All about Yves: Saint Laurent and the Warhol effect

Abstract

Abstract The illustrious careers of Yves Saint Laurent and Andy Warhol intersect in revealing ways: Warhol started out as a graphic artist working in fashion advertising, celebrated for his illustrations and department store windows, but longed to be recognized as a famous artist; Saint Laurent, who so admired literature, painting and opera, felt his talent was squandered on the business of fashion and coveted the prestige of the fine arts. But while the YSL brand invested heavily in the artistic persona of the couturier as rooted in a form of decadent nostalgia, Warhol’s persona simply represented the present like no other personality of the period, casting his critical gaze over the workings of mass-media culture, actively shaping his own legend as the recorder of surfaces. With the rise in the 1960s of Saint Laurent’s popular ready-to-wear line and subsequent global licencing agreements, Pop art overlapped with consumer fashion, sharing similar preoccupations such as serial repetition and mass diffusion. This article investigates the impact of Warhol’s wide-ranging enquiry into media representation on the career, image and persona of one of France’s most illustrious and glamorous designers of the later twentieth century. It does this by drawing on a number of contemporary film dramatizations and documentary portraits of Saint Laurent’s life including the recent biopics Yves Saint Laurent (Lespert, 2014) and Saint Laurent (Bonello, 2014), both of which read the subject through the lens of celebrity culture.