On View: ‘Yves Saint Laurent, Line and Expression’ at OCMA

“Yves Saint Laurent: Line and Expression,” on at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) through October 27, is a presentation of both fashion genius and artistic talent. The show has traveled to Costa Mesa, California from the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech, where it was inspired by the profusion of sketches on loose sheets of paper and spiral notebooks upon which French designer Yves Saint Laurent would commence each of his collections. His drawings are a vast and spectacular resource: they reference eighty-one haute couture collections over four decades, from 1962 to 2002. Here, his strong shapely outlines span the sharply rectangular shoulders of a wool smoking coat (F/W 1984) to a triangle-bodices silk crepe floor-length evening dress (S/S 1991).

These drawings were both preparatory documents and imaginative forays, artistic materials and pragmatic architectural plans. Many haute couturiers at the end of the nineteenth century forewent drawings and crafted silhouettes by draping or cutting directly on a mannequin—Madeleine Vionnet, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Madame Grès were amongst such figures. Drawing was, at best, a technical tool and not an articulation of creative vision. In this way, Yves Saint Laurent has a peerless legacy—he was a prodigy of Christian Dior, after all, who himself began as an illustrator—not only for the completist catalog of his archives but also for the way in which he left key clues into his way of thinking and his process.

We spoke with French exhibition curators Olivier Saillard and Gaël Mamine about the difference between fashion drawing and fashion illustration and the necessity of presenting the exhibition as a fresh fashion discovery even to aficionados.

Can you talk about your collaboration? Are your roles complementary, synchronized or something else?

Olivier: We share the same tastes, same understandings and same scenographic approach. We’re also partners in life. Our collaboration is about spontaneous exchange. Gaël was a conservator at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent, so I leaned on his knowledge, but I’ve always thought that Yves Saint Laurent was a great draftsman and a great colorist. There are couturiers like Christian Lacroix and Karl Lagerfeld who were great draftsmen too; others were not. I work at the Fondation Alaïa, and Azzedine was a great sculptor but was not a draftsman. I think for newer generations, Yves Saint Laurent’s drawings are relatively unknown. Twenty years ago, when there wasn’t Instagram, if you wanted to study something, you had to immerse yourself in the archives. He invented his own way of drawing, which is somewhere between Christian Dior’s style from the ‘50s and ‘70s. His drawings were androgynous, a kind of Jean Cocteau calligraphy he adopted for the fashion world. His clothes are like drawings incarnate: his black smoking is like the gesture of a black pencil, or the flick of a paintbrush. There are bright long sheath dresses that are like traces of color. The exhibition is conceived as a show of art graphique as opposed to a ‘fashion exhibition.’

The Yves Saint Laurent archive is incredibly vast: there are over 60,000 drawings cataloged. How do you sift through such volume?

Olivier: I always say that an exhibition starts with the first piece that is selected. The first one brings about all the other ones. It’s mysterious. We stop at one drawing, which brings about others; it’s about creating balance. I started with black-and-white drawings, but I had in mind the drawings created for the Russian collection, which were fantastically colorful—it’s one of Yves Saint Laurent’s most beautiful. It introduces a folkloric aspect to his work in a very interesting way.

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Gaël: The number of drawings is greater than the number of clothes made. There are also recurrent things, like the link to Pop Art and Picasso, with the themes and ideas that are illustrated. The notebooks were amazing, especially from ’62—they’re really complete ensembles that are very energetic and present the essence of his first collection.

Is there a one-to-one ratio between the drawings and the silhouettes here?

Gaël: All the silhouettes correspond to the drawings. There are about forty items of clothing and around sixty drawings. What is great at OCMA—which is a contemporary art space—is it’s totally pared down and lets in lots of natural light. The clothes are at the heart of the exhibition, and the drawings are at the periphery. The drawings are like a frieze that embraces the clothes. Certain drawings explain how he worked and his legacy from Maison Christian Dior; Yves Saint Laurent had a very particular style: it’s like a signature. It’s a portrait of Yves Saint Laurent—not only through his fashion but also through his drawings.

How does the geo-cultural context change the way you show the work? The vision of couture is not the same in the U.S. as in France or in Morocco—how do you translate that vision through the curation? 

Olivier: Each time I do an exhibition, whether it’s in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world, in Asia or in Paris, I try to make a selection of work that is not universal—because there are things that are inscribed in a territory—but that are easy enough to defend from the point of view of the open spirit of the eye. That is to say, you can be well-versed in couture or not but still learn from a work. When I started in the ‘80s, I learned that you must never think you’re working for the people of your métier—you have to conceive of something for people who know nothing about the subject, regardless of venue.

Most couturiers have used fashion drawing as a technical reference, something matter-of-fact, if at all. What does a full-fledged fashion drawing add to the imagination of the brand?

Gaël: The drawing is not something innate in the history of haute couture. The earliest couturiers of the early 20th Century worked on clothing directly, and with the premier d’atelier or première d’atelier who worked with them—but drawings weren’t part of the creative process. It developed with the ultimate master, Monsieur Dior, who instilled something particular, which was taken up by Yves Saint Laurent—but he took it further because he had his own style.

Olivier: Fashion drawing is a discipline that is not properly classified like other disciplines: fashion is recognized as an art, but fashion drawing is a category that is a bit disdained. For example, I’ve never seen an exhibition about the fashion drawings of couturiers. There have been exhibitions about fashion illustration, but I’ve never seen anything about the history of fashion drawings. That’s an oversight. Yet when boys and girls become interested in fashion when they’re young, it’s through drawing. There’s this idealization through fashion drawing, there’s a caricature aspect: they’re visions of women that are so idealized that they’re archetypes. In Yves Saint Laurent’s drawings, they are idealized, but they’re full of movement—the clothes aren’t static, they breathe. The clothes resemble a real way of living, even if the woman doesn’t. It brings us into the mind of a couturier, through a practice that doesn’t reduce fashion to fabric; it adds something more.

Why do you think there is this oversight with fashion drawings?

Olivier: It’s not the same to draw clothing, invent it, as to reproduce it as a drawing for a magazine. I think there is a preponderant history of clothing, which is to say that clothing is a form of media separate from a drawing or a toile. But I think that’s something to correct. If you see pages from a notebook or annotations in the margins, it’s poetic—the fashion drawing is anecdotal, although it’s even more essential. Fashion drawings comment on clothing before and after its completion. I think more exhibitions should delve into the process of creation. Clothing is not just a final result. It is the final result when it’s on the shoulders of a man or a woman, but before that, it’s a step in a creative process, which is a whole, including the drawing and the cut fabric. It’s important to show fashion as an artistic practice and not to trap it on the “red carpet”—it requires more from museums.