Yves Saint Laurent Mondrian Dress

Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930

Genre: Abstract Art

Media: Canvas, oil paint

This is a painting by Piet Mondrian he was a Dutch painter and theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 2oth century. Mondrian began producing grid- based paintings in late 1919. when I looked at this painting I felt very limited, in terms of colours and shapes it’s very simple and basic but which is what Modernism and Bauhaus are best known for so this painting also reminded me of architectures, abstracts and geometric. for the colours that have been used is yellow, red, and blue which are all high contrasting primary  colours and all of them got divided with vertical, horizontal thick black lines which help to accentuated the lines across over each other are “similarly rendered”. The composition and the painting itself is very “static”. The Mondrian Collection was designed by French designer Yves Saint Laurent 1966, the collection was a homage to the work of several modernistic artists, part of the collection were six cocktails dresses that were inspired by the paintings of Piet Mondrian. The designer acknowledged that the work of Mondrian inspired him to focused on the simple and minimal decoration overall the effect appeared simple but the technique was complex and required precision cutting to achieve intensive  haute couture successfully making the dress expensive.

Although this Mondrian Collection were very successful it was noted that several other designers had produced very similar works beforehand, in 1965 a New York reported noted that the dresses closely resembled two- colour jersey dresses that had already been produced and widely retailed by French Desinger Michele Rosier and John Kloss. The collection was widely published in many fashion magazines with one dress featuring on the cover of Vogue in 1965, and can be found in several museums around the world including the V&A Museum in London.

References

1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mondrian_collection_of_Yves_Saint_Laurent
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian
3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian
4. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian
5. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian
6. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Stijl
7. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Stijl
8. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Stijl
9. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism
10. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Poliakoff