until Sunday May 04 2025

Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris
T : +33 (0)1 44 31 64 00
5 Avenue Marceau
75116 Paris
France

Contact
moc.siraplsyeesum@scilbup
https://museeyslparis.com

Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé lived their daily lives surrounded by flowers and gardens in their apartments, their secondary homes, and their fashion house. Passionate about flowers, the couturier found them to be an infinite source of inspiration.

Yves Saint Laurent shared this admiration for nature with many artists and writers, in particular with one of his favorite authors, Marcel Proust, as he revealed in the magazine L'Egoïste in 1987. A Proustian universe appears in the designer’s interiors as well as during his runway shows. The writer would describe women as flowers, whereas the couturier would pay homage to them by covering them with blossoms.

Over thirty garments and drawings seen in the exhibition highlight this symbiosis between nature, literature, and the work of Yves Saint Laurent.

As in a book, each chapter of the exhibition displays quotes from Proust alongside flowering silhouettes by Yves Saint Laurent, while accessories and drawings by the couturier are presented on pedestals. As if along a garden path, flowers are everywhere one turns, revealing the personality and tastes of the designer: from the lily of the valley so dear to Christian Dior to the YSL logo with its initialed lily-like monogram, from roses signifying love to the bougainvillea of Morocco, or to wheat, the bearer of luck and triumph.

Through iconic garments seen in the exhibition, the visitor discovers the expertise that Yves Saint Laurent drew upon to bring his floral creations to life: from his earliest applied embroidery on the spring-summer dress of 1962 to his inventive prints from the spring-summer 2001 collection, an unforgettable reference to the paintings of Pierre Bonnard.