Although it may not always have been the case, many modern fashion designers today incorporate sketching into their creative processes. At one time, a select group of professional fashion illustrators were considered to be the ones most fit to use it for press illustrations of completed designs. Tomorrow, the Orange County Museum of Art will host the Musée Yves Saint Laurent: Line and Expression, a joint exhibition of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech and the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris. The exhibition delves into the groundbreaking impact of French designer Yves Saint Laurent’s love of drawing on the evolution of modern fashion and the function of illustration.

Couturiers such as Madeleine Vionnet, Cristóbal Balenciaga, and Madame Grès draped cloth directly onto mannequins in the early 20th century. Drawing inspiration from his mentor, Christian Dior, who is known for graphically drawing the New Look collection, Saint Laurent made artwork the backbone of the design firm he founded in 1962. When Saint Laurent returned to Paris from his twice-yearly trips to Marrakech, he would share the 2B pencil sketches he had made with his studio team so they could start working on the new collections.

The show features the designs of Yves Saint Laurent.
At a time when post-war fashion was at its heaviest, Saint Laurent’s minimalist aesthetic began to take shape, as shown in Line and Expression, through his spare but expressive sketches. Out of over 60,000 drawings kept by the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, co-curators Olivier Saillard and Gaël Mamine chose 104 designs by the designer for his most famous styles, such as the Pop Art cocktail dresses, Ballet Russes peasant dresses, and le smokings. Mamine claims that Yves Saint Laurent truly enjoyed the act of conceptualizing something fresh via drawing. “Even in those brief lines, there is an overwhelming sense of strength and purity.”- A

The designs, which are framed in blonde wood and displayed across four galleries at a single height, are based on a variety of garments and jewelry, including both haute couture and ready-to-wear. It is described by Mamine as “a dialogue between sketches and garments.” When viewed as a whole, they demonstrate Saint Laurent’s consistent fascination with male tailoring, the use of black and blue together, and the use of spectacular swaths of color on sleek, linear designs throughout his forty-year career.

The exhibition’s journey from Morocco to a museum of modern and contemporary art in Costa Mesa, California, was far from straightforward. Heidi Zuckerman, director and CEO of OCMA, caught it last year on vacation at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakech. “As a tourist, I was enthralled by the way Yves Saint Laurent, like many sculptors and painters, made preparatory drawings,” she says, describing her experience. It was a natural fit for her program of “looking at fashion as part of art,” which she has been teaching at OCMA since 2021.

Upon returning home, Zuckerman made a cold call to the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakech in an effort to persuade the museum to grant Line and Expression a traveling exhibition. She had further confidence in the match because OCMA is conveniently located across the street from South Coast Plaza, the retail paradise of Southern California. I thought Yves Saint Laurent’s work would just be a really amazing fit for our group,” she adds, describing the brand’s sexuality and elegance.