Yves Saint Laurent Volume 45.2
PENDANT of copper and sterling silver; hydraulic press, 6.5 x 2.8 centimeters, 2017. FINGER RING of copper and sterling silver; hydraulic press, 6.5 x 2.8 centimeters, 2017. RING of sterling silver; hydraulic press, 6.5 x 2.8 centimeters, 2017. Photographs by Timo Krapf. MODEL TYPING, WITH JEWELRY: Stack of 3 Anticlastic Bands of sterling silver, 2.4 x 0.5 centimeters, 2018; Cosmos Ring of sterling silver and leather cord, 5.0 x 4.0 centimeters, 2019; Anticlastic Wrap Cuff of sterling silver, leather, 4.0 x 5.5 centimeters, 2019. Model: Marina Boswell. Photograph by Walter Colley Images.
SKETCH for a floor-length evening ensemble of graphite pencil and pastel on paper, Spring-summer 1988 haute couture collection. © Yves Saint Laurent.
Yves Saint Laurent: Line and Expression” is the first fashion-focused show to be mounted at the Orange County Museum of Art, which opened in 2022, just a stone’s throw from the Saint Laurent boutique at South Coast Plaza, the largest and luxe-est shopping center on the West Coast. It’s an obvious venue for a ripped-from-the-runway fashion display, but OCMA is a museum of modern and contemporary art rather than design or craft. While there are frocks galore, the show offers a unique opportunity to appreciate the designer as a draftsman, highlighting his graphic works alongside garments inspired by Matisse, Van Gogh, Picasso, Mondrian, and other artists the designer studied and collected.
The exhibition arrived directly from the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakech, Morocco, where the Algerian-born designer had a second home. He would retreat there twice a year in June and December to design his collections, far from the distractions of Paris. Seeking inspiration in the ancient city’s colors and contours, he filled loose sheets and spiral notebooks with sketches that he took back to Paris stuffed in a suitcase—500 to 1,000 drawings per collection, growing more developed and detailed with each stage of a garment’s realization.
“Sketch upon sketch, inquiry and more inquiry, little by little... One variant leads to another,” the designer said. “A new idea is born.”
Drawing was integral to Saint Laurent’s creative process; he was frequently photographed with a pencil in hand and a sketch in progress. Some designers—notably Coco Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet and Madame Grès—draped directly on the body without sketching first. Others enlisted professional illustrators to transcribe their ideas onto paper. Elsa Schiaparelli hired artists to capture the finished garments as they went down the runway, using their watercolor-enhanced drawings to sell the clothes to clients. Saint Laurent, too, had an in-house illustrator for that purpose. Though the designer discovered a talent for photography in the 1980s, he revived the practice in the 1990s. The history of his house would be recorded in sketches and swatches, not photographs.
INSTALLATION VIEW of “Yves Saint Laurent: Line and Expression,” 2024. Showing from left to right: N° 116. PROTOTYPE Floor-length ensemble of woolen cape, silk chiffon dress, Spring-summer 1988 haute couture collection; N° 082. PROTOTYPE of silk chiffon cape and floor-length dress, Spring-summer 1989 haute couture collection; N° 092. PROTOTYPE of silk crepe floor-length evening dress, Spring-summer 1991 haute couture collection; N°098. PROTOTYPE of silk satin crepe evening dress, Spring-summer 1979 haute couture collection; N° 109. PROTOTYPE of silk satin crepe evening dress, Spring-summer 1979 haute couture collection. Orange County Museum of Art. Photograph by Yubo Dong, ofstudio.
Tutored by the fashion magazines he devoured as a student as well as his first employer, fashion illustrator turned couturier Christian Dior, Saint Laurent pushed fashion sketching beyond detailed technical drawings, treating it as an art form in its own right. His duties at Dior included making copies of his mentor’s original sketches for the various workshops in the atelier; photocopies would come much later. Just as a preparatory drawing establishes the composition and mood of an artist’s final canvas, Saint Laurent’s sketches are meant to convey vibes rather than minutiae of cut and construction. Yet they are often accurate, down to the placement of buttons.
