Art calmed Yves Saint Laurent

2009-02-20 14:00

Paris - In 1965 Yves Saint Laurent stunned the fashion world with his Mondrian collection.

Only a designer of his genius and artistic sensitivity could have seen the potential for flattering a woman's shape in the grids of black lines framing bright primary colours which are the Dutch abstract painter's hallmark.

The Mondrian shifts were just the first manifestation of Saint Laurent's lifelong love affair with art, reflected in the collection amassed with his partner and right-hand man Pierre Berge, which is being dispersed by auction at the Grand Palais next week.

Throughout his career, he paid homage to such diverse influences as Van Gogh, Braque, Matisse, Picasso - the painter's daughter Paloma was one of his inner circle - Pop Art and David Hockney.

"I have always been passionate about painting, it is natural that it should inspire my creations," Saint Laurent said in 2004.

Sensation

The designer said he had never wanted to copy - "Who would even want to try?" - but to make links between painting and clothing "because painters are always of their time and can accompany one's life".

For the 1965 Mondrian collection, which caused such a sensation, Saint Laurent had his seamstresses cut little jersey shifts so cleverly that they accommodated the curves of the female form, while appearing as perfectly flat as the original oil paintings.

"We followed the grains of the fabric so that the seams between the coloured panels were almost invisible," journalist Alice Rawsthorn quotes one as saying in her biography of the designer.

French fashion historian Florence Muller, who curated an exhibition on Saint Laurent in Canada and the United States, said the designer's creations "were never paintings to be worn but real clothes".

Like the Mondrian shifts, whose geometric construction she compared to stained glass. "It's a very pleasant garment to wear in that the body feels free, very much in the spirit of the 1960s."

In his tributes to Van Gogh, Saint Laurent used embroidery to evoke the characteristic thick layers of paint and shiny, matt or painted sequins to produce the effect of light or shadow.

His jacket inspired by Van Gogh's paintings of irises in his 1988 spring couture collection is one of the prize acquisitions of Lebanese multi-millionaires and couture benefactor Mouna Ayub.

Eclectic taste

The embroidery, by the prestigious house of Lesage, took some 750 hours.

Saint Laurent's eclectic taste also embraced Asian art. After a visit to the Zen temples in Kyoto in the 1960s he began collecting antique Chinese art objects and in 1977 dressed his models in kimonos and mandarin tunics like imperial concubines for the launch of his perfume "Opium".

But the single artist with which he arguably had the closest affinity was Matisse, Berge recalls in conversations with the French journalist Laure Adler soon to be published.

"He spent his childhood in a country (Algeria) rich in colour and light, comforted by his very great love of Matisse. The more I look at the paintings of Matisse, the more I see new developments in the work of Saint Laurent, above all the associations of colour.

It is in that way that Yves was interesting in the history of colour in fashion, the unlikely associations which play on opposite tonalities."

Former model Nicole Dorier, who directed the couture house's catwalk presentations, said "with every collection, there was an invasion of art, which mixed with his work to the point that he got under the artist's skin and at the end it was like two artists rolled into one".

Born with a nervous breakdown

Alexis and Nicolas Kugel, the antique dealers who supplied many of the beautiful objects which graced the home which the designer shared with Berge in rue de Babylone, observed that for Saint Laurent "art was a physical need even stronger than passion".

"His collection was an extension of his passion and his existential problems," Nicolas Kugel said of the designer of whom Berge famously said was "born with a nervous breakdown".

He recalled how one day when Saint Laurent was putting the finishing touches to a collection in a nearby hotel, he suddenly turned up unannounced in Kugel's nearby gallery "because he felt an urgent need for calm".

That was what art represented for him, Kugel said, saying how touched he had been.

- AFP