YVES SAINT LAURENT AUX MUSEUMS celebrates the 60th anniversary of Yves Saint Laurent’s first fashion show. The couturier, just 26 years old, signed his first collection under his own name on January 29, 1962. It immediately imposes a spirit but also a style.

Through his models, a whole culture, a whole artistic universe is expressed. Because in its creative power, Yves Saint Laurent reinvents, with rigor and fantasy, all the plastic heritage of the world. In this perspective, this vast exhibition project considers the creation of Yves Saint Laurent as traversed by different cultures and temporalities.

Supported by the Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, the YVES SAINT LAURENT AUX MUSEUMS exhibition creates a dialogue between certain models, among the couturier’s most iconic, but also beautiful lesser-known discoveries public, and the permanent collections of various Parisian museums. Thus, this project traces the creative and unique journey of Yves Saint Laurent while celebrating the arts of the world. The radiant nature of the project makes it possible to build bridges between Yves Saint Laurent and different artistic worlds.
At the Center Pompidou , in the heart of the National Museum of Modern Art , the route approaches the work of Yves Saint Laurent as that of an artist deeply rooted in his time and as a witness to the evolution of artistic creation in the 20th century. century. Absolute master of this period, Picasso holds a special place in the work of the couturier as evidenced by the sets of quotations offered at the Musée national Picasso-Paris . Sensitive to the correspondences between the arts, Yves Saint Laurent never ceases to juggle between rhythms and colors, lights and materials, like the dialogues set out at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris , which alternate monumental rooms and more intimate sequences. At the Louvre Museum, it is the couturier’s fascination for light, for gold – the color of the sun – for the decorative arts but also and above all for grand pageantry that is honored in the Galerie d’Apollon. However, all these trajectories that respond to each other cannot be understood without questioning the role and place that Marcel Proust occupies in the couturier’s imagination. This Proustian passion, as well as the question of gender through masculine-feminine dress codes, will be explored at the Musée d’Orsay .

Echoing the masterpieces from the permanent collections of the partner museums, part of the archives of the fashion house – carefully collected by Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent – ​​are presented at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris . Mostly unpublished, these archives make it possible to read the manufacture of the models, to feel the life of the fashion house, to understand the creative process but also to pay tribute to all those and to all those who participated in the realization of these models. .

Thought like an archipelago, the exhibition offers new forms of dialogue and encourages the public to create their journey from one museum to another, leading them into hitherto unknown or new spheres. It is also a question of going beyond the traditional framework of an exhibition, of playing on networks of affinities, of creating spheres of vibrations, in order to offer a new look at the works of Yves Saint Laurent.