Mondrian dress

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Mondrian dresses

The Mondrian dress ( English Mondrian cocktail dress ) is the generic term for a collection of cocktail dresses that the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent designed and shown for the first time in the autumn collection 1965. It got its name because its design is based on the art of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian .

draft

Prototype: Typical arrangement of surfaces according to Piet Mondrian

The dresses in the typical Mondrian pattern were the first models that Saint Laurent, who was interested in art, designed on this subject. The dress was created during a fashion phase that was characterized by mini dresses with clear construction lines that emphasized the contours of the body.

Azzedine Alaïa had tailored the sample . It was part of a collection of ten dresses and is in the style of a robe sac ( sack dress ). It is made of wool - jersey , using single - colored fabrics in white, black and the primary colors red, blue and yellow and strictly geometrically combined according to the design . The seams - and thus the pattern construction - run along the colored surfaces and thus do not allow any cuts along the body shapes, from which the design deliberately distracts. The knee-length dresses are sleeveless; they were made by Abraham and Bianchini Ferier.

meaning

One of the six variants by Yves Saint Laurent (1965; wool, trimmed with silk ribbons)

With the Mondrian dress, Yves Saint Laurent implemented a design inspired by art in the style of neo-plasticism into a fashion creation for the first time. With this new language of color and form, it was a creation that ignored the classic stipulations of haute couture and, on the other hand, had a lasting impact on society. The regularity of the shapes in the clothes should lead to looking for a deviation from the rule and thereby arouse interest. The eye would look for abnormalities within the symmetrical shapes. This would be even clearer on the three-dimensional model of the clothes than on the original two-dimensional works of art by Mondrian.

Yves Saint Laurent's Mondrian dresses did not emphasize the female body. On the contrary, this served rather as a “framework” for the dresses in the minimalist style. The fabric should be effective in its surface structure and the colored areas were clearly delimited. The cut of the clothes meant that long-legged, slender models with broad, square shoulders and thus a more prepubescent appearance most closely corresponded to the ideal of beauty .

Pierre Bergé is quoted as saying:

“They were case dresses made of jersey, on which paint was applied and fixed with millimeter precision. Not a seam, no cut, no dart for the chest - nothing that helps the dress fit well. The dress hugs the hips, the chest and look at the women in the dresses, it fits perfectly. Three holes for the arms and the head, that's all ... and ... then I understood that it works, because the problem in fashion, these are the ideas that you have to be careful of, there are always some too many. The idea alone is completely unimportant, it must have a correspondence, it must correspond to the time, the era, the women and their bodies. "

The success of the Mondrian line is seen as one of the reasons why Saint Laurent opened the first YSL Rive Gauche boutiques with prêt-à-porter models from 1966, making his models affordable even for sections of the population who could not afford haute couture .

reception

As early as September 1965, the dress was featured on the cover of the fashion magazine Elle . This was followed by cover photos on Harper's Bazaar and Vogue Paris with pictures of David Bailey . The dress was often copied. In 1978, Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé acquired a Mondrian work of art in blue, red, yellow and black. In 1979, Saint Laurent tried to refine and improve the idea of ​​the Mondrian look again in the fashion season of that time . In 2002, the clothes were shown again on the catwalk among others at the last Saint Laurent fashion show, where he showed the highlights of his work.

Today Mondrian dresses are exhibited in many museums around the world. In the private museum run by the Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent about the life and work of the fashion designer, a dress is on display next to a picture of Mondrian. Other dresses can be found in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam , the Metropolitan Museum of Art , the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Kyoto Costume Institute .

In 2011, a 1966 Mondrian dress sold for £ 30,000 at Christie's .

literature

  • Mondrians dress 1965 in: The Design Museum: Fifty Dresses that Changed the World , Hachette UK, 2009 ( limited preview in Google Book Search)

Individual evidence

  1. Manager Magazin : Oh, Yves! , April 7, 2004
  2. ^ The Independent : Fashion: Alaia: A life: His clothes helped shape the Eighties and some of the most glamorous bodies in the world. But he is turning his back on fashion's obsession with the new and collections every season. Azzedine Alaia talks about hoiis past in Tunisia and his present in Paris , October 16, 1994
  3. Akiko Fukai: Fashion: The Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute: a History from the 18th to the 20th Century , Taschen, 2002, p. 571 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
  4. collections.vam.ac.uk
  5. Mondrias dress 1965 in: The Design Museum: Fifty Dresses that Changed the World , Hachette UK, 2009, o. P.
  6. ^ Yves Saint Laurent Retrospective ( Memento from December 20, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  7. Daniel Devoucoux: Mode in Film: on the cultural anthropology of two media , transcript Verlag, 2007, p. 142/143 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
  8. Jutta Beder: "Between Blümchen and Picasso": Textile design of the fifties in West Germany , LIT Verlag Münster, 2002, p. 120/121 ( limited preview in Google book search)
  9. Mondrias dress 1965 in: The Design Museum: Fifty Dresses that Changed the World , Hachette UK, 2009, o. P.
  10. ^ Piet Mondrian designed by YSL
  11. ^ Obituary for YSL on diepresse.com ( Memento from December 25, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  12. www.stiletto.fr: LIGNES DE FORCE , December 17, 2010
  13. Erin McKean: The Hundred Dresses: The Most Iconic Styles of Our Time , A&C Black, 2013, p. 134 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
  14. www.lesmads.de: Hedi Slimane publishes backstage pictures of the “YSL Farewell Show” from 2002 , June 6th 2011
  15. Manager Magazin : Oh, Yves! , April 7, 2004
  16. ^ Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
  17. www.netmuseum.org
  18. collections.vam.ac.uk
  19. Digital Archives | The Kyoto Costume Institute. In: www.kci.or.jp. Retrieved November 12, 2016 .
  20. Page at Christie's (accessed December 14, 2014)