“There is a strength in me, a fierce will that pushes me towards the light…, said Yves Saint Laurent. I am a fighter and a winner.” It was he, then interned at the Val-de-Grâce hospital in Paris, who decided to open a house in his name, announcing his choice to Pierre Bergé. The first collection was presented on January 29, 1962, at 30 bis, rue Spontini, a street a little out of the way of the 16th arrondissement. The models were made in the old Manguin workshops. “It was dirty, we cleaned up, we did everything. We went to look for old mannequins that we stuffed with hay, ”recalls Monette, then small hand. “We flattened the chests, we broke the hips. Mr. Saint Laurent distributed the sketches, we did the canvases.”
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What instinct pushes the former artistic director of Dior to take up such a challenge, when Paris seems to have forgotten it?
Fashion robbed him of his youth.
Yet it is she who will give him back his name in letters of gold.
Yves Saint Laurent was the first couturier exhibited during his lifetime: the retrospective organized by Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute of the Met, in New York, in 1983 attracted more than 600,000 visitors.
Then it was Beijing, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Paris, the parade at the Stade de France, Montreal, San Francisco…
Artistic dialogue
January 2022. Sixty years have passed, an opportunity for the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation to pay tribute to the couturier through an exhibition designed as a journey through six Parisian museums (1). From the Mondrian dress to the Hommage à ma maison jacket, from the Matisse blouse to the green fox coat from the Liberation collection, the models are distributed along a path that confronts dresses with works from public collections. Art and fashion, lines and colors collide in a masterful interplay of flat tints and correspondences.
But it is his unique gaze, his way of setting fire to all genre conventions, his interpretation that prevails. His genius as an artist is his ability to transform a vision into a gesture, a painting into a living silhouette, the works into portraits of character embodied by the women in his dresses. “Dior has dressed the angels, he wrote to his mother, I still have to dress the demons.” Isn't Yves Saint Laurent's most beautiful work first of all his fight, one of those led by Goya when he said: "The sleep of reason engenders monsters." Yves Saint Laurent is also about this extraordinary link with women, this art in life, this strength, this movement irreducible to anything that freezes it, statifies it. Here, the public will be able to touch with their eyes what Yves Saint Laurent knew how to provoke: to touch the heart.
(1) "Yves Saint Laurent at the museums", from January 29 to May 15, at the Center Pompidou, the Louvre Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Orsay Museum, the Picasso-Paris National Museum and the Yves Saint Laurent Museum Paris.
Laurence Benaïm is the author of a biography of the couturier, “Yves Saint Laurent”, published by Éditions Grasset.
Violeta Sanchez
Tribute to my house embroidered jacket, exhibited at the Louvre Museum.
Photo Yves Saint Laurent Museum Collection Paris © Yves Saint Laurent @ Nicolas Mathéus MUSÉE D'ORSAY
“Yves Saint Laurent's gold was precious and Byzantine, even frank it was never flashy.
With him, you didn't wear gold, the gold belonged to you.
It was still extremely embodied.
Even when it was battleship, a jacket was structured and worked like armour, it was never stiff.
We weren't there like in a straitjacket.
There was a great sensuality.
Yves Saint Laurent was a way of catching the light, he illuminated women without making them a beacon.
As with this Hommage à ma maison jacket, which will be exhibited at the Louvre Museum.
With him, women shone from within.
The garment was there to reveal you.
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Amalia Vairelli
Evening set in satin, to see at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris
Photo Yves Saint Laurent Yves Saint Laurent Museum Paris © Yves Saint Laurent @ Nicolas Mathéus
“My Italian father had brought me from Africa to France to avoid the excision that my mother wanted. She died in an attack in Somalia. I had no landmarks. I started working with Monsieur Saint Laurent in 1978, I stayed with him until the end, in 2002. I felt protected from any form of aggression, even with an almost bare dress, because it clogged doubts, wounds, and that we were enveloped in a balm that subtly gave you all the powers. Like in this fuchsia dress, which will be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. With Yves Saint Laurent, my faults became qualities. I was four months pregnant, I was hiding it, he had seen it. He took me to the studio and in front of the mirror he draped a muslin. I said to him: "But, sir, you can see my belly." He said to me: "Yes,that's what I wanted." He released me without telling me. He had that power: to reveal, without betraying, to give strength, courage. He became my son's godfather. Yves Saint Laurent gave me a passport for life.”
