Transboundary Fashion Seminar
Hosted by the Bunka Gakuen University and the National Art Center in Tokyo, the research seminar Art in Fashion, Fashion in Art has gathered researchers from France and Japan to discuss the complex interconnections between the fields of visual arts and fashion in both countries, in the past and the present.
Parsons Paris was represented by Dr Leyla Neri who delivered a communication entitled Beyond Replicas: The Embodied Canvases of Yves Saint Laurent. She addressed the pictorial forms inspired by the work of painters such as Mondrian, Van Gogh, Wesselmann, Braque and Matisse that the couturier has produced between 1965 and 1988 from a material culture perspective by focusing on the morphological and stylistic features of a series of syncretic fashion objects.
The communication highlighted Saint Laurent’s deep reflection on bodily techniques, space and materiality, and his reinterpretation of the iconic painters’ works not only as a superficial tribute to his favorite artists, but as a recurring experimental tool to question more broadly his identity as a couturier and fashion design as an artistic and social arena for the making of new modernities.
