Cocktail Dress and Cape

Yves Saint-Laurent is acclaimed to be the greatest designer of the twentieth century. After the sudden death of Christian Dior in 1957, he took over the famous Dior brand when he was still only twenty-one years old. He began his own fashion house in 1961, his art-based ‘Mondrian Look’ or ‘Pop Art’ designs taking the world by storm. He invented the unisexconcept of women’s clothes that contained elements of men’s clothing design. He produced the ‘Rive Gauche’ line of readymade clothes to cater for the mass-consumption society and his influence on twentieth century fashion cannot be overstated.
Yves Saint-Laurent’s rich imagination was called on to be used in a variety of fields. Born in Algeria, North Africa, he became enamored of the African sunlight and bright colors in his youth, later purchasing a villa in the Moroccan town of Marrakech and visiting the area regularly. He used the inspiration he received from life in this town in his clothes. In his spring/summer collection of 1967 he used large numbers of beads to create an ‘African look’ that was met with enthusiastic interest. The work here was shown in the season following his ‘African look’. It uses large numbers of pink and yellow beads, lavish use of ostrich feathers adding a touch of elegance to a rich evening dress while simultaneously utilizing elements of the hippy fashions that were emerging at that time.