Marisa Berenson
Abaca
"He said to me, 'Your grandmother is a magician.'
Elsa Schiaparelli was one artist among others: from Dalí to Cocteau, from Bérard to Vertes, everyone worked with her on creations, it was an exchange, each collection was an artistic happening.
On display at the Musée national Picasso-Paris, a jacket inspired by Pablo Picasso.
Photo Yves Saint Laurent Museum Paris © Yves Saint Laurent @ Nicolas Mathéus
Yves, he did not work with artists, he paid homage to them, as with Pablo Picasso and this jacket exhibited at the Picasso Museum.
What inspired him was the woman.
It was she who was put forward through the artists, the cultures, the colors of the world.
Laetitia Casta
Laetitia Casta: "The first thing he gave me was this heart around my neck, which will be exhibited at the Louvre Museum"
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“With him, the energy came from the heart, not from the head.
The first thing he gave me was this heart around my neck, which will be exhibited at the Louvre Museum.
He was a painter of life.
He was like a prophet, he always leads me and advises me.
Today he is even more alive than when I met him.
His sentences, I understand them.
He is here and he always will be.
What linked us was totally intangible.
Yves Saint Laurent looked at me with such a pure and sincere look, it's as if he had recognized me, adopted me.
He gave me something emotional that I lacked then, despite all the love I had received from my family.
Beauty is a dream, a dream: devoting yourself to an ideal with fervor to bring happiness to people.
Yves Saint Laurent had that, and he passed it on to me.
When he said to me: “How beautiful you are!”, he meant what floats in the air, grace, the grace that we cannot catch, that we cannot possess.
This word “beautiful”, which had never reached me, put me on the ground when I heard it from him.
I knew what that represented for Yves Saint Laurent: a life of work, of research into universal beauty, this absolute and indefinable quest.”
Betty Catroux
Betty Catroux: "Fashion doesn't interest me. Yves knew it, we never talked about fashion with him. Maybe that's what got him excited"
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“Fashion doesn't interest me. Yves knew it, with him we never talked about fashion. Maybe that's what turned him on. My slightly transgender side, he captured it, but we didn't mention it. I am always in black, always as a boy. I felt well dressed as a man by him. He gave me everything. I gave everything to the museum. Even now, I'm dressed as a man, always in Saint Laurent. From Yves, I still have this complicity, this childish side, thinking only of having fun. My memories with him are not based on fashion. Mixing art and fashion is all Yves would have wanted, it was his absolute fantasy. I am very proud to have lived through all of this. But old memories don't touch me. Yves lived in nostalgia, not me. I will go see this exhibition,because it's a wonderful idea and it's about my private life, but I'm not going to pass out."
Carla Bruni
Carla Bruni: "All the dresses of Yves Saint Laurent revisited something"
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“All of Yves Saint Laurent's dresses revisited something.
There were like refrains.
Her haute couture clothes restructured the body.
A dress became sublime skin, embroidered, chiselled by the workshops.
He was the king, and we were treated like queens.
I have never experienced anywhere else but at his place such perfection in a garment, the feeling of being redesigned.
Canvas of a dress inspired by Georges Braque, exhibited at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Paris.
Photo Yves Saint Laurent Museum Paris © Yves Saint Laurent @ Nicolas Mathéus
At the Stade de France, in my strapless dove dress, I felt like I was flying
(the canvas of the tribute dress is on display at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, editor's note)
.
What I liked was this bond, so simple, so respectful, which united us.
He was irresistibly sweet and melancholy, and funny at the same time.
I have only one regret: not having danced entire nights at Le Sept with him and Loulou.
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