In my closet hangs a vintage coat, white wool with a grid of thin black stripes and scattered squares of primary colors. By no means a couture garment, it is unmistakably influenced by the paintings of Piet Mondrian and, as I learned from Nancy J. Troy and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis’s Mondrian’s Dress, has a place, however small, in the phenomenon that took the fashion world by storm in 1965.
A brilliantly conceived study, Mondrian’s Dress explores the little dress at the center of a web of ideas that continues to expand. The book’s rich essays cover fashion history and journalism, global commercialism, art history and collecting, Pop Art, and “strategies of musealization.” A wealth of photographs and an impressive depth of research give this book a definitive and scholarly air without being ponderous and off-putting. At times, it is just a blast.
Inspired by the mature work of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 Mondrian dress—not in fact one dress but a handful of outstanding models—offered simple, classic elegance. It was not the wasp-waisted Dior New Look nor was it a frothy confection of silk and tulle. Typically a sleeveless sheath, cocktail-length, with black stripes on white-wool jersey and rectangles of primary colors, the Mondrian dress was instantly recognizable, avant-garde yet tasteful. In addition, the garment’s construction was of such high quality that the dress held its shape without appearing stiff, and it even minimized bodily contours. As the authors make clear, the very aesthetics of the dress—its construction, its planar simplicity, its self-contained nature—and the way it hung on the body suggested abstraction. Was it a dress or a work of art? Although one can go pretty far down the theory rabbit hole when it comes to Mondrian, it is enough to say that the unities found in his classic abstract compositions were replicated in Saint Laurent’s dress. And though Saint Laurent was not the first designer to bring fashion into conversation with high art, he was the first to do so in a way that was neither hokey nor blatantly commercial (see Warhol’s Brillo Box dress or Campbell’s Soup’s “souper dress”). In the words of the Saint Laurent biographer Laurence Benaïm: “The Mondrian dress would become the first haute-couture dress that was shown, exhibited, and cited as a consumer item.”
The idea of a dress in “dialogue with art” is not the authors’ conceit but rather the animating impulse behind the mind that put the house of Saint Laurent into the rarefied arena of fine art. That mind was Saint Laurent’s lover and business partner, Pierre Bergé, whose devotion and business acumen took the couture house into the vastly lucrative world of licensed products. (Before he met Saint Laurent, Bergé had already demonstrated his ability to shape artistic careers by masterminding the meteoric success of the French Expressionist Bernard Buffet.) As Bergé said in 2009, “I always wanted to turn Yves into an icon, right from the start.”
The authors do not aim to portray Saint Laurent (who died in 2008) as an artist on par with Mondrian. Still, Saint Laurent’s position in the art world is secure—in large part because Bergé worked tirelessly to ensure the designer’s legacy with museum exhibitions, including a splashy retrospective at the Met in 1983, ample coverage of the Saint Laurent–Bergé art collection (which includes three Mondrians), and the establishment of the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent, a museum and archival collection dedicated to the study and preservation of the couple’s work. With this kind of effort, Saint Laurent might be forgiven this bit of false modesty: “Now that I am in museums, perhaps I am a real artist,” he said in 1990.
The book has some wonderful moments. A two-page spread offers a rare peek at the 1965–66 “production board” with sketches of the variants of the Mondrian dresses alongside matching coats and fabric swatches. In another photo from the 1966 Detroit Auto Show, six models in Mondrian-inspired getups outpace both the futuristic Oldsmobile Toronado and the conventionally attired model in a black cocktail dress with gloves past her elbows. Celebrities caught wearing the Mondrian ensured its popularity: in one photo, we see Princess Grace of Monaco in the “relatively demure model no. 77”; in another, Jane Fonda looks uncommonly dowdy in a tweed suit next to the Italian actress Elsa Martinelli, also sporting the no. 77 accessorized with a huge brooch, ponytail, and cigarette. Another highlight is the book’s extensive discussion of the problem of copying and mass-market knockoffs. But the point is made most strongly with a 1965 Miami Herald Sunday feature. The full-sheet story in color follows how in ten weeks the dress went from designer exclusive for $1,000 in July to an American copy for $25 in August, a rayon and acetate number for $9 available in September, and—oh, ignominy!—a $3.99 version available in October at the five-and-dime chain Kress.
The chapter on ready-to-wear and Pop Art recalls the shock value and transience of Pop Art, qualities not necessarily conducive to success in the couture world, even one so dedicated to youth culture as Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. Still, as the authors point out, it is instructive to consider Mondrian and Saint Laurent’s Pop Art dresses in the playful context of Elsa Schiaparelli’s surrealist creations, Andy Warhol’s performative fashion-objects, Tom Wesselmann’s irreverent collages, and the Benday-dot fantasies of Roy Lichtenstein.
At their peak, Saint Laurent and Bergé were making $15 million a year (in 1970s dollars), and they might have been satisfied to secure their reputation as art collectors—the 2009 auction of their splendid holdings could have furnished a single museum. But this book makes it clear that the designer grew to love the idea of being enshrined in museums as much as his partner did in finding ways to put him there. Today, Saint Laurent’s name graces the façades of museums in Paris and Marrakech, a city the designer knew from his childhood in Oran, Algeria. And in 2022, an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou displayed the Mondrian model no. 81 next to Mondrian’s Composition in Red, Blue, and White II from 1937, so we may surmise that the groundwork laid by Pierre Bergé, who died in 2017, successfully demonstrates “the continuing potency of Saint Laurent’s dialogue with art as a means of canonization at the highest levels of elite fashion and art.”
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Source: newcriterion.com
