Yves Saint Laurent and Photography: Exploring Artifice and Fame

The topic of “Yves Saint Laurent and Photography” is simply what it says. It runs on the International Center of Photography by way of Sept. 28.

Saint Laurent (1936-2008) was one of many nice couturiers. That snakily intertwined YSL logo — have initials ever been so alluring? — is much more well-known than it’s distinctive, and it’s lots distinctive.

Born in Algeria to French mother and father, Saint Laurent was designing paper dolls when he was a young person. The present contains one. It’s among the many greater than 300 objects on show. They embody scores of images, but additionally advertisements, classic copies of Vogue and Elle and Paris-Match and Life, a Saint Laurent child photograph (cute child), and certainly one of his passports.

As these private objects counsel, it’s very a lot a from-the-inside view. The ICP organized the present with the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris and the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent (Bergé was Saint Laurent’s one-time lover and longtime enterprise associate). So whereas the view provided of YSL is absorbing and in depth, very in depth, it isn’t, allow us to say, crucial. The French time period “billet doux” means love letter. Another French time period is “roman fleuve,” which means a multivolume novel. “Yves Saint Laurent and Photography” has the angle of the one and heft of the opposite.

At 21, Saint Laurent took over the home of Dior. Imagine somebody that younger being named music director of the Berlin Philharmonic or elevated to the College of Cardinals. Four years later, he opened his personal home. The ‘60s made him globally well-known. The ‘70s enlarged that fame and made him very wealthy. The present largely, and understandably, scants the ultimate couple of a long time of his profession (he retired n 2002).

The present might simply as properly have been known as “Yves Saint Laurent and Photographers” — photographers each of Saint Laurent and his fashions. A partial listing of these with work on show contains — pause for consumption of breath and widening of eyes — Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Cecil Beaton, Guy Bourdin, Robert Doisneau, Hiro, Horst, William Klein, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton, Norman Parkinson, Irving Penn, Marc Riboud, Bert Stern, Juergen Teller, Deborah Turbeville, Andy Warhol. Some of them are among the many best of style photographers. A number of are among the many best of photographers, interval.

There’s a Newton photo of Warhol wearing a Saint Laurent leather jacket. That’s a fashion three-fer. Naty Abascal, wearing a Saint Laurent pantsuit in a 1967 Frank Horvat photograph, strikes such an elegant pose it’s more like dance than fashion. Jean-Claude Sauer’s picture of Saint Laurent cocktail dresses from 1966 is the ‘60s at their most fizzily fun.

A Bettina Rheims photograph from the couturier’s 1982 spring collection shows a pile of broad-brimmed hats on a sofa. It’s such a marvelous mass of millinery you’d think the British royal family women’s auxiliary were in attendance. Marvelous in a different way is Henri Dauman’s 1958 photograph of Saint Laurent standing on New York’s Seventh Avenue. In the background a Thom McAn store is visible. Might Saint Laurent have been tempted to pick up a pair of Hush Puppies?

In a video, several associates speak of how much the camera responded to Saint Laurent’s features. Well, colleagues of the deceased are never on oath. Part of the fascination of the many (many) photographs of him is how the camera didn’t really respond to him — the way, say, it did to Karl Lagerfeld or even Bill Blass. Even when Saint Laurent is smiling, which is rare, there’s this blank, slightly pasty quality to his face. Never really seeming at ease, he generally wears an expression poised between perturbed and puzzled. He’s a Sphinx not sure of the answer to his own riddle.

Saint Laurent figures four times in “Costume Art,” the companion exhibition to final spring’s Met Gala. That annual event — its official name is the Costume Institute Benefit — may seem like its own thing. Yes, it’s a massively publicized fund-raiser for the institute. Yes, it’s an orgy of seeing and being seen, of guests dressing up and getting to attend the ultimate senior prom. But after all the champagne flutes have fluted and all the guests limo’d home, the exhibition remains. “Costume Art” runs through Jan. 10.

An intriguing idea inspires “Costume Art” (the echo of “costume jewelry” is surely unintended): to juxtapose fashion from the Met’s collection with all sorts of other art from the Met’s collection. So a Saint Laurent ensemble inspired by van Gogh’s “Irises” hangs next to the painting. Or a dress from the 1880s with a pronounced bustle is displayed next to a study Seurat did for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”

There are nearly 400 items in the show, which as one has come to expect of the Costume Institute are very capably, even excitingly, presented. As a combination, theatricality and utility are tough to beat.

Not all of the artists represented are of the caliber of van Gogh and Seurat, but many are, or close to it: Henry Moore, Klee, Dürer, Andrew Wyeth, Delacroix, de Kooning, Munch, Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Anselm Kiefer, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus. And that’s just for starters.

As for fashion designers, a representative sampling would include Jean Paul Gaultier, Pierre Cardin, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Tory Burch, Vivienne Westwood (lots), Alexander McQueen (even more), Christian Louboutin, Thierry Mugler, Rei Kawabuko, Issey Miyake. That, too, is just for starters.

The designs go heavy on the transgression, but are by no means limited to that. A 1947 Charles James muslin study for an evening gown has a curving grace that’s deeply pleasing. A photograph can’t do justice to its elegant dimensionality. Its fine art counterpart is a Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux terra-cotta model of the sculptor’s fiancée.

Most of the juxtapositions are nowhere near as direct — or, if you prefer, as reductive — as that one or those with the Seurat and van Gogh. “Costume Art” is much more conceptually and curatorially driven — much more. The show is divided into sections, all of them corporeally derived, and some of them quite unexpected in a Costume Institute context, such as “Bodily Being in Its Diversity,” “Corpulent Body,” and “Anatomical Body.” Two of the more perplexing are “Vital Body” (“an animated topography,” a wall text states, “wherein the heart functions simultaneously as a corporal engine and semiotic nexus”) and “Mortal Body.” “Ultimately,” that wall text says, “fashion serves as the definitive memento mori, acting as both a distraction from inevitable biological decline and as a constant reminder of our shared destiny.”

Suffice it to say that “Costume Art,” itself very much a semiotic nexus if not a definitive memento mori, is not your grandmother’s fashion exhibition. Especially if your grandmother was Diana Vreeland.

YVES SAINT LAURENT AND PHOTOGRAPHY

At International Center of Photography, 84 Ludlow St., New York, by way of Sept. 28. 212-857-0000, www.icp.org

COSTUME ART

At Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., New York, by way of Jan. 10. 212-535-7700, www.metmuseum.org

Mark Feeney could be reached at [email protected].