haute provocateur

^ A celebration of the provocative beauty of woman, Saint Laurent style, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

For those of you who think nothing of fashion and style - especially you who dismiss them as useless, irrelevant or even annoyingly distracting from the more important issues today, especially today - I ask you to take a moment and step back and ponder this. Think of the last time you caught sight of a woman or man on the street, in a restaurant, on the train, at an event, who held your attention for more than a few seconds, and whose very atmosphere you fixated on. Everyone has had this fleeting moment with a stranger, even you.

You may not remember what they wore, who they were with, or even if it was day or evening when you saw them. But you do remember them, right? More piquantly you remember how you felt, how their presence affected you, even if you never met them. Perhaps they radiated power and confidence, or an enticing eroticism, or some oblique intellectual charisma, or even sheer cool factor. But just the same, they affected you, held your attention, admit it.

This experience you had felt is emphatically a vital, dynamic element in the coda of Yves Saint Laurent in how he creates for women. His understanding of what at once titillates and disquiets men about women isn't so much intellectual as it is intuitive. And that offers another clue into how the Saint Laurent style enchants, elusively - to analyze it is to kill it, to dissect it is to dilute it. Saint Laurent played with this enchantment sartorially, the idea of seduction through this cocktail of intelligence, knowingness, and sheer sensuality. The woman who dresses in Saint Laurent is very well aware that she can strike a man from the inside out, at once upsetting him with her intellect and massaging his vulnerabilities betwixt her fingers. And she also knows he wants that.

^ Photographer Helmut Newton's rather controversial yet iconic vision of Saint Laurent's "Le Smoking" is a powerful mix of provocation and evocation; today's "Le Smoking" as interpreted by the house of Saint Laurent's current designer Stefano Pilati is no less powerful (photographed by Greg Kadel).

A crisp khaki cotton mini dress from the late 60s is styled with details usually found only on safari hunting gear, yet the skirt is so short, hemmed at the thighs and showing off mile long legs. It's as if Saint Laurent suggested that woman can be both hunter and prey to a man. A woman's "Le Smoking" (a black tuxedo pantsuit first conceived by Saint Laurent in 1966) envisioned in 1975 by photographer Helmut Newton deep into the night on a deserted Paris street on a willowy high cheekboned woman, half bathed in shadow, holding a cigarette, her hair slicked back like a man's, eyes cast down. Does she desire to be man or that much more feminine in her androgyny? Is she a willing victim or predator? Is she waiting pensively for someone or in thought about what she had done to someone?

The Saint Laurent style possesses the power to both challenge traditionally accepted gender roles, almost as a reprisal, and suggesting new ways to experience them without necessarily decorticating them - skirting the issue by wearing pants, as it seems. This is why his pantsuits and mini dresses caused controversy in Paris and around the fashion world during the turbulent 60s, with the Vietnam War in full swing, the white hot rise of feminism, and the post 50s cultural uprising of youth. Saint Laurent's clothes were both reactionary and boldly optimistic politically, though the shy Saint Laurent himself would have been quick to say that he was just exploring new ideas about women and beauty, not pushing buttons with subversion. Such is the oft unintended consequence of most any visionary or genius.

^ A Mondrian on my wall: the visual and textual field report from my niece from the exhibit at the de Young Museum.

Saint Laurent's exploration, as it turned out, is in the end more about the experience of feminine beauty's evocation and provocation, not a dissemination of it.

Perhaps one aspect of woman's beauty as provocateur can be explained in terms of how institutions have perceived it and dealt with it historically:

"Beauty is trivial, even though it is intertwined with money, sex, power, pride, fear, love, respect, race, and class. I believe theologians have treated beauty as trivial precisely because it affects them and those around them so powerfully that it makes them uncomfortable. They don't know what to do with it, so they pretend it doesn't matter and urge anyone who asks to do the same. Like money, like sex, like alcohol, beauty is potent enough to be dangerous."

- Is Feminine Beauty Dangerous: A Brief Look at Our Theological Legacy by Karen Lee Thorp

I regret not being in San Francisco right now to experience the current Yves Saint Laurent exhibit at the de Young Museum (it will not be shown anywhere else in the U.S., up and running until the first week of April next year, so I still have a chance). My two nieces who live there (both young women with strong individual personalities) saw it. One of them sent me a postcard, a mannequin in one of Saint Laurent's iconic Mondrian inspired dresses. I wrote this post in response to her quizzical comment about the exhibit and of the role of haute couture in the world, hopefully it can explain things a bit. As well I'll leave off with a quote from an album of the 80s German band Propoganda....

"Without love, beauty, and danger it would be almost impossible to live."

Yves Saint Laurent invoked all three, indeed.

Related:

Yves Saint Laurent | Wikipedia
Yves Saint Laurent YSL online shop
Yves Saint Laurent biography | infomat.com
Yves Saint Laurent, Giant of Couture, Dies at 71 | The New York Times

ms. olsen

^ Art Night concert in the Chinese courtyard of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. I snapped the pic just after I finished my volunteer work as docent in one of the galleries and would have stayed longer if I weren't so hungry and needed to get home.

Last night was the seasonal Art Night in Pasadena. As a docent of the Pacific Asia Museum I volunteered to plant myself in one of the galleries and talk to patrons-at-large and answer any questions they have.

The crowd was wonderful, a great mix of ethnicities and other backgrounds - mixed race couples and families, high school and art school students, hipsters, old school patrons, art ladies, and all others spanning all ages. It was cool for me because instead of the typical cut and dry academic talk that seems to characterize many docents, I sort of 'gossiped' about the objects, brought out their humanistic traits.

I was in part inspired to talk this way by my old costume history professor, Ms. Olsen. When I was studying in the undergrad program at the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 80s, I took a couple of her courses. She was this incredible, beautiful older Austrian blonde, all 6 feet of her, with amazing facial bones, gleaming white smile, lean athletic body, and northern blue twinkly eyes. You know, the kind of eyes that knowingly look you up and down, as if saying "You need to get the fuck over your inhibitions and make mad passionate love to the world!"

This wasn't surprising of her considering she was a former costume designer for The Goodman Theater in Chicago. And when she wasn't teaching at the Art Institute (her classes were always held in the fall term) she was out on her ranch near Teton Village in Wyoming, working with her staff of sexy cowboys I bet.

Ms. Olsen was always at least several minutes late for class (which was usually scheduled from 6 to 9pm). She didn't really walk in late, instead she strode in, as if energized from a victorious battle. And she usually did it wearing her signature Tyrolean hat, full length wool bouclé knit Missoni cape on which in intarsia was rendered in its entirety the Swiss Alps (complete with snowcaps), and her customary brown leather riding boots. Enter stage right!! Half the time her excuse was: "Well, I'm sorry I'm late but you know those gay guys always make you wait, even when you just meet them for a drink!"

Ms. Olsen didn't so much lecture in class as hold court. And when she held court, it wasn't so much a somber event as it was a huddled gossip session. About what a bastard Henry VIII was to poor Ann Boleyn, say. Or how they were such bastards in 16th century Venice to pass sumptuary laws forcing Jews to wear yellow patches on their clothes. ('bastard' was one of her choice words). Ms. Olsen relished her gossip sess --- I mean, lectures.

I could only hope that my tours at the museum could be at least half as evocative and intriguing as Ms. Olsen's lectures (but without the colourful choice words, unfortunately). I miss her.