Montreal’s Tribute to Yves Saint Laurent

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The passing of Yves Saint Laurent, one of the world’s most prolific and influential designers, was occasion for articles and photo essays celebrating his life and career. But to truly understand the power and extent of Saint Laurent’s oeuvre, one needs to see the clothes. Which is reason enough to visit the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’s retrospective of Saint Laurent’s work, the first in more than 20 years.

“We started working with a living legend,” the museum’s curator of decorative arts and one of the curators of the show, Diane Charbonneau, said. “And now we’re left with his legacy.”

The show — a collaboration between the Fondation Pierre Berge Yves Saint Laurent, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the MMFA — includes 145 examples of Saint Laurent’s ability to reinvent the foundations of women’s wardrobes and to propel forward haute couture during the second half of the last century. Divided into four sections — “Masterful Pencil Strokes,” “The Yves Saint Laurent Revolution,” “The Palette,” and “Lyrical Sources” — the exhibit spans his creations from tuxedo dresses to safari jackets to fine-art inspired frocks.

Though the exhibition’s timing now seems prescient, the initial inspiration for the retrospective was the lack of a recent look at Saint Laurent’s work; the last time he was given a museum show was in 1983, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art made Saint Laurent the first living designer to have a retrospective there. “They felt that there was a need to have a new exhibition,” the French fashion historian, Florence Müller, who served as a guest curator for the current show, said of the foundation’s impetus. “There were many garments that were never exhibited before,” she said. And, Ms. Muller added, “For the foundation, there was this idea of starting a tour of a new retrospective that could be strongly cultural and artistic.”

Indeed, while the show is a comprehensive look at Saint Laurent’s meticulous design sketches and attention to garment construction, its emphasis is on the philosophy and various cultural inspirations — literary, artistic, cinematic — that guided the course of the collections. “The work of Yves Saint Laurent goes much further than that of a fashion designer,” Saint Laurent’s longtime business partner, Pierre Bergé, wrote in the show’s catalog. “He extended the realm of aesthetics to embrace social issues, using in a certain way the approach of a moralist. This retrospective should be viewed in this perspective.”

One of the show’s four themes, “The Yves Saint Laurent Revolution,” for example, concerns his co-optation of traditionally masculine garments, especially the pantsuit and the tuxedo, for women’s wear. “A woman is only attractive in pants if she wears them with all her femininity,” the designer once said. Included in the “Revolution” section are an extraordinarily sober brown wool tweed pantsuit and coordinating woolen turtleneck, a sketch of a wool jersey jumpsuit made to order in 1969 for socialite Nan Kempner, who was a major patron of Saint Laurent’s designs, and the tuxedo-inspired dress worn by Catherine Deneuve in “Belle du jour.” “Saint Laurent effectively created a contemporary uniform for a woman that was neither futuristic fancy dress nor asexual garb,” Vogue contributor and fashion journalist Hamish Bowles wrote.

But some of the show’s most powerful and vibrant moments can be found in its other two sections. “The Palette” focuses on Saint Laurent’s use of color and shape. Inspired by the bright colors of Morocco, the elaborate embroidery of Russia, and the opulence of Chinese empress dresses, he carried the torch of previous designers such as Paul Poiret and Elsa Schiaparelli in finding ideas from around the globe. “Lyrical Sources” examines his inspirations from the worlds of literature and visual art. At various points between the 1960s and ’80s, Saint Laurent used prints and colors from some of the biggest names in modern art — Mondrian, most famously, in 1965, Picasso in 1979, and Braque in 1988. And the world of literature was not far from Saint Laurent’s mind, either. Inspired by Oscar Wilde, for example, he designed knickers paired with a piped velvet jacket and a vest in 1993.

Given the extraordinarily wide array of material they intended to cover, the selection of garments was no small task for the three curators, Ms. Müller, Ms. Charbonneau, and the associate curator of textiles at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Jill D’Alessandro.

The Fondation Pierre Berge Yves Saint Laurent, located in Paris, houses 5,000 garments and more than 15,000 accessories, all preserved in temperature- and humidity-controlled rooms and with acid-free papers and containers. Along with two technicians, the curators combed through the collection, narrowing the field to 800 pieces, then to 160, some of which were dictated by the ability of the garments to fit the mannequins. The curators also made an effort to include pieces not previously exhibited, 60 of which ended up in the show.

The fact that the show was, at the time, not a posthumous presentation made their choices somewhat simpler. “If it had happened before,” Ms. Charbonneau said, referring to Saint Laurent’s death, “the pressure not to miss out on something would have been really different.”

Until September 18 (1380 Sherbrooke Ouest, between Bishop and Crescent streets, 514-285-2000).


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use