Photography’s Reminiscence of Fashion – ASAP/Evaluation

“Yves Saint Laurent and Photography”
June 11, 2026 – Sep 28, 2026
International Center of Photography (ICP)

How greatest to current the dialogue between style and pictures? Each medium is dependent upon the opposite—for materials, for inspiration, for documentation. An exhibition that opened this summer time on the International Center of Photography (ICP) in collaboration with Musée Yves Saint Laurent explores that mutual imbrication by means of the case examine of Yves Saint Laurent, some of the photographed couturiers of all time. Photography preserves, interprets, and finally offers afterlives to the style designer’s evolving profession. 

The exhibition unfolds in two elements: it begins with the presentation of matted and framed photos of Yves Saint Laurent and his creations after which leads us to an area the place round 200 journal pages, contact sheets, marketing campaign catalogs, press clippings, and archival objects come collectively to recount the historical past of his style label. Adopting the acquainted language of the white dice, the primary room invitations the viewers to come across images as autonomous artworks. By distinction, the second room, with ephemera in vitrines and pictures unfold throughout the wall area, asks us to contemplate the documentary high quality of images. This dialectic between autonomous art work and supporting doc runs all through the reveals and, certainly, all through the historical past of those comparatively younger mediums. 

In the primary room, portraits of Yves Saint Laurent exceed the standard conception of portraiture: lots of them appear much less involved with Saint Laurent as a sitter, and extra with him as an object inclined to the artistic manipulation of pictures. In Irving Penn’s 1957 portrait shot for Vogue Paris, Saint Laurent poses towards a easy backdrop on the photographer’s studio. Using a wide-angle lens and taking part in meticulously with proportions and lightweight, Saint Laurent’s left eye recedes into the shadow within the seemingly easy picture, and his proper eye turns into the irreducible focus. Placing Saint Laurent’s head on the middle of the picture, along with his shoulders abstracted, his fingers prolonged past the body, and a mushy eye that refuses to look away, Penn constructs an austere and haunting neutrality. 

If Irving Penn interpreted the person, Helmut Newton translated the garments. In his iconic 1975 portrayal of Vibeke Knudsen in Saint Laurent’s tuxedo, Newton units a cinematic stage, skillfully heightening the gender rigidity of Saint Laurent’s revolutionary creation. In the picture, Knudsen’s determine seems slender and elongated, but the visible language refuses to assert her as totally female. Composed and relaxed, cigarette in hand, with a mushy gaze directed onto the road, Knudsen’s posture initiatives a quiet sense of confidence. Her left hand attracts our consideration to the pocket: a garment element that’s historically privileged in menswear. In one of many defining photos of each Helmut Newton’s and Yves Saint Laurent’s careers, style and pictures change into inseparable of their collaborative play with gender.

In an accompanying picture, Newton locations one other feminine determine behind Knudsen. With her head tilted barely downward, her physique turned in the direction of Knudsen, and her hand gently resting on Knudsen’s proper arm, a way of belief and intimacy emerges between the 2 figures. In nude, the brand new determine seems totally weak—but her vulnerability appears shielded by Knudsen within the tuxedo. Neat gender stereotypes don’t apply on this scene of belief, assist, security, energy, and partnership. And that is the legacy of pictures for Yves Saint Laurent: once we keep in mind his subversive gender performs right this moment, we’re much less probably to think about the tuxedo in isolation and extra more likely to keep in mind the complete scene through which the tuxedo is immortalized. In this fashion, pictures turns into our reminiscence of style.

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As we strategy the second a part of the exhibition, the ambiance shifts. Photographs now escape mats and frames, as a substitute making it onto journal pages, press clippings, marketing campaign catalogs, Polaroids, contact sheets, and all the things else. Against the darkish inexperienced wall, organized within the model of a visible montage, the images on this room interact in an intimate dialog with one another, assuming a various vary of roles in relation to style. Although contact sheets, as an example, seem small, serial, and provisional, typically depicting the identical topic in related poses, additionally they, to Saint Laurent’s eye, doc refined however important variations. From the persistent marking on these contact sheets, we witness Yves Saint Laurent’s artistic course of: the cautious choice by means of which his creations assume their photographic id. Here, pictures turns into a instrument that aids Saint Laurent’s style follow. He is ready to discover the exact moments the place his style speaks, solely by means of a dialog with pictures.

Nowhere is that this dialog between style and pictures extra obvious than on the pages of magazines. In the September 1965 situation of Harper’s Bazaar UK, Saint Laurent’s iconic Mondrian gown, photographed by Richard Avedon, seems with the textual content “Dress of tomorrow.” In the photograph, Jean Shrimpton stands towards a cloud-filled, otherworldly sky. Shot from a low vantage level, with Shrimpton’s gaze up and away from the digital camera, her determine seems to be statuesque. The monumentality of the composition—along with the daring stripes of the Mondrian gown, the minimalist head gown, and the otherworldly nature of the setting—initiatives the imaginative and prescient of modernity and utopia, of “tomorrow.” Still, on the finish of the caption, the textual content doesn’t neglect to incorporate a website the place the gown may be discovered—and acquired, right this moment. “At Bergdorf Goodman”: as utopian, maybe intangible, as this {photograph} makes it really feel, style is, the truth is, inside attain.  

Perhaps this rigidity between utopia and consumerism is a double of the dialectic between pictures as inventive collaborator of style and pictures as silent document of style. But the exhibition “Yves Saint Laurent and Photography” finally suggests pictures can change into the medium by means of which style takes on its that means, reminiscence, and cultural life. The historical past of style just isn’t solely written in materials, but in addition in photos. Fashion and pictures certainly want one another—very similar to how tomorrow may want right this moment, as static because it might sound.

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  Rong Wang

  Rong Wang is an MFA candidate in nonfiction writing at Columbia University. She was the earlier director of ROSEGALLERY in Santa Monica. Trained in style design at Parsons School of Design, she writes about pictures, style, and visible tradition.