Yves Saint Laurent is exposed in six museums in Paris for the 60th anniversary of his first parade

Yves Saint Laurent is exposed in six museums in Paris for the 60th anniversary of his first parade

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On January 29, 1962, Yves Saint Laurent offered his very first parade.Sixty years later, the dresses of the Grand Couturier joined the permanent collections of the Center Pompidou, the Museums of 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Unpublished exhibitions to see until May 15.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, "said Madison Cox, president of the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation told AFP.

In 1983, the outfits of Saint Laurent entered the Metropolitan Museum in New York, making him the first designer to be exhibited during his lifetime in a Museum of Fine Arts.In Paris, a large 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 any scenography and furnish it with clothes.It was important to integrate them into the permanent collections, "said Madison Cox.

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From table to clothing

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

"There are dialogues claimed explicitly by Saint-Laurent, but also visual rapprochements that we allowed ourselves" like an orange dress with ample skirt with roundabouts placed in the middle of the kinetic paintings of Sonia Delaunay, explains to AFPMarie Sarré, from the Modern Collections Service of the Center Pompidou.

Yves Saint Laurent s'expose dans six musées à Paris pour les 60 ans de son premier défilé

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

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

It is at the heart of the clock show at the Orsay museum that dresses created on the occasion of the Proust ball for the Rothschild bar and Jane Birkin will be exhibited on the occasion of the Baroness.On the other hand, a dress "from which it looks like she had dropped 'lunch on the grass'" of Manet and Monet cannot be presented, the brightness of the room being too aggressive for a fragile fabric.

In the gallery of Apollo at the Louvre, we will find the heart, a favorite jewel that Saint Laurent had drawn in the 1960s and which he had one of his muses in all his parades carried.

Some 350 sketches of drawings by Yves Saint Laurent exhibited

While the Museums of Fine Arts welcome clothes, that of fashion has chosen to exhibit...The drawings of Yves Saint Laurent who "appreciate as such".

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

Once validated, the room was cut into cotton canvases before being definitively made with a chosen fabric.Sometimes the finished product did not fall well."The room was then struck off from the collection and the parade.He was an artist: he did a first draft, it didn't work, we don't do it again, "said Aurélie Samuel.

Throughout the 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 mannequin that has hips, buttocks, breasts, a woman in fact.Today, models have no shapes to get into all clothes and be engaged by more possible houses ", according to Aurélie Samuel.

With AFP

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