Yves Saint Laurent

Four Fashion designs. Unsigned, no date, but circa 1976. Colored marker on paper. Each sheet 10 1/2 x 8 inches. The four designs are pasted along their top edges to a black paper-covered board.

These four designs are from Yves Saint Laurent's 1976 fall-winter collection, titled "Opéra – Ballets Russes," where he first began to embrace bright colors and sumptuous fabrics, reintroducing opulence into his fashion designs after a decade dominated by muted blacks and whites. It was also his first collection to have its fashion show at the Hotel Inter-Continental. The collection was, as the name suggests, partly inspired by Sergei Diaghilev, his costume designer Leon Bakst, and Tsarist Russia. However, the designs are also evocative of nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings and certain pieces of Moroccan menswear, such as the jabador, burnous, saroual and tarboosh. Saint Laurent reworked those traditional garments into women's clothing that was liberating in terms of its silhouette, yet inherently feminine - a collection that exists between genders and cultures. It is often cited as one of the most lauded and important in Saint Laurent's long and storied career. The New York Times heralded the show as "revolutionary," and wrote in its gushing review, published on July 28, 1976, that "Yves Saint Laurent presented a fall couture collection today that will change the course of fashion around the world."

Provenance: Gift of Yves Saint Laurent to Fernando Sanchez (1935-2006), thence by descent to the current owner.

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