A theater lover, Saint Laurent saw fashion as a kind of costume, full of drama and fantasy. By the time he left Dior to launch his own house in 1961, his sketching technique had matured into a distinctive, recognizable style. His angular figures, with their long necks and legs, evoke fashion models confidently striking poses on a runway rather than mannequins or, for that matter, real women in everyday settings. The exhibition includes four decades of his drawings, from 1962 to the designer’s retirement in 2002. Fittingly, his final runway show included chiffon “pencil stroke” (trait de crayon) dresses, a tribute to his working method.
INSTALLATION VIEW of “Yves Saint Laurent: Line and Expression,” 2024. Foremost piece is N° 082. PROTOTYPE of silk chiffon cape and floor-length dress, Spring-summer 1989 haute couture collection. Orange County Museum of Art. Photograph by Yubo Dong, ofstudio.
YVES SAINT LAURENT, ANNE-MARIE MUÑOZ AND PIERRE BERGÉ in the studio, 5 avenue Marceau, 1977. Photograph by Guy Marineau. © Guy Marineau.
Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, his partner in business and life, came up with a system of organization to keep track of all these drawings, again following Dior’s efficient example. Not only did this system impose order on the suitcases of loose paper, but it ensured that none of the sheets strayed from the studio and into the hands of copyists. Names, numbers and fabric notes in shorthand around the margins of the sketches speak to a busy and complex yet intimate and well-oiled atelier.
“Yves Saint Laurent: Line and Expression” highlights the designer’s initial line drawings in pencil and felt-tip pen, with only a few examples colored in gouache and pastel. Saint Laurent called these rapid black and white sketches “the miracle of the moment.” He let his pencil be his guide, never knowing what would manifest.
Seamstresses converted the two-dimensional sketches into muslin; only then was the final fabric chosen, though the sketches suggest shimmering silks, ethereal chiffons, textural tweeds, or buttery velvet, using straight lines for heavy weaves and wavy ones for flowing fabrics. At that point, the designer would dash off a new round of sketches, freshly inspired. His final collection boards, grouped by category of clothing, provided an overall vision of his runway shows as well as a personal record of his work; in this practice, he emulated fine artists including Claude Lorrain and J.W.M. Turner, who kept similarly sketched catalogues of their oeuvres.
Only a fraction of more than sixty thousand surviving sketches in the Musée Saint Laurent’s collection made it into the show. Exhibition co-curator Gaël Mamine explained the difficult process of selecting them: “I wanted to get the signature of Saint Laurent, so we are really focused on some silhouettes which are really relevant.” These include the iconic little black dress with white collar and cuffs from the designer’s Belle de Jour era, as well as many variations of Le Smoking, the feminine tuxedo Saint Laurent debuted in 1966 and included in every subsequent collection. There are bows galore: at the throat, the waist, the bust, and the hip. There is sensual evening wear with the designer’s signature plunging backs and necklines, and wrap dresses with slit skirts. Many of the designer’s sketches were never produced at all, but testify to his wide-ranging exploratory process.
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The objects are displayed chronologically, beginning in the 1960s, with drawings largely hung around the outer walls and garments clustered in the center of the galleries, allowing visitors to appreciate how both Saint Laurent’s drawings and his couture creations evolved over time. The house’s early years are dominated by sketches; the Picasso-inspired “vase” dresses and the Fall/Winter 1976 Ballets Russes collection are represented in sketch form only. The latter collection, famous for its rich colors and fabrics, is here distilled to black and white lines, like an x-ray of the concept.
N° 130. PROTOTYPE of floor-length evening ensemble: silk satin tunic and skirt, Fall-winter 1987 haute couture collection; N° 064. PROTOTYPE of silk crepe floor-length evening dress, Spring-summer 1986 haute couture collection; N° 097. PROTOTYPE of silk satin evening tunic and skirt, Spring-summer 1981 haute couture collection. Orange County Museum of Art. Photograph by Yubo Dong, ofstudio.
