foundation' shop, 5 avenue Marceau
Fines Arts Museums of San Francisco
De Young Museum
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
San Francisco, CA
www.famsf.org
Twenty-five years have passed since his groundbreaking restrospective opened in 1983 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in New York. Yves Saint Laurent remains the most influential fashion designer of the second half of the twentieth century, famed for having revolutionized the haute couture tradition and developed a new wardrobe for the modern, emancipated woman during the heady days of the 1960s. Throughout his forty-year career, he continued to push the boundaries of sartorial design -merging the worlds of fashion and art. A classicist -fond of discipline- as well as a provocateur, Yves Saint Laurent used his extensive artistic vocabulary to quote from the streets of Paris, London, or New York as freely as he drew inspiration from the writings of Shakespeare, Cocteau, or Proust, or the paintings of Matisse, Picasso, and Mondrian.
Extracts from exhibition catalogue
Nathalie Bondil, Director, Montreal Museum of Art
John E. Buchanan, Jr. Director of Museums, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The exhibition will be divided into four themes :
The display will include 130 accessorized creations belonging to the Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent, as well as drawings and videos.
Fines Arts Museums of San Francisco De Young Museum 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive Golden Gate Park www.famsf.org
The Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent is a one-of-a-kind institution. Located in a mansion on the avenue Marceau in Paris, it contains salons, a creative studio, the offices and workshops of the couture house, spaces in which to hold envents and exhibitions, as well as archives of major importance for consulting the collections. [...] But the mansion is much more than just a memory bank. The whole place vibrates to the rhythm of its founders, who continue to animate it wiht their passion for fashion. From the 1970s, Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent intuitively realized the importance of transmitting, for the present and future fashion heritage, quintessence of the style of this couture house. So they invented the concept of a fashion heritage, which has since gathered pace into a movement. No luxury house today designs new products without drawing inspiration from the elements of the past. This is known as respect for the genetic codes of the brand, interpretations of the DNA of the label. Yet no house, other than the YSL house, possesses collections of such richness, constitued by their creator hown the years, season after season. This selection offers a complete vision of the couturier's oeuvre and makes it possible to faithfully retrace all of the moments that mark a life and work dedicated to feminine beauty. It is another fulfillment of Yves Saint Laurent's desire, as stated in ELLE Magazine (27th January, 1992): "I should like people in a hundred year's time to be studying my dresses, my drawings."
Without waiting that long, the Yves Saint Laurent retrospective offers a glimpse of the comprehensiveness of the designer's work, exemplary in the repercussions it had on contemporary fashion, riche in lessons for the age of creativity. The importance of the collections has made it possible to focus the choices on the fundamentals of the creator's style, comparing his work with the era and retainging examples illustrating the Saint Laurent revolution. When, in his youth, Yves Saint Laurent created the Trapeze line at Christian Dior in 1958, his entry into fashion was hailed as a sensation by the press. Behind this change in garment proportions in 1955, lay the outline of a more radical change in the whole institution of haute couture. It happened at just the right time, when the zeitgeist gave young people a voice. Yves Saint Laurent was also young, like those who used the power of peech on the barricades, such as Françoise Sagan and Bernard Buffet, or the creators of Pop Art. But his revolution did not proceed to demolish the institution he had created. He acted as a relay between the old and the new worlds of fashion, with a foot in one while looking toward the other. That is how he saw himself (Yves Saint Laurent et la photographie de mode, Albin Michel, 1977): "I grew up in an environment that was very attached to tradition. Yet, at the same time, I wanted to change all that, because I was torn between the attraction of the past and the future that urged me forward." [...]
Yves Saint Laurent, extracts from exhibition catalogue
by Pierre Bergé
When Yves Saint Laurent decided to end his career in 2002, we immediately started the plan to create a foundation. Thus began the Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent, fundamentally aiming to preserve the five thousand drawings, sketches, and miscellaneous items.
The foundation is principally responsible for spreading the work of yves Saint Laurent through exhibitions and cultural and educational events. We are, therefore, particularly delighted about the retrospective in Montreal in summer of 2008 and in San Francisco in fall of 2008. The first Yves Saint Laurent exhibition was held in 1983 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, at the instigation of Diana Vreeland. Twenty-five years later, we are honored to return to North America. This retrospective displays the huge range of the work of our creative designer. We shall see how -and with what panache- he became the successor to Christian Dior and how, over the years, he imposed his wwn style. Let's say it again: Fahsion changes, but style remains. Yves Saint Laurent's style is recognizable to everyone. It takes its root in its respect for women and their bodies. Never was a garment created just to satisfy a whim; all of them were placed in the service of women.
