Yves Saint-Laurent in his office near the Champs-Elysées in 1961. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images
London, Friday night
If a faun could go through a needle's eye it would come out looking rather like Yves Saint-Laurent. He is uncommonly fine-drawn and, with a designer's eye to effect, enhances this spindleshanks look by the tightness of his drawn clothes. With strangers he is also uncommonly withdrawn, breaking out now and then into a grin half-secretive, half-placatory.
It would not be surprising if this boy of 23 felt the burden of embodying the house of Dior - an enterprise that combines the art of high fashion in Paris with the business of marketing accessories in Britain and America.
Saint-Laurent is directly responsible only for the first to the tune of drawing about a thousand sketches a year from which he sifts the Dior collection. If this is a burden it is unshared. It all comes out of his head, he says; outside influences like last year's orientalism affect only the finishing touches.
He claims in fact the standing of an inward-looking artist. "I do not decide that skirts shall be short or long. The shape of the dress itself often dictates the length." He deals in subtleties. Mention a pre-1914 designer like Poiret, of hobble-skirt fame, and he smiles: "Fashion was a little naive in those days, both the clothes and the way people talked about them. Clothes are more austere now and so are critics. Poiret made clothes for individual customers but I wouldn't like to make a dress just for its own sake" (" La robe pour la robe ").
What Saint-Laurent aims at is the total effect: a dress show, he acknowledges, comes to be more and more like a theatrical first night. No wonder after this that Saint-Laurent seems unperturbed at the word "theatrical," used of his work by unfriendly critics. No wonder either that what had brought him here is his first commission as a theatrical designer - the clothes for the big ballet "Cyrano de Bergerac"
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