Yves Saint Laurent: from the Louvre to the Pompidou Centre, six Parisian museums celebrate the great couturier

It was January 29, 1962. The crowd flocked to 30 bis rue Spontini to attend the presentation of Yves Saint Laurent’s first collection. Fired from the house of Dior two years earlier, the couturier, just 26 years old, imposed his definitively modern conception of the women’s wardrobe that day. With his tuxedos, pea coats and woollen trousers, the couturier reinvented the female silhouette by giving women a new freedom . While this famous show will celebrate its sixty years in 2022 ,  six prestigious Parisian museums will pay tribute to the couturier through an anniversary exhibition called “Yves Saint Laurent at the Museums”. While the cocktail dresses created in 1965 evoking the abstract paintings of the painter Mondrian have gone down in history, the couturier has been inspired on many occasions by many masterpieces of modern art. Supported by the Pierre Bergé-Yves  Saint Laurent Foundation, the retrospective establishes a series of dialogues between the designer’s emblematic pieces and the permanent collections of Parisian museums, in order to highlight the close link that the couturier,  who died in 2008,  had with art.

Throughout Paris, the most prestigious cultural institutions will unveil the great couturier’s inspirations within their walls from the end of January. The Centre Georges Pompidou will present the couturier’s clothes and drawings simply as those of an artist anchored in his time. At the Picasso Museum , the exhibition will highlight the correspondences between Pablo Picasso’s paintings – dear to the couturier – and the silhouettes inspired by the work of the Spanish master. The Musée d’Orsay will explore the creator’s passion for Marcel Proust through the question of gender, highlighting the considerable place that the French writer occupied in the designer’s universe. With In Search of Lost Time, the Parisian dandy transposes, through fiction, the bourgeois world made up of intrigues and disappointments in love, which Yves Saint Laurent experienced a century later. As for the Louvre Museum, a display in the heart of the sumptuous Apollo Gallery will retrace the couturier’s fascination – born in Oran in 1936 – for golden colours and light. Finally, the Yves Saint Laurent Paris Museum will present a previously unseen part of the fashion house’s archives, preciously preserved by the Pierre Bergé-Yves  Saint Laurent Foundation. More than a retrospective, this archipelago of exhibitions will offer the unprecedented opportunity to rediscover the richness and eclecticism of the couturier’s artistic references, as well as the collections of major cultural institutions.

Yves Saint Laurent at the Museums, from January 29 to May 15, 2022, Paris.