The Dress Yves Saint Laurent Made From a Mondrian Painting

Yves Saint Laurent's mother had given him a book on Piet Mondrian for Christmas in 1964 — Michel Seuphor's 1956 monograph on the Dutch painter. By the following August, he had turned six of the paintings into cocktail dresses.

The couture problem was hard. Mondrian's grid is rigid; the body is not. A printed grid on a curved fabric would warp the proportions on the dress form, the painting would skew across a hip, the lines would bend. Saint Laurent's atelier solved it by inlaying flat panels of wool jersey, each color cut as a separate piece and seamed along the black lines of the composition. The seams disappeared into the painting. The shaping for the bust and waist was hidden inside the grid, not added on top of it.

The Autumn-Winter 1965 couture show went up on August 6 with twenty-six grid- and color-block-inspired looks; six were direct Mondrians. Vogue put one on the cover. The press treated it as a redirection of high fashion toward mid-century painting, away from the lingering ornament of the 1950s.

Knockoffs arrived in weeks. American manufacturers ran cheap printed versions onto rayon and shipped them through department stores by the next season. Saint Laurent watched a couture experiment become a mass print and turned on his own collection. "I hate Mondrian now," he said at the height of its success.