YVES SAINT LAURENT AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Images from an illustrious career.

Famed couturier Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008) is celebrated in a sumptuous volume of photographs drawn from an exhibition at the Arles Photography Festival 2025 and the holdings of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris. Photos include portraits of Saint Laurent; shots of couture, ready-to-wear fashion, and runway shows; Polaroids, personal photographs (even one of the designer as a baby), and contact sheets. Commentary by art historians, curatorial specialists, and museum staff testify to Saint Laurent’s intimate relationship with photography. “My greatest asset,” he once remarked, “has been the eye I have for the time I live in and for the art of my time.” As Christoph Wiesner, director of the Arles Photography Festival, observes, for Saint Laurent, “working with photographers was a means of exploring his own limits, of giving his clothes another life beyond the purely material one.” Saint Laurent had been assistant to Christian Dior at the time of Dior’s sudden death in 1957; immediately, he was thrust into the public eye, with critics and fashion doyennes alike anticipating his creations. From his first show, in 1961, his evolution as a designer was documented by photographers who included some of the most famous names in the field: Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, William Klein, Lord Snowdon, Horst P. Horst, Inge Morath, Cecil Beaton, and Annie Liebovitz, all represented here. His models, too, were renowned: Audrey Hepburn, Twiggy Lawson, Jean Shrimpton, Paloma Picasso, Catherine Deneuve, among many others. He was much photographed himself, with portraits revealing a well-curated “cool masculinity” as well as changes in dress, hair style, and affect—most notably in 1971, for the launch of his men’s fragrance, when he posed nude, his long hair tousled, wearing nothing but his signature black glasses.

An elegantly produced homage.