No designer in the past forty years has been more consistently celebrated or influential than Yves Saint Laurent. Since his house’s first couture collection burst onto the fashion scene in January 1962, his genius—the eye for the beautiful and sumptuous, the taste for the theatrical and extravagant—has dazzled, amazed, even startled the world.
Profound cultural influences have persistently informed Saint Laurent’s world. His fashion collections have cleverly evoked great art: silk jackets beaded and sequined with Impressionist paintings, Trapeze dresses suggestive of Mondrian. He has used exquisitely grayed, neutralized pinks inspired by the Cubist colorings of Juan Gris—and flaming, shocking, blinding pinks inspired by the brilliant hues of his native North Africa. Indeed, his inspirations are far—reaching, resulting in couture employing Russian peasant chintzes, Moroccan embroideries, flamenco spots on evening clothes. But whether in his fashions or in his interiors, Saint Laurent’s vaulting imagination is always in harmony with his flaw-less sense of style and elegance and his unending quest for perfection.
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All these wonderful objects are his companions in the never-ending cycle of drawing and designing that is his passion and his life. “Nobody can imagine my capacity for solitude,” he once observed. “For somebody like me, who can’t stop accumulating objects, the absence of them is an oddity.”
Among the pieces there are notes of Proustian nostalgia: a set of silver-mounted desk accessories that formerly graced the desk of Czar Nicholas II; a seventeenth-century silver-gilt ewer and basin that once belonged to an archduke of Austria.
There are also touches of the highly personal: framed photos, notes and sketches of friends or people he admires; stacks of books and magazines; vases always filled with his favorite lilies; souvenirs and reminders of friends of earlier days, such as Rudolf Nureyev, Coco Chanel and Jean Cocteau.
He also rightfully suspects that “elegance is in the heart, in the very being.” It is clearly at the heart of both his designs and his life.
