six Parisian museums pay tribute to fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent

Yves Saint Laurent, aged 26, signed his first collection under his own name on January 29, 1962. It immediately imposes a spirit but also a style. Through his models, a whole culture, an artistic universe is expressed. The exhibition Yves Saint Laurent at the Museums, supported by the Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, vscelebrates the 60th anniversary of this first parade.

Six Parisian museums – the Center Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Louvre Museum, the Orsay Museum, the National Picasso-Paris Museum and the Yves Saint Laurent Paris Museum – take part and highlight the dialogue between the fashion creations of Yves Saint Laurent and the world of art.

Exciting meeting and indiscretions on the genesis of this vast, somewhat crazy project with two of the exhibition curators – Madison CoxChairman of the Pierre Bank – Yves Saint Lawrence, and Stephen Janson – fifteen days before the opening of the six exhibitions, January 29, 2022.

Franceinfo culture: what is the genesis of this somewhat crazy project?
Madison Cox, President of the Pierre Foundation Bank – Yves Saint Lawrence : Lidea came first because we absolutely wanted to celebrate these 60 years. VSt was a moment in the history of the house that had to be marked, just like the disappearance of Pierre Bergé, Four years ago. It was important to be able to say that the Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent foundation existed and that we were taking care of this heritage. We must not forget that in 1983 in New York – for the retrospective exhibition of Yves Saint Laurent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – it was the first time that the fashion of a living couturier entered a museum of Fine Arts. -Arts and that caused a scandal. This is where this dialogue between fashion and the arts, fashion and museums began. Today, in 2022, fashion has really become an art appreciated by the public, who are even thirsty for this universe. The Saint Laurent house has been exhibited during retrospectives in Beijing, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, New York… and it continues, in Tokyo where a major retrospective is once again planned. I absolutely wanted to mark these 60 years but I told myself that there had to be other means than a huge retrospective.

How did you proceed?
Madison Cox: talking with Mouna Mekouar (co-curator of the exhibition) of this relationship, of this dialogue between the couturier and art, I said to myself why not make pop-up spaces of these various universes of inspiration in the permanent installations of museums. I also wanted to include Stephan Janson (co-curator of the exhibition) who really has this knowledge of the work of Saint Laurent, an eye from the outside, it’s always interesting.

What were the difficulties?
Madison Cox: we started talking at the end of 2019. We had made a list of museums, places. It was very ambitious perhaps, but sometimes you really have to dream and we even had the idea of ​​doing Paris and New York. America was very important in his career, it was there that he found the first funding for his fashion house. We had even started discussions with various institutions. Now I realize it was totally crazy. I have always remembered this sentence from Pierre Bergé: we must turn dreams into reality.. But when the world exploded (note: with the appearance of the Covid-19), the borders were closed and all three of us said to ourselves: it is absolutely necessary that we have our feet on the ground, we will abandon New York. I remember the director of the Harlem Museum saying to me: you don’t realize how important this is for the Afro-American community, Yves Saint Laurent was the first to have paraded women of color. It was very moving but impossible.

How was the project set up?
Madison Cox : from the moment that the name of Yves Saint Laurent was mentioned, all the institutions had a story to tell: no longer a question of rivalry between the institutions but a kind of solidarity. In the midst of confinement, the institutions were closed and in addition there were changes in the management of museums, which added a certain level of complication.

Stephan Janson, co-curator : this dream that is part of Saint Laurent’s world, which was extremely cultured, allowed him to do things that made people dream… and the extraordinary thing in this project is that people, because of this cursed Covid have dreamed to think about the future.

Madison Cox : from the beginning, it was one of our principles to promote permanent collections but it was not a question of occupying empty space and creating a temporary scenography but of underlining the importance of the permanent collections of these institutions and to create dialogues. It’s quite interesting this crossword game and even if it’s complicated for us, because we are a tiny institution, it’s also a new innovative way to represent Saint Laurent, to reinterpret things for a new look.

Stephan Janson : Saint Laurent, unlike many of his colleagues, knew how to digest all this vastness of art appreciation he had. There are some things that haven’t been on display for a long time that will come out of the reserves.

Precisely, how was the selection of the pieces at the heart of the museums made? ?
Stephan Janson : we were quite stubborn, we had our ideas. When you talk about Yves Saint Laurent at the Louvre, all the departments can respond and there it was a decision of the Louvre in the end (note: to exhibit in the Apollo gallery). We can imagine a very baroque and romantic side of the couturier, for the Musée d’Orsay it’s perfect. That going to be extraordinary, it is the relationship with another art, literature and Proust. Mr. Saint Laurent made collections dedicated to Picasso so it was easy for the Picasso museum where there are few but majestic pieces. For modern art museums, like the Center Pompidou, there we didn’t have enough clothes. We have twenty pieces in each museum but they were greedy, they wanted more. At only museum that is free, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, there is a selection to die for and for an audience that may not be lucky enough to have the means to go around all the museums, this worth the pain.

Madison Cox: we made proposals but there were problems: of brightness for example because the rooms of the museums of Fine Arts are not at all in conformity with spaces muzzles designed for textiles. It’s 50 Lux, and there was nothing you could do to block out the light. It is a constraint.

What choice of scenography was favored?
Stephan Janson: I I’ve never done an exhibition, but there’s one thing that often bothered me when I saw the exhibitions devoted to Saint Laurent, and that was that what I had seen in fashion shows was unbeatable, but when we recreate all this on mannequins, it gave me an idea of ​​very beautiful but it lacked life! There was the look, there was a form of respect for Mr. Saint Laurent and what he had wanted with the garment accompanied by the hat, the earrings, the bracelet, the rings, the gloves, the shoes and bag. But I, who had the chance to see almost all of his shows, remembered all that and thought it was a shame. When I arrived, I said: I would like to show the clothes without accessories. As I am a sewing technician, I knew that for certain dresses, we no longer saw her mastery with the quantity of accessories. I claim to show that Saint Laurent did not need artifice to be sublime. It was a bet, I’m happy because it’s really incredible. For example at the Center Pompidou, there is a dress from 1965 that looks like it was made tomorrow, not even yesterday! Suddenly, there is no more period reference, it’s just the cut, the fit, the quality and the proportions. I’m sure that this exhibition, shown like this, will have a huge influence on future fashion.