Gradually, the garments multiply and eclipse the sketches, bringing them to life in three dimensions. One vast platform holds mannequins in black gowns, with an occasional pop of color in the form of a sash, a sleeve, or a coat’s hot pink lining. It’s the same technique Saint Laurent memorably used in his first dress for Dior, famously photographed by Richard Avedon on model Dovima as she cuddled with an elephant. Yet the black itself is made up of dozens of different shades, with shadows created by draping, pleating, or texture: wool, crepe, satin, velvet, sequins. It could convey many moods, ranging from sophisticated to subversive to serious.
Another large platform is an explosion of color. Certain combinations that some designers might consider incongruent became Saint Laurent’s signature: green, chartreuse, and sky blue; orange and pink; fuchsia, red, and black. Others hues stem from Saint Laurent’s love of art: Picasso red, Chagall blue, Goya pink. He borrowed the bolder “shocking pink” and other Surrealist influences from Elsa Schiaparelli, whose work he admired.
The garments are samples, whisked straight off the runway and into the Saint Laurent archives in pristine condition. There is no hint of the women who wore them; even the models are identified only by their first names. But the designer’s illustrious clientele needs no introduction. He met Catherine Deneuve when she was just 22; a lifelong client, she sang at his last runway show in 2002. He dressed the Duchess of Windsor, Princess Grace of Monaco, Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, and Nan Kempner. A white Le Smoking recalls Bianca Jagger. “Women and I love each other,” the designer said in 1997. “My collections are love stories.”
METAL BRACELETS WITH BEADS, Spring-summer 1980 haute couture collection. Photograph by Yubo Dong, ofstudio.
A case in the final gallery holds jewelry from the Musée Saint Laurent’s collection, much of it designed by Saint Laurent’s model and muse, Loulou la Falaise. It is inspired by natural elements like coral, stone and crystal, but often rendered in unearthly colors. A narrow side gallery showcases another aspect of Saint Laurent’s graphic work: poster-sized enlargements of the “Love”-themed New Year’s cards the designer drew and sent out every year. You’ll leave feeling envious of the longtime friends and clients lucky enough to have collected this museum in miniature.
SUGGESTED READING
Benaim, Laurence. Yves Saint Laurent: A Biography. New York, NY: Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2019.
Drake, Alicia. The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris. Back Bay Books, 2007.
Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech. Yves Saint Laurent: Line and Expression. Marrakech, Morocco: Éditions Jardin Majorelle, 2021.
Updike, Robin. “Yves Saint Laurent. The Perfection of Style.” Ornament, Volume 39, No. 3, 2016: 28-33.
YVES SAINT LAURENT in front of the collection boards for a fashion show, 5 avenue Marceau studio, Paris, 1986. © Yves Saint Laurent. All rights reserved.
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N° 002. PROTOTYPE Daytime ensemble of Grain de Poudre wool spencer jacket and trousers, silk crepe blouse, Spring-summer 1984 haute couture collection and N° 030. PROTOTYPE of linen pantsuit, shantung top, Spring-summer 2001 haute couture collection. Orange County Museum of Art. Photograph by Yubo Dong, ofstudio.
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell is a Los Angeles-based fashion historian, curator and journalist and a frequent contributor to Ornament. Her most recent book is Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the 20th Century. An avid fashion scholar, Chrisman-Campbell was excited to see Yves Saint Laurent exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art, which just opened two years ago in 2022. A contemporary and modern art venue, OCMA offered a greater focus on the fashion designer’s extensive collection of sketches. From her essay, the words of Saint Laurent resonate from the twentieth century: “ ‘Sketch upon sketch, inquiry and more inquiry, little by little... One variant leads to another,’ the designer said. ‘A new idea is born.’ ”
