Forget Paris and New York, Yves Saint Laurent is coming to Teesdale. The Bowes Museum, a French-style chateau in picturesque County Durham, is staging the UK’s first exhibition devoted to the late fashion designer.
Yves Saint Laurent: Style is Eternal, which runs from Saturday 11 July to 25 October, features more than 50 designs, including his androgynous tuxedos and Mondrian-inspired shift dresses.
The Bowes Museum is a “natural destination” for the show “given its exceptional work with fashion and textiles,” says Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s partner and the president of the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, which has co-organised the exhibition. “It is the perfect setting for us—a museum built as a French Chateau, in the age of the Second Empire.” Organised around themes such as “Art”, “Transparency” and “Masculin/Féminin”, the show also sheds light on Saint Laurent’s creative process by including sketches, atelier specification sheets and Esparterie hat blocks.
Fashion shows—of the museum, not the catwalk kind— are a rapidly growing trend. In London this week, museum visitors can get their fashion fill at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), which is presenting a well-heeled display of shoes (until 31 January), the British Museum, which is focusing on Pacific barkcloth clothing (until 6 December), or the National Portrait Gallery, which is showing portraits of one of fashion’s greatest muses, Audrey Hepburn (until 31 August).
After a record-breaking stint at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty is drawing to a crowded close at the V&A with round-the-clock opening times planned for its final weekend at the beginning of August. The UK’s exhibition programming has never looked so stylish.
