Paris Exhibition Shows How Yves Saint Laurent Said It With Flowers

PARIS – For Yves Saint Laurent, florals were not just for spring.

A new exhibition opening at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Paris on Friday shows that flowers were a mainstay of the late couturier’s collections, from his first outing after he took over as creative director of Christian Dior in 1958 to his last collections in 2021.

“The Flowers of Yves Saint Laurent” is the companion to the exhibition that bowed in March at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakesh, Morocco, marking the first time the two institutions have joined forces on a show.

“It’s a pretty magical theme to understand Yves Saint Laurent. Why? Because ultimately, to look at the flowers of Yves Saint Laurent is to understand his life,” said Elsa Janssen, director of the Paris museum.

The designer and his partner Pierre Bergé were always surrounded by flowers and gardens, whether in their apartments in Paris, their secondary homes in France and Morocco, or their fashion house. This passion for nature was also reflected in their collections of furniture and art, including paintings by Édouard Vuillard and Henri Matisse.

To mark the opening of the exhibition, the Paris museum’s entrance was decorated with a colorful arrangement incorporating sunflowers and chrysanthemums by florist Baptiste Pitou, who was in charge of the ornate backdrops for Saint Laurent’s runway shows.

Gaël Mamine, who curated the exhibition with fashion historian Olivier Saillard, noted that while the Marrakesh show used black backdrops to highlight the bold colors of the designs, the Paris leg was informed by the intimacy of the couture atelier and Saint Laurent’s enduring love for the writing of Marcel Proust.

“Marrakech was a garden for Saint Laurent where he could recharge his batteries and work, and here in the fashion house that is open to the public today, we wanted to represent the relationship between the designer and his models, assistants and all the people who helped put together the collections,” Mamine said.

Set designer Claudia Huidobro imagined a blank page backdrop dotted with book-shaped displays printed with quotes from Proust, in which the author describes women using floral metaphors.

Selecting which dresses to display was a delicate exercise, with prints and embroideries of lilies, poppies, roses and bougainvillea competing for attention.

“It’s about telling the story in such a way that you see a beautiful garden, and not a horrible busy mess, so it’s really a question of balance,” Huidobro said.

It was an opportunity to pull rarely-seen designs from the archives, including a black sleeveless column dress with applied 3-D embroidery from Saint Laurent’s first collection under his own name in 1962, noted Serena Bucalo-Mussely, curator and head of collections at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum.

He frequently paid tribute to Dior by featuring his mentor’s lucky flower, the lily of the valley, in his designs. In a neat bookend, the blossom appears on a 1958 straw boater and an embroidered silk organdy blouse from 2001, showcased side by side.  

Dotted among the richly patterned dresses are stylized paper flowers by Joséphine Pinton. The exhibition also features two works by U.S. artist Sam Falls, while the catalog is enriched with photographs by Sarah Braeck juxtaposing the clothes with patterned backdrops.

While the exhibit showcases a rich variety of fabrics and techniques, from printed silks from the now-defunct Swiss textile manufacturer Abraham to embroideries by specialists Lesage and Hurel, it also includes sketches and accessories, including a galvanized copper headpiece by Claude Lalanne, produced for a 1981 collection.

And then there is arguably Saint Laurent’s most memorable floral confection, the rose-covered bikini with a diaphanous pink train worn by Laetitia Casta for the finale of his spring 1999 haute couture show. “The Flowers of Yves Saint Laurent” runs until May 4, 2025.