Calais Lace Museum to Host Yves Saint Laurent Exhibition – WWD

PARIS — The Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Paris has teamed with the Museum for Lace and Trend in Calais, France, for a two-part exhibition specializing in the way in which that Yves Saint Laurent used nude results in his designs.

The primary leg of “Yves Saint Laurent: Transparencies” will run in Calais from June 24 to Nov. 12, and will likely be adopted by a present in Paris in February 2024. Co-produced by the 2 establishments, the Calais exhibit will characteristic 60 outfits spanning greater than 4 many years along with equipment, drawings, pictures and movies.

“The exhibition reveals how Yves Saint Laurent was in a position to rethink the language of seduction within the context of sexual revolution,” the Museum for Lace and Trend mentioned in an announcement.

Whereas bare clothes rule the pink carpet in 2023, the lingerie-inspired appears have been thought of scandalous when Saint Laurent launched them in 1966, 4 years after founding his label. “Nothing is extra stunning than a unadorned physique,” the late couturier as soon as declared.

Throughout a preview on the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Paris, Elsa Janssen, its director, and Anne-Claire Laronde, chief curator and director of the Museums of Calais, offered a glimpse of a number of the key designs that will likely be showcased, together with the 1968 Nude Gown, a very clear floor-length chiffon gown with a hoop of ostrich feathers across the hips.  

Modeled by the designer’s muse Danielle Luquet de Saint Germain with nothing beneath however a jeweled belt, the gown shocked onlookers on the time. It nonetheless induced a sensation many years later, when French mannequin and actress Laetitia Casta wore it to France’s Césars movie ceremony in 2010, albeit with a lace bodysuit.

Domitille Eblé, supervisor of the graphic arts assortment on the Yves Saint Laurent Museum Paris and co-curator of the exhibition, confirmed off a featherlight sheer pussy-bow shirt comprised of a dry material referred to as cigaline, which Saint Laurent paired with a bermuda model of his signature tuxedo in 1968.

The garments will likely be displayed alongside his unique sketches and assortment boards, in addition to pictures such because the Jeanloup Sieff {photograph} of Marina Schiano in 1970 sporting a gown with a plunging lace cutout within the again. The outfit will open the exhibition in Calais and likewise options on the poster.

The set design by Studio Tovar will benefit from the hovering volumes of the museum’s up to date wing, with a monochrome design that includes translucent panels printed with key quotes and pictures, mentioned Shazia Boucher, heritage curator and deputy director of the Museums of Calais, who’s co-curating the present.

{The catalogue} features a textual content by trend historian Emilie Hammen explaining how Saint Laurent contributed to ladies’s emancipation via his clothes. His designs performed with sheer materials like lace, tulle, chiffon and organdy, in addition to cutouts that selectively revealed the chest, again, buttocks and abdomen.  

“Her textual content additionally offered the inspiration for the captions inside the exhibition with the intention to present historic context for this man’s view of ladies’s our bodies and nudity — what it says in regards to the period and about his position in it,” Laronde mentioned.

The Museum for Lace and Trend opened in 2009 and attracts between 50,000 and 70,000 guests a 12 months, a lot of whom are unfamiliar with trend, in line with Laronde. “We’re at all times cautious to additionally deal with audiences who’ve by no means seen a trend exhibition,” she mentioned.

Whereas rooted within the native lace business courting again to the nineteenth century, the museum has produced exhibitions with establishments worldwide together with the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum for a present on the Spanish couturier and the Groninger Museum within the Netherlands for an Iris Van Herpen retrospective.