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[Patricia Mears] People always ask us. How do you come up with an idea for an exhibition and my co
curator, Emma and I, thought the 1970s was completely timely. In fact
interestingly, many of the magazines that we've been looking at over the past few
months have been featuring this whole revival of the 1970s. I think what
separates this exhibition from virtually every other one we have done in the main
gallery is that we rely completely on our permanent collection. The Museum at
FIT has the strongest and most comprehensive holdings of Halston in the
world and we also have a very very strong Yves Saint Laurent collection. For all
that has been done on these two designers, the book, the exhibitions, even
films and documentaries, nobody's ever juxtaposed them. Halston
was a great designer slash dressmaker. Most people don't know this. He was a
genius at construction. What I found most interesting is that he started off as a
milliner or hat maker. Somebody who made rigid constructive elements, much the way
Charles James did. But unlike James who made gowns that were so rigid, they could
almost stand up on their own, Halston believed in softness and
fluidity and really believed in creating garments for the modern woman. He also
was someone who eliminated all superfluous trimmings and ornamentation
and really focused on clothes that would highlight that natural body.
[Emma McClendon] When I first
started to look at the work of Yves Saint Laurent, I definitely held the same
mindset that a lot of people do. Mainly that he was a couturier
in the classic sense. Someone who created true fantastical and dreamy designs with
a high sense of drama in them. But when I started to examine not only the garments
themselves in our collection but also the holdings of our Special Collections
library, what I realized is that during the 1970s particularly the early years,
Rive Gauche. his ready-to-wear line was actually extremely important for his
development. Not only as a designer but also for the development of his business
and his celebrity status.
[Patricia Mears] We saw both designers going through tremendous
transformation and change in the late 1960s. Great social upheaval, political
upheaval, was also showing its wear on the fashion industry. Emma and I
discovered as we started to look at the objects how remarkably similar the two
of them were in the early part of the decade particularly. We were struck
sometimes that when we paired these similar objects next to one another, you
couldn't tell who had designed what and so the way in which we really wanted to
show the differentiation between the two was to pick a handful of themes that
were very important in the 1970s. One of them was the rise of menswear and here
we see in most cases the more literal translation of menswear by Saint Laurent
and it really marked the departure by Halston. Halston decided to make almost a
unisex uniform. He wore himself a black turtleneck often made out of cashmere
very simple slim cut trousers and either a cardigan or a jacket. He made those
same elements for a woman's wardrobe. The other thing that he was very good at was
taking a simple object from a man's wardrobe. For example, a man's shirt and
turning it into one of the most successful garments ever made in
American fashion industry. His famous shirtwaist dress and what made it really
successful was the fact he made it with an important synthetic called ultra
suede. When he first discovered ultra suede, it turns out he was having dinner
in Paris and was seated next to the great Japanese designer Issey Miyake.
Miyake was telling him about ultra suede and Halston misunderstood its physical
attributes. He thought Miyake was saying it was waterproof rather than machine
washable. So Halston's first experiment was a trench coat. Well clearly an
absorbent fabric was the wrong thing to choose but this happy accident in fact
turned out to be one of his most successful pieces.
[Emma McClendon] Without a doubt the
most famous example of Yves Saint Laurent looking to menswear in his women's
clothing was his "le smoking" or tuxedo for a woman. He first debuted in
1966 but kept on reintroducing different versions of it throughout the rest of
his career. He followed up the "le smoking" with a gangster style pin
striped double-breasted suit. He then showed a very successful now iconic
Safari look and then throughout the 1970s these grew into a whole range of
essentials for the modern woman's wardrobe.
[Patricia Mears] Exoticism was very important
during the 1970s. If you look at the work of Halston and you see that he created a
more narrow range of clothes and was far less literal in his translation of
non-western clothes than Saint Laurent. Halston used the bias cut cutting on an
angle and draping on an angle unlike any other designer before him. By draping on
the bias, he steps away from the more traditional process of cutting
indigenous clothing on a straight grain and by doing this I think pushes
American fashion towards couture in a way nobody had before. Halston used
almost always solid patterned fabrics. I think this area of this exoticism
section we have actually is one of the few places where you'll see him use
patterned fabrics.
[Emma McClendon] Whereas Halston was looking to non-western and exoticism
to influence his construction, Yves Saint Laurent was much more looking at the exotic as a
source of decorative elements for his clothing. An extremely important
influence on Saint Laurent was the work of Paul Poiret in the early 20th century. The
same use of color and drama and fantasy ran throughout Paul Poiret work and
really set an example for Saint Laurent. Yves Saint Lauren most famous collections are
probably undoubtedly his Russian or Ballet Russe collection of 1976, closely
followed by his Chinese or opium collection the following year. Opium
first came on the market in 1977 in France and it caused an absolute
sensation. It started out selling fragrances like Chanel number five in
less than three months and when it came over to the US it was launched with a
blowout party on board about the Peking and then ended with a colossal
after-party at Studio 54. Though opium did spark some
controversies in New York, within a year it was selling five million dollars.
Interestingly though YSL is remembered so much for these
exotic creations or non-western fashions, he actually never traveled to these
places. Though he had a house in Marrakesh and was himself from Algeria,
he never traveled to China before he designed these collections. He never
traveled to Russia. He was essentially an armchair explorer.
[Patricia Mears] One of the things that
we found that was celebrated throughout that time period was their own personal
design styles mainly their homes and Yves Saint Laurent had not only homes that were
very much in the historical tradition of French furniture and design, he also did
have orientalism sort of stream throughout his life as well. Halston
conversely had one of the most famous homes in New York City, a townhouse
designed by Paul Rudolph. The New York Times ran a major
article about the house saying that it did evoke the very essence of what
Halston's work was about modern, streamlined, and beautifully detailed.
Another section that's very important is the influence of historical referencing
to these designers. Again Halston doesn't take the references quite so literally
and he's not so expansive in his use of historical references. You don't see
buttons and zippers on his clothes. He often had hidden hooks and eyes. He
didn't believe in having any ostentatious and decorative element even
foreclosures. So his idea was to hide that as much as possible and one source
of inspiration for that was not only Madeleine Vionnet but Claire McCardell, the
pioneering american designer.
[Emma McClendon] Yves Saint Laurent, when looking at historical
periods, really took inspiration from two periods in particular. The interwar years
of the 1920s, 30s, as well as the 1940s, then on the other hand he looked at the
late 19th century period of the Belle époque. They showed his indebtedness to
two important couturiers. On the one hand, the looks that he derived from the interwar
years show his indebtedness to Chanel. The modernity, the androgyny of these
adaptations likewise the volume and the femininity and the drama of his Belle
Epoque period designs really show how closely he was still looking to the
designs of Christian Dior and his work even in the 1970s.
[Patricia Mears] We felt it was
important to put both designers within historical context. Not only to trace the
development of their particular careers, but to show the business development and
cultural developments that had a lot of influence. Not only on them, but the
fashion industry at large. While Saint Laurent had a champion in Pierre
Bergé, who was not only his business partner but if you will his champion and
legacy maker, Halston did not. Emma ended the timeline
in 1984 when Halston lost the right to his own name and so it was sort of a I
guess a lesson to be learned for younger designers on how to move forward as your
business expands. While Saint Laurent had a more expansive longer career, Halston is
really thought of it as penultimate if you will 1970s designer. But in both
cases that decade was so important in expanding the vocabulary of what fashion
could be and I don't think two people did it better,
uncrystallized the idea of 1970s better than Yves Saint Laurent and Halston.
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