Calais Lace Museum to host Yves Saint Laurent exhibition – WWD

Paris – The Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Paris has teamed up with the Musée des Las and Fashion in Calais, France to present a two-part exhibition focusing on the way Yves Saint Laurent used nudity in his designs.

The first leg of “Yves Saint Laurent: Transparencies” will be held in Calais from June 24 to November 12, and will be followed by an exhibition in Paris in February 2024. Created jointly by the two institutions, the Calais exhibition will show 60. Costumes spanning over four decades, in addition to equipment, drawings, photographs and videos.

“The exhibition shows how Yves Saint Laurent was able to rethink the language of seduction in the context of the sexual revolution,” the Museum of Lace and Fashion said in a statement.

In the year While nude dresses grace the red carpet in 2023, the underwear-inducing look was considered scandalous when Saint Laurent introduced them in 1966, four years after he founded the label. The late couturier once said, “There is nothing more beautiful than a naked body.”

During a preview at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Paris, Elsa Jansson, director and Anne-Claire Laronde, chief curator and director of the Calais museums, hinted at some of the key designs, including the one on display. In the year 1968 Nude dress, a completely transparent floor-length chiffon dress with an ostrich feather ring around the waist.

Styled by designer muse Daniele Lucet de Saint Germain with nothing but a jeweled belt, this dress shocked onlookers at the time. Decades later, French model and actress Laetitia Casta When she wore it to the 2010 French Césars film festival, though, she wore a lace bodice.

Domitil Ible Saint Laurent, graphic arts collection manager and exhibition curator at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum Paris, showed a feather-light PC-bow dress made from a dry fabric called Cigaline, paired with a Bermuda version. His signature tuxedo in 1968.

The clothes are shown along with the original designs and collection plates, as well as a photo of Marina Schiano wearing a cut-out dress in the background of Jean-Loup Sif in 1970. The dress will open the exhibition in Calais and will also appear on the poster.

The design by Studio Tovar takes advantage of the large size of the museum’s modern wing, with a monochrome design with decorative panels printed with key quotes and images, said Shazia Boucher, curator of heritage and deputy director of the Calais Museums. In cooperation with the scene.

The catalog includes an essay by fashion historian Emilie Hamann explaining how Saint Laurent contributed to women’s emancipation through his clothes. His designs played with fabrics such as lace, tulle, chiffon and organdy, as well as cuts that favored the bust, back, seat and stomach.

“Her text also provides the basis for the captions in the exhibition to provide historical context for this man’s views on women’s bodies and nudity – what he says about the era and his role in it,” Laronde said.

Las and Fashion Museum It opened in 2009 and attracts 50,000 to 70,000 visitors a year, many of whom are not fashion conscious, Laronde says. “We are always careful to reach out to audiences who have never seen a fashion exhibition,” she says.

While rooted in the local lace industry since the 19th century, the museum has organized exhibitions for Iris van Herpen’s background with institutions around the world, including the Cristobal Balenciaga Museum at the Netherlands Courier and Groninger Museum in the Netherlands.