Yves Saint Lauren and Halston
I went to the Yves Saint Laurent and Halston exhibit in the Fit museum and to was a lovable visit. I really enjoyed looking at both designers creations and the important moments of their lives. Laurent and Halston were the most famous and influential fashion designers of the 1970s.
For me it was really hard to distinguish Laurent’s and Halston’s work, I realized they both were really good with color and textures in fabrics. They both went from simple looks to jumpsuits, or hollywood-like simple but sexy dresses.
It was fun to see how fashion changes from the 50’s to the 70s, you could find from an elegant browned schemed colored elegant suit to a crazy disco colorful glittery bodysuit.
My favorite section were where you could find only three simple dresses with a opening on the cleavage area, it looked s elegant, feminine, beautiful and sexy at the same time.
I loved the timeline on the hall before the main exhibition where you could see the highlights of these two designers. I didn’t ever researched their lives before so it was really interesting for me to know that Yves Saint Laurent started out from a sketching competition which lead him to working with Givenchy and Chistia Dior! Also Halston starting from New York from bellow to growing to the well know high fashion designer he is today.
What really inspires a designer? After a few minutes of analyzing the designs and reading some facts I realized how Yves Saint Laurent based a lot of his designs in cultures (Chinese, Russian, American-Hollywood, etc) which I though was really on point for our class and our next assignment. Also I noticed some of the designs from both the designers were based in Hollywood movies from the time. I loved how there was no much difference between evening and day gowns. This visit gave me some good inspiration for how to develop my ideas from the culture from my neighborhood.
Great! Yes, they were influenced by other cultures, and that does lead well into our next assignment. Also, the time period was crucial in terms of design. As you mentioned, attire from the 50s was quite different, and you can assume that what was considered fashionable and elegant in the 70s wouldn’t have been tolerated twenty years earlier. This just shows how much culture changes in brief periods of time — it also demonstrates how politics/culture/sociological trends can be seen and measured, in a sense, through fashion. As we have been discussing, our clothes carry symbols. Whether we intend to be or not, we are emblematic of our own time (which is perhaps harkening back to another time whose messages we are perpetuating) visually through own appearance.