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“Yves Saint Laurent was the first designer to act like a rock star,” said curator Florence Müller. She was introducing the traveling exhibition “Yves Saint Laurent: The Perfection of Style,” which opens in Richmond at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts this weekend. The lanky designer didn’t just look the part, Müller explained, he acted it: his sensibilities being in complete accord with the times. Liberation, freedom, a certain naturalness, and a breakdown of barriers between art, fashion, and pop culture not only defined the ’60s, but Saint Laurent’s entire approach to design, too.
Born in Oran into a loving French family, Saint Laurent escaped from the bullying he received at school into an imaginary world informed by fashion magazines and art. He eventually made his way to Paris and to the house of Christian Dior, birthplace of the New Look and other body-morphing silhouettes. In hindsight, we can see that Saint Laurent was a disrupter from the start. In 1958, after the unexpected death of Dior and Saint Laurent’s appointment to succeed him, the 21-year-old presented his first collection for the house. The “Trapeze” line won him raves; it also freed the body from constraints and corsetry, which effectively, writes Müller, “launched the fashion of the 1960s.” Saint Laurent crossed a line when he interpreted, in crocodile and mink, the style of beatniks and bikers in his Fall 1960 couture collection. Such iconoclasm cost him his job. With Pierre Bergé, he opened his own house in 1962, and his innovations, from Le Smoking to separates, continue to influence designers today. Saint Laurent, says Müller, was “dressing women for everyday life,” perhaps an even greater challenge, she suggests, than making an impact with couture. That he was able to do both is gloriously illustrated in “Yves Saint Laurent: The Perfection of Style.”
The exhibition (which includes pieces on loan from Vogue’s International Editor at Large Hamish Bowles) tracks the designer’s development from childhood to retirement. There are sections on Saint Laurent’s sartorial play with gender and good taste, as well as his use of art references. The largest portion explores his evolution from darkness to an explosion of color, which grew, in part, from his discovery of a new way of life and sensuality in Marrakech, where he and Bergé would live part time from 1966. Adding depth to the display of beloved looks, such as the Mondrian, Proust, and tuxedo dresses, are previously inaccessible drawings, printed matter, and ephemera like paper dolls Saint Laurent made as a child. “I think he learned how to draw from the fashion magazines; for him, it was like the rehearsal of his life achievement,” explains Müller. “He was, first of all, a designer who knew how to make a drawing, which is quite rare today.”
Also rare was Saint Laurent’s sense of proportion and insistence on ease, even in formalwear. Loulou de la Falaise, a muse who worked alongside the designer, once told WWD while wearing a ball gown that “a dress like this is as comfortable as an old sweater.” Asked what surprised her when putting this exhibition together, Müller, who has curated several exhibitions on Saint Laurent, replied: “Every time the surprise is how easy [the clothes are], how you put the dress on and it fits the mannequin perfectly. For me, it’s really magical because the proportions are really perfect and everything is very light.” For Müller, one of the best outfits in the exhibition is a black silk jersey jumpsuit from the Spring 1975 collection, ordered by the designer’s main muse, Betty Catroux. “It’s easy to wear, it’s light, it fits the body perfectly, and there is nothing that you want to remove,” she says. Perfection in dress, in other words.