Legendary designer Yves Saint Laurent lives on at Denver Art Museum

With more than 68,000 works from across the world, the Denver Art Museum has made the Mile High City a showcase leader of fine art. And now the only U.S. city to showcase the current buzz: the Yves Saint Laurent Retrospective exhibit featuring the French fashion designer’s timeless and influential collection on display through July 8 in the art museum’s Hamilton Building.

Saint Laurent – one of the biggest names in fashion history – was a celebrity in his lifetime and the first living designer to be exhibited independently in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983.

Saint Laurent died in 2008 at age 71, and the Denver exhibit commemorates his avant-garde collections he pioneered through his passion for ready-to-wear designer styles in women’s fashion.

Museum Director Christoph Heinrich worked hard to bring the exhibit to Denver and said the city is well worthy of an exhibit of this magnitude.

“We have the most beautiful women here, because the weather is so good, and we built the Hamilton building to show world-class shows,” Heinrich said at a March 22 media preview.

“Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective” showcases the designer’s 40 years of glam and fashion with 200 haute couture garments, plus an impeccable display of Saint Laurent’s sketches, documentaries and fabric swatches that illustrate the monumental contribution to fashion.
The pantsuit was one of Saint Laurent’s most revolutionary influences in the world of fashion. The play on feminine and masculine styles steadily gained popularity during the ’50s and ’60s, when skirts and dresses had been considered the only appropriate clothing for women to wear in the workplace or social functions.

Saint Laurent’s work was a gender revolution, and the fantastic finale of the Denver Art Museum’s YSL exhibit is 40 different styles of the female tuxedo.

“Yves Saint Laurent thought there is nothing more elegant than being dressed totally in black,” chief curator and fashion historian Florence Muller said.

Muller said that because Saint Laurent had such a classic eye, his pieces have a modern yet timeless feel.

Also revolutionary was Saint Laurent’s range of design that crossed from simplistic and minimalist to scandalous and daring. During the ’70s, when fashion was influenced by the hippie movement, Saint Laurent sought to bring sophistication back into women’s wardrobes and the world of high fashion.

Saint Laurent was one of the first to insist upon using black models in his runway shows.

“They were his inspiration,” Muller said. “He found so much beauty in them.”

The co-founder and manager of the exhibit is Saint Laurent’s companion Pierre Bergé, who remained a lifelong friend and business partner to Laurent.

Though Bergé sees art and fashion as separate spheres, he said the two are inseparable.

“Fashion needs an artist to exist, to be,” Bergé said.

And Yves Saint Laurent may be one of the greatest artists of all.

On the Web at http://denverartmuseum.org