In honor of Piet Mondrian's birthday yesterday (albeit in 1872) I'm sharing these pretties from Yves Saint Laurent.
(image from neimanmarcus.com)
In 1965 Yves Saint Laurent created a jersey shift dress inspired by the work of Mondrian. The Met summarizes this fashion landmark nicely: "As the sack dress evolved in the 1960s into the modified form of the shift, Saint Laurent realized that the planarity of the dress was an ideal field for color blocks. Knowing the flat planes of the 1960s canvases achieved by contemporary artists in the lineage of Mondrian, Saint Laurent made the historical case for the artistic sensibility of his time. Yet he also demonstrated a feat of dressmaking, setting in each block of jersey, piecing in order to create the semblance of the Mondrian order and to accommodate the body imperceptibly by hiding all the shaping in the grid of seams." Here is the dress and what I'm guessing was the particular painting that inspired it, completed in 1930.
(images from metmuseum.org and actlab.utexas.edu)
What I love about the palettes is that they took an original fashion concept from Yves Saint Laurent and made them wearable. Obviously red, yellow and blue are not the most versatile colors to wear on your face, so the palettes provide a nice variation on the YSL-Mondrian theme. These are definitely on my wishlist, but at $54 a pop I don't think I'll be getting them any time soon since the spring collections have depleted Museum funds. Someday I'll get them!
