The Flowers of Yves Saint Laurent
Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Paris
September 20, 2024 – May 04, 2025

Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé lived their daily lives surrounded by flowers and gardens – in their apartments, their secondary homes and at their fashion house. Passionate about flowers, the couturier found them to be an infinite source of inspiration. Yves Saint Laurent shared this admiration for nature with many artists and writers, in particular with one of his favorite authors, Marcel Proust, as he revealed in the magazine L’Egoïste in 1987. A Proustian universe appears in the designer’s interiors as well as during his runway shows. The writer would describe women as flowers, whereas the couturier would pay homage to them by covering them with blossoms. Over thirty garments and drawings seen in the exhibition highlight this symbiosis between nature, literature and the work of Yves Saint Laurent.

As in a book, each chapter of the exhibition displays quotes from Proust alongside flowering silhouettes by Yves Saint Laurent, while accessories and drawings by the couturier are presented on pedestals. As if along a garden path, flowers are everywhere one turns, revealing the personality and tastes of the designer: from the lily of the valley so dear to Christian Dior to the YSL logo with its initiated lily-like monogram, from roses signifying love to the bougainvillaea of Morocco, or to wheat, the bearer of luck and triumph.

Through iconic garments seen in the exhibition, the visitor discovers the expertise that Yves Saint Laurent drew upon to bring his floral creations to life: from his earliest applied embroidery on the spring-summer dress of 1962 to his inventive prints from the spring-summer 2001 collection, an unforgettable reference to the paintings of Pierre Bonnard. We see the larger-than-life silk gazar flowers worn on the runway by Laetitia Casta as a summer bride in 1999, an enduring image from the oeuvre of Yves Saint Laurent. This spontaneous dialogue between the arts and different eras continues as we come face to face with the work of the American artist Sam Falls, whose works are seen throughout the exhibition. Traveling the world, he gathers plant samples and preserves the memory of floral landscapes by directly printing their pigments on canvas. The patterns and colors of his reconstructed take on nature blend harmoniously with those seen in the haute couture pieces. In the clothing of Yves Saint Laurent, as in the paintings of Sam Falls, flowers transcend time and remain eternally in bloom.

Since the birth of the luxury and haute couture industries at the end of the nineteenth century, flowers have served as a signature for couturiers and the world of fashion. The great Charles Frederick Worth liked them oversized: presented as if emerging from large branches, these generously proportioned flowers became his emblem. At the turn of the century, the Belle Époque used designs derived from stems and flowers to striking effect. Jacques Doucet made the hydrangea his recurring motif. Shortly after 1914, Paul Poiret invented a simplified rose in accordance with the artistic trends of his time. Coco Chanel stitched her creations with camellias. In the 1930s and 1940s, ordinary day dresses sported country-inspired motifs. Christian Dior is the couturier who firmly asserted his vision of an idealized woman according to the spirals and curves of a flower. In 1947, his New Look collection was partly designed by a line he called “Corolla,” Yves Saint Laurent was in harmony with this tradition, which transformed haute couture salons into gardens.

From his beginnings at Dior, and under his own name beginning in 1962, flowers in seedlings or bouquets, or just stitched on the back of fabric crop up throughout Saint Laurent’s collections.

Organized over four themes, the dresses selected for the exhibition present the stylistic breadth as well as the textiles and colors that Yves Saint Laurent enjoyed using to evoke flowers. Embroidered, they transform dresses into delicate compositions. Combined in bouquets, using chiffon or taffeta, they serve as a homage to Christian Dior. Whether printed in contrast on silk, cut and applied to the fabric itself or blended onto two-tone taffeta, flowers, realistic or fanciful, would transform the couturier’s runway shows and collections into fertile and poetic herbariums.

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