The Flowers of Yves Saint Laurent

From September 20, 2024 through May 4, 2025, the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris presents The Flowers of Yves Saint Laurent. Designed by curators Olivier Saillard and Gaël Mamine, the exhibition follows an opening exhibition on view at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech from March 2, 2024 through January 5, 2025. For the first time, the two museums have joined forces to mount a joint exhibition devoted to a major theme in the designer’s work.

“Wheat brings good luck Lilies, my favorite flower”

A bronze Venus, symbol of my profession and of my passion for bronzes Proust’s In Search of Lost Time

Since the age of fifteen I have never stopped rereading this incomparable work.”

Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé lived their daily lives surrounded by flowers and gardens in their apartments, their secondary homes and at their fashion house. Passionate about flowers, the couturier found them to be an infinite source of inspiration.

Yves Saint Laurent shared this admiration for nature with many artists and writers, in particular with one of his favorite authors, Marcel Proust, as he revealed in the magazine L’Egoïste in 1987*. A Proustian universe appears in the designer’s interiors as well as during his runway shows. The writer would describe women as flowers, whereas the couturier would pay homage to them by covering them with blossoms.

Over thirty garments and drawings seen in the exhibition highlight this symbiosis between nature, literature and the work of Yves Saint Laurent.

As in a book, each chapter of the exhibition displays quotes from Proust alongside flowering silhouettes by Yves Saint Laurent, while accessories and drawings by the couturier are presented on pedestals. As if along a garden path, flowers are everywhere one turns, revealing the personality and tastes of the designer: from the lily of the valley so dear to Christian Dior to the YSL logo with its initialled lily-like monogram, from roses signifying love to the bougainvillea of Morocco, or to wheat, the bearer of luck and triumph.

Through iconic garments seen in the exhibition, the visitor discovers the expertise that Yves Saint Laurent drew upon to bring his floral creations to life: from his earliest applied embroidery on the spring-summer dress of 1962 to his inventive prints from the spring-summer 2001 collection, an unforgettable reference to the paintings of Pierre Bonnard.

We see the larger-than-life silk gazar flowers worn on the runway by Laetitia Casta as a summer bride in 1999, an enduring image from the oeuvre of Yves Saint Laurent.

This spontaneous dialogue between the arts and different eras continues as we come face to face with the work of the American artist Sam Falls, whose works are seen throughout the exhibition. Traveling the world, he gathers plant samples and preserves the memory of floral landscapes by directly printing their pigments on canvas. The patterns and colors of his reconstructed take on nature blend harmoniously with those seen on the haute couture pieces. In the clothing of Yves Saint Laurent, as in the paintings of Sam Falls, flowers transcend time and remain eternally in bloom.