AN EYE ON YVES

Hamish Bowles spent decades collecting the groundbreaking work of Yves Saint Laurent. Now, he writes, it's going on exhibit in the late designer's Marrakech museum.

In July of 1984, as a tender 20-year-old correspondent for Australian Harper's Bazaar, I was summoned to attend Yves Saint Laurent's haute couture show. The great designer, it should be said, was rather befuddled by this time: While it wasn't so much his age (he was only 47—younger, after all, than I am now), he simply seemed lost in his own world. However, he was still razor-sharp when it came to his work—and in any case Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent's onetime romantic partner and the company's defender of the gate, snarled at anyone who got in his way, and made sure the show ran like clockwork.

The fall show had come at the end of the week dedicated to the Parisian haute couture houses—Karl Lagerfeld, then newly arrived at Chanel, was making a splash; there were also Emanuel Ungaro, Madame Grès, Hubert de Givenchy, and on it went. Yves's show, however, was eclipsing, his clothes perfection of cut and drape and color and form—as they drifted very slowly through the grand 1880s ballroom of the Hotel Intercontinental.

Some 40 years later, I was asked by the esteemed garden designer Madison Cox, who, after the passing of both Yves, in 2008, and Pierre, in 2017, inherited their mantel—Madison is president of the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent, which oversees the extraordinary Jacques Majorelle house, Villa Oasis, and its surrounding gardens in Marrakech—I might show my own collection of Yves’s work at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum there (After Yves died, Pierre and Madison were longtime partners and eventually married.) Stunningly designed by Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty of Studio KO, the museum, along with the foundation, has changed the look and feel of Marrakech since its opening in 2017. This would be the first time that someone other than Yves would have their collection shown at the museum and, naturally, I was both thrilled and intimidated by the concept.