In the autumn of 1965, only five years after opening his eponymous house, Yves Saint Laurent sent his models down the runway in sleeveless, shift mini-dresses, bearing bold designs inspired by artists such as Van Gogh, Piet Mondrian and Serge Poliakoff. It caused a sensation in both the fashion and art worlds. And today, the Mondrian dress in particular is an iconic YSL design that claims a pride of place in fashion history.
It was perhaps in reference – conscious or unconscious – to this heritage, that Saint Laurent’s latest creative director, Hedi Slimane, chose to continue the fashion/art dialogue with three, long-sleeve shift dresses that had more than a touch of Californian chic about them.
Though he may be the head honcho at the Paris-based maison, Slimane still counts Los Angeles as his home, as does Baldessari who operates out of a Venice Beach studio. Slimane, who has been a fan of his work ever since he was a student at the École du Louvres in Paris, first collaborated with the octogenarian artist when he shot him for a photography show entitled ‘California Song’, held at LA’s MOCA in 2011. But this season he obtained Baldessari’s permission to interpret some of his oeuvres for Saint Laurent’s Autumn/Winter 2014-15 prêt-à-porter collection.
Baldessari, who works as much with text and photography as paint, is best known for using found images and for adding provocative blocks of colour onto faces and forms in a graphic, collage-like aesthetic. Three such works have been re-appropriated by Slimane with extraordinary, shimmering, handworked embroidery that beautifully captures the texture of the originals. You’ll find a red arm on a blue, headless torso – barely recognisable as such – against gold, blue heads with silver bodies, embracing against black, all in meticulously ordered sequins. There’s a red-faced figure with a yellow nose, connected but disconnected from a blue arm holding a handgun, all rendered in expert beadwork. This is one of the designs that can be more readily sourced from the Baldessari’s work ‘Noses & Ears, Etc: Couple and Man with Gun’ (2000).
With Baldessari’s signature style now in sartorial form, ten of each dress have been handmade as limited and numbered editions with one of each set aside for John Baldessari’s personal archive. Further bringing Baldessari’s works to the fore of this collection was Slimane’s decision to juxtapose a further 80 black and white works from the artist’s archive as a means to illustrate the small art edition catalogue that serves as Saint Laurent’s fashion show invitation.
While the boundary between art and fashion is already quite blurred - some of the world’s major art institutions regularly include fashion designers in their exhibition schedules - Slimane stands in the thick of this dynamic, provocatively pushing the cultural blur forward into the Now and into the future.
