On January 29, 1962, Yves Saint Laurent offered its very first fashion show.

Sixty years later, the great couturier's dresses are part of the permanent collections of the Center Pompidou, the Musées d'Orsay, the Louvre, Picasso, Modern Art and the Yves Saint Laurent Museum.

Unpublished exhibitions to see until May 15.

"The house has already celebrated so many birthdays. (...) I wanted to do something else," Madison Cox, president of the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, told AFP. 

In 1983, Saint Laurent's outfits entered the Metropolitan Museum in New York, making him the first couturier to be exhibited during his lifetime in a fine arts museum.

In Paris, a major retrospective was dedicated to his work at the Petit Palais in 2010.  

In 2022, "it would have been boring to find an empty space, make some scenography and furnish it with clothes. It was important to integrate them into the permanent collections", underlines Madison Cox.

06:02

From painting to clothing

At the Center Pompidou, the route is indicated in a leaflet but the visit can become a treasure hunt: find a piece by Yves Saint Laurent discreetly installed in the middle of works with which it dialogues like the famous Mondrian dress. 

"There are dialogues explicitly claimed by Saint-Laurent, but also visual comparisons that we have allowed ourselves" such as an orange dress with a full skirt with gyratory patterns placed in the middle of Sonia Delaunay's kinetic paintings, explains to AFP Marie Sarré, from the modern collections department of the Center Pompidou. 

According to her, this approach will bring other audiences to the museum, while Parisians who come mainly for the temporary exhibitions will thus rediscover the permanent collection. 

Landscaper, Madison Cox wishes to show through these exhibitions "where ideas come from" for timeless creations whose modernity is striking. 

At the heart of the Salon de l'Horloge at the Musée d'Orsay, dresses created for the Bal Proust for the Baronne de Rothschild and Jane Birkin will be exhibited.

On the other hand, a dress "which looks like it descended from 'Déjeuner sur l'herbe'" by Manet and Monet cannot be presented, the brightness of the room being too aggressive for a fragile fabric. 

From Saturday January 29, the Musée d'Orsay is getting dressed up with the #YvesSaintLaurentAuxMusées exhibition.



A celebration of the 60th anniversary of the first show of #YvesSaintLaurent to live in six institutions, including the museum #YSL Paris.


👉https://t.co/oGiNnAkMD9 pic.twitter.com/Fa7y7rFV2S

— Musée d'Orsay (@MuseeOrsay) January 28, 2022

In the Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre, you will find the heart, a favorite jewel that Saint Laurent designed in the 1960s and which he had worn by one of his muses in all his parades. 

Some 350 sketches of designs by Yves Saint Laurent on display

While the Fine Arts museums welcome clothes, the fashion museum has chosen to exhibit... the drawings of Yves Saint Laurent which "can be appreciated as such".

With 350 sketches of the models that the couturier had chosen for his last retrospective show in 2002 at the Center Pompidou, "we have at a glance a synthetic vision of the work" of the couturier who was "an outstanding designer", underlines Aurélie Samuel , heritage curator and director of the Yves Saint Laurent museum. 

Once validated, the piece was cut out of cotton canvas before being finally made with a chosen fabric.

Sometimes the finished product did not fall well.

"The piece was then removed from the collection and the parade. He was an artist: he made a first draft, it did not work, we do not redo", says Aurélie Samuel. 

During the entire preparation of the collection, which lasted a month and a half, all the canvases were retouched on a living model, "which is no longer done today". 

"Each canvas was designed on a model that has hips, buttocks, breasts, a woman in fact. Today, models do not have shapes to fit into all the clothes and be hired by as many houses as possible “, according to Aurélie Samuel.     

With AFP

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