From Marrakech to Paris, “Line and Expression” Explores Yves Saint Laurent’s Drawing Practice

Yves Saint Laurent: Line and Expression was organized by the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech and Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, with a loan funded by Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent. These philanthropic and heritage extensions serve as a means to give back to the city that reimagined Yves Saint Laurent's collections and legacy.

After its opening in Morocco at Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech, Line and Expression found its next home at the Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa. From Morocco to Southern California, the intention was “to bring awareness into the next generation,” as emphasized by Director of Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech, Alexis Sormin. “I know very few institutions in the US or in Europe, or in Africa, that are free to the public.” OCMA’s policy of free admission for all aligned with the mission to increase access and visibility for Saint Laurent’s archives, solidifying its slot as the home for the US premiere for the exhibition.

A prodigy of the late Christian Dior, Saint Laurent shared the same love for hand-drawing his designs. Each piece from Yves Saint Laurent’s collections traces back to a single sketch. In these archival sketches, the essence of certain fabrics and silhouettes, like the soft intricacy of a chiffon-pleated garment, are breathtakingly captured in “simple and pure” lines, to borrow the words of exhibition curator Gaël Mamine.

“Drawing is part of the process of creation,” Mamine says, and for Saint Laurent,-it was the first step. The archival exhibition explores the late draftsman’s eclectic and expressive collections from the period of his life when he reimagined haute couture.

Alexis Sormin further explains that “throughout [Saint Laurent’s] life, he would draw and draw and draw — sometimes redraw.” Even when a model was dressed in the prototypes of Saint Laurent’s garments, rather than “adding or subtracting” over the original sketch, the couturier modified the dress by redrawing the piece.

“He was perhaps more of a traveler by imagination than by movement into space,” Sormin adds. “Marrakech was the only place he would go to very often outside of Paris…and in Marrakech, he drew capriciously.”

LEFT: Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent, Marrakech, late 1960s. All rights reserved. TOP RIGHT: Yves Saint Laurent in front of the collection boards for a fashion show, 5 avenue Marceau studio, Paris, 1986. All rights reserved. BOTTOM RIGHT: Yves Saint Laurent, Anne-Marie Muñoz and Pierre Bergé in the studio, 5 avenue Marceau, 1977. Photo: Guy Marineau. © Guy Marineau

Yves Saint Laurent was born and raised in French-occupied Oran, Algeria in 1936, and moved to Paris at the age of 18 after winning a competition for young aspiring designers.. Three decades later, the designer had cemented his name in fashion as the protegee of Christian Dior, and at the age of 21 took over as the head designer at Dior after Christian’s death in 1957. When Saint Laurent was conscripted into the French Army in 1960 to fight in the Algerian War. Hospitalized within a month of leaving Paris for a depression induced by the hazing from other soldiers, he learned he had been fired and replaced at the house of Dior. Once he was discharged from service, Saint Laurent returned to Paris, successfully sued the house of Dior for breach of contract, and subsequently founded the house of Saint Laurent with his partner, Pierre Bergé, showing his first collection in 1962.

By 1966, he decided to go on holiday with his Bergé, and the two fell in love with Marrakech, Morocco. The city bustled with tourism after the country gained independence from France the decade prior. After purchasing their first Marrakech home, Dar El-Hanch, Saint Laurent retreated from the world to sketch and architect thousands of timeless designs. Today, Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech sits adjacent to Jardin Majoelle; a garden and villa complex the designer rescued from demolition in the 1980s, which now attracts roughly 800,000 visitors a year.

Gaël Mamine highlighted how the designer worked with his couture studio in Paris, where they analyzed and actualized his sketches into material garments. Designs were translated with fabrics, colors, and silhouettes, distilling into their physical form.

Line and Expression’s architecture integrates Saint Laurent’s design practice and process into the physical exhibition. Following the design process, while wandering away from framed pages, you’ll be met with an elegant and expansive assortment of garments and accessories on display. Ranging in origin from 1963 to 2001, these pieces encapsulate fabrics, colors, and other materials that transcended into physical prototypes. In many ways, these qualities are rooted in Saint Laurent's stays in Morocco. The haute-couture collections at Line and Expression embody that reminder of cultural heritage:lush colors, caftan silhouettes, hooded dresses, rich natural stones, and layering silk fabrics. Exploratory 1970s sketches on display and 1980s haute-couture suits and evening gowns draped with capes speak to the way the courtier introduced more fluidity into his womenswear ensembles. These influences stem from the men’s garments like vests and capes that he saw during his time in Marrakech.

