Wednesday, April 10, 2013

"I Love a Dying Frenzy" Yves Saint Laurent

"Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, I love a dying frenzy. " 
"Decadence attracts me.  I've seen the afterglow of sumptuous Paris before the war.  The balls of the fifties - Arturo Lopez, Charles de Bestegui.  The youthfulness of the sixties, Talitha and Paul Getty lying on a starlit terrce in Marrakesh, beautiful and the damned, and a whole generation assembled as if for eternity where the curtain of the past seemed to lift before an extraordinary future."   
Yves Saint Laurent
Decadence.  There has always been a feeling of decadence to Saint Laurent: his life, his world, his work.

His clothes have layers of meaning - they are not simply sexy or masculine - and it is not that they are complex but that they capture moments in time, in travel, in memories and in daydreams of the future.  They are timeless and eternal: yesterday, today, tomorrow.

This red lace bustier dress, lined in a nude silk, with the body outlined in navy grosgrain ribbon from Spring Summer 1992 could have been worn by Zelda Fitzgerald to a dance on the Gold Coast of Long Island.  She would have danced and drank to dawn and probably fought with F Scott Fitzgerald the entire time.  But the next morning, she would have studied ballet while Fitzgerald wrote.  This is the woman YSL designed for: complex, interesting, beautiful, decadent, smart and a little world weary.




and from the original runway show:






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