Sheer, the diaphanous creations, at the Yves Saint Laurent museum Paris

The Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris presents "Sheer, the diaphanous creations of Yves Saint Laurent", once again a must-see for all fashion enthusiasts!

At Hotel FABRIC, as a hotel located in a former textile factory, we love fashion and we can only advise you to visit this exhibition and dive into the world of this essential artist of French and international fashion!

For this exhibition, the Parisian museum has invited curator Anne Dressen as artistic advisor to focus on transparency as Yves Saint Laurent's preferred artistic expression. The exhibition's scenography is designed by architect Pauline Marchetti.

Transparency, when worn, creates a dichotomy with the very concept of clothing: it is theoretically incompatible with the garment's function of covering, concealing, or protecting the body. Drawn to this contradiction and the suggestive power of transparency, Yves Saint Laurent began using materials such as chiffon and lace as early as the 1960s. Like a recurring motif, transparency appears throughout his forty years of creation, sometimes associated with embroideries or opaque fabrics. Boldly, he reconciled antagonisms, allowing women to proudly and insolently affirm their bodies.

Drawing on the power of materials, this new exhibition aims to explore fashion and Yves Saint Laurent's vision in all their complexity: by closely examining their relationship with the body and a completely reinvented version of nudity.

Among the forty textile pieces on display are iconic creations from Yves Saint Laurent's history of unveiling the female body, such as the first bare-breasted blouse, dubbed the "See-Through Blouse" by the American press, from the spring-summer 1968 collection, or the Nude Dress, a black chiffon dress adorned with ostrich feathers from the following collection. Rarer pieces testify to the couturier's virtuosity in presenting a powerful and liberated female figure. To complement this, essential elements of the creative process are presented: sketches, tracing paper patterns, photographs, as well as accessories (hats, jewelry, shoes, etc.), and a series of drawings inspired by Goya's paintings.

Resonating with Yves Saint Laurent's creations, works by modern and contemporary artists punctuate the exhibition. Anne Bourse's hypnotic drawings echo the layering of materials and colors; Man Ray's experiments with fashion photography recall Yves Saint Laurent's lace research; the fluidity of chiffon and its movement is found in Loïe Fuller's serpentine dance captured by the Lumière brothers; finally, a work from Picabia's Transparences series reveals the visible and invisible parts of the model, the elusive part of her persona.

The journey is organized around 5 sections.

The first section provides an introduction to materials, exploring several pieces made of organza, Cigaline®, lace, tulle, or chiffon. These variations allow the couturier to play with different transparency effects.

The second section shows how the female body gradually reveals itself through openwork transparencies. Using lace and tulle, certain parts of the body are abstracted, as if they were illuminated by spotlights.

Upstairs, the exhibition continues by addressing the theme of the fluidity of movement generated by supple fabrics, such as chiffon, which animate, cover, and reveal the body, accompanying it like a double, a dreamy mist. In the so-called "flou" sewing workshops, as opposed to those of the "tailors," transparency gives the body total freedom.

Further on, transparency reveals the construction lines of a garment, especially in organdy, allowing the body to be structured, as evidenced by the tracing paper patterns presented for the first time.

At the end of the journey, several bridal silhouettes with their tulle veils, so often reinvented by Yves Saint Laurent, conclude the exhibition, as they do in every fashion show. Yves Saint Laurent's brides are never transparent: they assert their freedom in unfathomable freedom.

This exhibition makes visible the artistic and sensitive poetry of Yves Saint Laurent; his creative rebellion against the shifting prohibitions of society remains more inspiring than ever today.

Until 25/08/2024. Open every day from 11 am to 6 pm, except Monday (last admission at 5:15 pm). Late night opening on Thursdays until 9 pm (last admission at 8:15 pm).

Photo ©Graphe Tween - Unsplash