Yves Saint Laurent believed he saw color in a new light during his stays, as Morocco's sun made the hues of everyday Marracech reflect in a new way for the designer. The exhibition showcases the blues, greens, pinks, and yellows that he introduced in monochromatic looks and innovative combinations during that time. The bright colors weaving between the black and white pieces are the mark of Marrakech on Saint Laurent’s legacy after making the city his second home.

Yves Saint Laurent: Line and Expression is on display from July 3rd, 2024 - October 27, 2024, at the Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa, California.

Fashion

Betsy Johnson's Hard Dressing

August 30, 2024

The world of Hard Dressing has been progressively teased, launched, and exhibited by creative director and stylist Betsy Johnson this year. A catalog offering a “comprehensive, solution-based guide to hair and style focusing on how these key identifiers can be utilized as a form of class camouflage,” Hard Dressing serves as the real-world manifestation of Johnson’s reflections on the state of dress today — whether it be the wealthy cosplaying as the poor, or the poor having to cosplay as the wealthy.

“It was this frustration that became the starting point for this project…. How every working-class artist must commercialize themselves to survive and make ends meet,” Johnson elaborated. Yet, the book intentionally acts more like a suitor than a salve, luring readers “with curated images and stories” that offer a temporary escape but no real solution to the problem. In Johnson’s words: “The book serves as a distraction, flooding minds with trivialities.”

By Sam Falb
Photography by Hugo Comte
Creative Direction & Styling Betsy Johnson
Set Design Rebecca Ilse
Makeup Porsche Poon
Hair Charlie Le Mindu
Nails Nirina Metz
Casting Conan Laurendot
Talents Aweng Chuol, Jinrong Huang, Bibi Hoad, Ana Rosolovskaya
Producer Meme Meng
Studio Art Director Jun Ortega

Photographs of models adorned in curated clothing and accessories are interspersed between tightly catchphrased posters (“TO MAKE YOUR LIFE MAGNIFICENT. ANYTIME. ANYWHERE”), campaign shots, and ephemera of the Hard Dressing ecosystem.

The work challenges the traditional notion of a catalog as purely pushing product — instead using the platform to integrate cultural critique, satire, content both fictional and real, and various personas including the “Fashion Critic” and “Dark Fashion Try Hard.” The guide is meant to help readers navigate the dark complexities of the fashion system, which ultimately, as Johnson explains, reinforces inequalities and furthers the issues at-hand.

A tangible extension of this vision, each page turns like a chapter in her ongoing narrative about class and identity. It harkens back to the world of K-HOLE, a similarly influential series of thought leadership publications released in the 2010s around notions of youth culture, branding, normcore, and contemporary discourse on style.

In March, Johnson introduced the world of Hard Dressing to audiences through a 24-hour livestream in a recreation of her mother’s salon during Paris Fashion Week, with special contributions from catalog collaborators Hugo Comte and Charlie le Mindu, as well as Yves Tumor and her commerce partner Basic.Space. A QVC-inspired reel by Éamonn Zeel Freel, a special poster, and mysterious tube of “PRODUCTS” accompanied the launch.

The follow-up to this initiation arrived in a June presentation at Paris gallery Sultana, where the concept came to life through a series of installations including a medicine cabinet of faux-bath products — “scaled-down deep fake beauty products referencing hair products and their relationship to Johnson’s coined ‘class camouflage,’” as the exhibition brochure read. A spray of human hair and synthetic wigs, sourced by set designer and frequent collaborator Rebecca Ilse from salons across Paris, was strewn across the space’s floor; "Do Not Touch the 'ART'" was scrawled across a column.

The multi-channel offerings of Hard Dressing speak to Johnson’s commitment to defiant, multilayered critique of the fashion industry’s complexities. In a sartorial landscape full of shifts both lamented and lauded — where the much-dreaded return of the “skinny” and dilution of heritage brands’ creativity in favor of sales coexist alongside a breathless assortment of buzzy emerging lines, and the creatives who support their endeavors (Johnson among them) — Hard Dressing emerges as both a voice of reason and revelation. “Ultimately this work highlights how consumerism and superficiality dominate our culture, offering little substance in return,” Johnson concludes in the catalog’s foreword.

We now await the next iteration of this project with baited breath, should there be one on the horizon.