In July of 1984, as a tender 20-year-old correspondent for Australian Harper’s Bazaar, I was summoned to attend Yves Saint Laurent’s haute couture show. The great designer, it should be said, was rather befuddled by this time: While it wasn’t so much his age (he was only 47—younger, after all, than I am now), he simply seemed lost in his own world. However, he was still razor-sharp when it came to his work—and in any case Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s onetime romantic partner and the company’s defender of the gate, snarled at anyone who got in his way, and made sure the show ran like clockwork.
The fall show had come at the end of the week dedicated to the Parisian haute couture houses—Karl Lagerfeld, then newly arrived at Chanel, was making a splash; there were also Emanuel Ungaro, Madame Grès, Hubert de Givenchy, and on it went. Yves’s show, however, was eclipsing, his clothes perfection—of cut and drape and color and form—as they drifted very slowly through the grand 1880s ballroom of the Hotel Intercontinental.
Some 40 years later, I was asked by the esteemed garden designer Madison Cox, who, after the passing of both Yves, in 2008, and Pierre, in 2017, inherited their mantel—Madison is president of the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent, which oversees the extraordinary Jacques Majorelle house, Villa Oasis, and its surrounding gardens in Marrakech—if I might show my own collection of Yves’s work at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum there. (After Yves died, Pierre and Madison were longtime partners and eventually married.) Stunningly designed by Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty of Studio KO, the museum, along with the foundation, has changed the look and feel of Marrakech since its opening in 2017. This would be the first time that someone other than Yves would have their collection shown at the museum and, naturally, I was both thrilled and intimidated by the concept.
After Yves and Pierre discovered Marrakech in 1966, Yves’s whole world changed: The color and energy of that magical place informed his palette, and his clothes became richer as a result. For me, too, Morocco has always been an otherworldly place, with the people I meet there—English, French, and, above all, Moroccan—mixing things up in a glorious way to create something new.
While the collection that Yves put together for the museum, largely in the final stages of his career, is exquisite—and includes almost all the spectacular end-of-show pieces from those later collections—mine is more understated and concerns his fashioning of his customer. And while Yves is justifiably renowned for summoning wonders, his lower-key pieces are also remarkable, and his relevance and influence on the world of the fashionably dressed are undeniable.
My own collection, assembled over 50 years, begins with his earliest designs for Christian Dior. (While Dior had been dazzled by the young Yves and acknowledged that he would one day, in the very distant future, inherit his crown, Dior’s sudden death at the age of 52 in 1957 handed the baton to Saint Laurent, then barely 21—and the rest, as they say, is history.) I was compelled at first to buy whatever I could afford, deftly finding things that dealers had overlooked, but as the collection grew, so did my ambitions. (I was, of course, acquiring the work of other designers too—Charles Frederick Worth, Poiret, Chanel, Mainbocher, Madame Grès, Balmain, Dior, Galliano, McQueen, and on and on, along with the exceptional work of lesser-known couturiers; I now have some 4,000 pieces.)
I found myself drawn to the clothes worn by the exceptionally stylish women who had ordered Saint Laurent: the so-called Shiny Set ladies such as Nan Kempner, Lynn Wyatt, Lily Safra, and Gabriele Henkel; publishing doyenne Eunice Johnson; stars like Carol Channing; the art dealer Lady Jane Abdy; Lady Agota Sekers, the wife of a Hungarian textile baron; and the stylish Françoise Picoli, who worked for Saint Laurent designing shoes. Generally, these women—striking-looking themselves—wanted clothes that would accentuate their good looks rather than eclipse them. Abdy chose a fall 1959 Saint Laurent for Dior short evening dress of black faille astonishingly trimmed with knitted black wool; Channing, an audacious pinstripe mannish suit from Yves’s 1967 couture collection (which I tracked down at a celebrity auction house in LA, far from the vintage-couture hunters). Kempner chose Yves’s most chic and quietly impactful pieces, such as the 1987 black crepe dinner dress with a fichu collar of red satin I found at the annual Posh charity sale in Manhattan. Picoli, meanwhile, selected a garnet velvet evening dress and shell-brocaded vest à la Schiaparelli from the fall 1978 runway as a rare treat.
Other wonderful things I came by, sadly, without knowing who had worn them: A miraculous smorgasbord of dresses and suits I found at Christie’s included a 1966 skirt of glorious Brossin de Méré patchwork, a Chanel-inspired 1981 white embroidered evening dress and black spangled-lace jacket, and a black embroidered dress from the Russian Moroccan collection of 1976. On and on and on they went. (The Yves Saint Laurent defenders of the flame refused to give me the client’s name, which they had, of course, gleaned—all couture clothes are numbered—as her family did not want it revealed, but they can rest assured: Her astonishing taste will be abundantly present in the show.)
When it was time to put my thoughts into practice, I leaned on the considerable help of the brilliant Patrick Kinmonth and his associate Raphaé Memon, who created some mesmerizing mise-en-scènes on their computer screens. The show begins with Christian Dior, followed by the Yves Saint Laurent couture years, and, finally, the Rive Gauche—though I’ve placed the first Yves dress that I ever bought at the start of the show, before one walks into the Dior salon, to set the scene: From his 1969 fall collection, it is a masterwork of textile designer Madame Brossin—a patchwork of flame reds worked into a cross-laced hippie dress. I got it at a charity shop for nothing, having spotted it in the window on my way to art school in London. Alas, I was late arriving to my class that Monday morning…but I now owned this sensational dress!
“Yves Saint Laurent: The Hamish Bowles Collection” runs through next January 4 at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech.
