Exhibition Review
The Flowers of Yves Saint Laurent at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris
     During a brief trip to Paris last month, lacking time to see all, I made a single stop in the city's rich array of fashion museums: the Musée Yves Saint Laurent, where I visited its new exhibition, The Flowers of Yves Saint Laurent. While Paris boasts many excellent fashion museums—such as the nearby Palais Galliera, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre, the Dior Museum, and the Azzedine Alaïa Museum in the Marais—this gem remains my favorite, consistently presenting exquisite exhibitions in Saint Laurent's former couture house, complete with his meticulously preserved design studio.
     What draws me to this museum is its modesty, a word that might seem unusual given the fame and talent of Yves Saint Laurent. The museum's intimate scale and precise adherence to Saint Laurent's superb design and craftsmanship create this sense of restraint. The curators' decision to let the clothes speak for themselves, with minimalist display installations, allows the silhouettes and details of each garment to take center stage. In his studio, on his desk, are sketches, swatches, and trims, which change with each exhibit, along with a few dressed mannequins, giving the impression that M. Saint Laurent could step in at any moment to continue designing the collection on display.
      The Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris presents The Flowers of Yves Saint Laurent from September 20, 2024, through May 4, 2025. The exhibition, designed by curators Olivier Saillard and Gaël Mamine, coincides with an exhibition on view at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech, the first time the two museums have joined forces to mount a joint exhibition representing a significant theme in Saint Laurent's work. The exhibition spans Saint Laurent's youthful career at Dior, through his first collections for his own house, until his spring-summer 2001 collection, one of his last before his retirement in January 2002. The exhibition contains over thirty garments plus drawings and photographs highlighting the harmony between nature, literature, and the creations of Saint Laurent.
     Why flowers? The Flowers of Yves Saint Laurent successfully argues for their importance in designer’s life and work. Saint Laurent shared an admiration for nature with many artists and writers, including Matisse, Bonnard, and his mentor, Christian Dior. Of these masters, his favorite, the author Marcel Proust, was the most influential. Proust compared women to flowers, but Saint Laurent dressed them in their colors, shapes, and delicate motifs. Excerpts from his notebooks and quotes from Proust are displayed on the walls, revealing his fascination with flowers. "Wheat brings good luck, Lilies, my favorite flower, a bronze Venus, a symbol of my profession, and my passion for Proust's "In Search of Lost Time." 1 [1]
       Saint Laurent's love for flowers was a personal preference and an artistic inspiration that played a vital role in the lifestyle he built with his partner Pierre Bergé. Flowers and gardens were constantly present in their homes and workplaces, including their Majorelle Garden in Morocco.
     The curators have divided the show into five themes: The Bal Des Têtes, A Couture Garden, Homage To Christian Dior, Flowers And Art, and Signature. When entering the museum, the visitor moves to the left circular gallery, reserved for design sketches and photos; this installation uses the space to show floral-themed design sketches, and the "bible" croquis drawings with swatches that Saint Laurent would hand over to the pattern room to start the process of turning a sketch into a garment.
    The second gallery is devoted to the famous Bal Des Têtes, a society masquerade ball held in 1957 in which costumes were required only from the neck up. The evening's organizer commissioned a twenty-one-year-old Yves Mathieu-Saint-Laurent, working as an assistant to Christian Dior, to create several studies of headdresses and décors. Displayed are his gouaches on colored paper, employing a vocabulary of flowers, feathers, and leaves.
     Directly across the landing are the main galleries housed on multiple floors, where the central part of the exhibition is displayed. As always, at this museum, the installations are creative yet restrained. The white walls and platforms are clean and spare, with black legible text announcing the central thesis, the themes, and object descriptions. The only added décor is subtle white metal flower sculptures, which keep the focus on the color and pattern of the clothing, accessories, and drawings—installed as if along a garden path, flowers are everywhere one turns, revealing the personality and tastes of the designer: from lily of the valley, Christian Dior's favorite, to roses signifying love, the bougainvillea of Morocco, or wheat, the bearer of luck and triumph.
        The entrance to A Couture Garden in the downstairs galleries is a series of flat window cases displaying accessories and flat garments, interspersed with a few single outfits or small groupings on platforms. The first gallery uses literature as a sub-theme. As in a book, each "chapter" displays quotes from Proust alongside flowering silhouettes by Saint Laurent, and on facing walls, accessories, and drawings by the couturier are presented. “Then it was, stepping onto the fine gravel of the avenue, that Mme. Swann would make her entrance, as late, languid, and luxuriant as the most beautiful flower, which never opened until noon…”2[2]
     Homage to Christian Dior focuses on the lily of the valley, Dior's lucky flower. Since 1958, when Saint Laurent designed his first Dior collection, he has paid homage by adorning the trim of his hats with sprigs of lily of the valley, and even for his final collection in 2001, he embellished an organdy blouse with this pure flower.
     Flowers And Art highlights Saint Laurent's lifelong passions. His floral print palette often echoed the bougainvillea's brilliant colors in his Majorelle Garden in Morocco. Pierre Bonnard's landscapes inspired a collection of organdy dresses with an abstract floral print. One season, inspired by Matisse's collages, Saint Laurent used patchwork inserts and embroidery echoing Matisse's peasant blouse paintings.
      Past exhibitions at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent have exhibited contemporary artworks relating to themes in Saint Laurent's designs, which mirrors a recent trend in museum shows to put fashion in dialogue with art.  The 2023 exhibition Yves Saint Laurent – Shapes & Forms successfully used work by artist Claudia Wieser, whose graphic sculptural shapes and colors echoed the clothing designs featured. In the 2022 show called The Gold of Yves Saint Laurent, gold wall sculptures by Johan Creten were installed on the gallery walls, reinforcing the sculptural qualities of Saint Laurent’s gold jewelry and buttons. 
     The Flowers of Yves Saint Laurent features paintings by Sam Falls, who uses flowers and forest leaves to create marks made over time on canvas. Although they are beautiful works, and one can understand the Proustian reference to time passed, Falls' pale brownish green palette does not share the visual rapport with the brilliant colors of Saint Laurent's floral designs featured in most of the exhibition, although they make a nice pairing with the shows finale.
     The last installation of the exhibition is entitled Signature, and it refers to the couture tradition of ending the fashion show with a wedding dress. In 1999, Saint Laurent ended his couture show with this "barely there" dress worn by Laetitia Casta, who appears as a nymph adorned with
silk gazar roses, and remains among the designer's most iconic runway moments.
     Once again, Elsa Janssen, the director of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, the curators Olivier Saillard and Gaël Mamine, and the exhibition designer Claudia Huidobro have presented an exhibition that effectively reinforces and expands the viewer's knowledge of Yves Saint Laurent's talent and immense body of work, while focusing on a significant theme in his oeuvre.
[1] 1. Yves Saint Laurent quote, Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, The Flowers of Yves Saint Laurent, 2024
[2] 2. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, The Flowers of Yves Saint Laurent, 2024