Yves Saint Laurent's amazing creative journey

The monumental exhibition, which will be held in parallel in as many as six Parisian museums, offers a new look at Yves Saint Laurent's unique creative journey, allowing us to build bridges between the ingenious couturier and different art universes.

After spectacularly entering the world of Parisian fashion at the head of Dior in 1957 as a 21-year-old, Yves Saint Laurent presented his first collection under his name on January 29, 1962, laying the foundations for a fascinating career that redefined femininity codes.

The celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the famous fashion house of the Pierre Bergé Foundation - Yves Saint Laurent will be marked by the exhibition 'Yves Saint Laurent in Museums', a multidisciplinary retrospective that goes beyond the traditional framework in every respect. 

The exhibition will not see the light of day within the walls of one museum, but in as many as six prestigious cultural institutions: from January 29 to May 15 exclusive exhibitions of the Louvre, Picasso Museum, Orsay Museum, Pompidou Center, Museum of Modern Art and, of course, The Yves Saint Laurent Museum will tell the story of Yves Saint Laurent in a new way, through a direct dialogue of his mythical creations with world art. 

Illustrating the continuity and deep unity of connections that the couturier weaves with art, each museum will present a program on a specific theme of his creative universe. For example, in the Louvre it will be gold, a color Yves adored. Accordingly, the Apollo Gallery, home to some of the most precious historical collections, including jewels of the French crown, will illustrate the designer’s fascination with light, gold, and decorative art. 

As befits a temple of modern art, the Pompidou Center will bring us closer to the work of Yves Saint Laurent as an artist deeply rooted in his time, a witness and participant in the evolution of 20th-century art. The designer's contemporaneity will be illustrated, among other things, by exhibits and the famous Mondrian dress from 1965, with which we will find a reference work by a Dutch painter. 

A lover of color, Yves Saint Laurent never stopped juggling between color and rhythm, light and material, which will brilliantly convey to the audience at the Museum of Modern Art the dialogue of his works with the works of many painters, especially Pierre Bonnard and Raoul Dufy. The Picasso Museum will, of course, explore the influences of the great Spanish painter, whose special place in Saint Laurent's work is attested to by a number of references and analogies.  

But all these paths that intertwine and correspond with each other cannot be understood without a deep re-examination of the role that Marcel Proust played in Couturier's imagination. The French novelist preoccupied with nostalgia was Saint Laurent's obsession: framed Proust's quotations hung on the walls of the maestro's studio, and each room of his castle in the countryside bore the name of one of the characters from the 'In Search of Lost Time' cycle. 

A pillar of this great gathering, the Yves Saint Laurent Museum will exhibit the creations and archive of the Yves Saint Laurent House which, after visiting other exhibitions, we will experience in a whole new light.