Sheer: Yves Saint Laurent
“From a visual perspective, it is one of the loveliest fashion books to come out this year and would be a beloved volume for anyone who loves to look at gorgeous pictures.”
Sheer: Yves Saint Laurent is a paradox of a fashion book. A delicate, slim volume in baby pink, it is small enough to fit comfortably in the hand and look just darling on a bookshelf. The photography is scrumptious. The layout, from typeface choice to image placement, could be easily nominated for a Pulitzer. The accompanying text, however, reads like a high school essay desperately trying to link a subject to buzzy issues, perhaps without ever even reading the source material.
The opening pages are luscious: evocative spreads of diaphanous fabric draped across a lightbox, almost like when children first discover they can photocopy their hands at their dad’s office. The compositions are all texture and playful chaos, fresh and fun and fetishized. This level of beauty continues throughout, mixing in contemporary images with vintage studio shots, facsimiles of ephemera, and runway photography. This approach to portrait of a designer through archive lands perfectly and is reason alone enough to purchase the volume. If only there were more.
The slenderness of the book may belie the fact that the thesis is a bit weak. Yves Saint Laurent was not the only couturier working in sheer fabric, and claiming that his use of such material was his contribution to how women could be presented as both “gentle and powerful” in the modern world is so broad in its vagueness that it could make a perfect SAT essay prompt.
In reality, sheer fabric is sexy. These clothes are sexy. The women wearing such outfits: sexy. That’s not a bad thing! Mincing over how the use of lace or chiffon is a feminist act brought to us by a gay man is unnecessary. Here, the cigar really is just a cigar.
Additional essays (all of them thankfully short) postulate even more masturbatory intellectualism than any reader needs. Some may even question if they are meant to be satire when, directly opposite a gorgeous photograph of Jean Shrimpton, arm stretched over her head and her notable areolas barely concealed by a transparent polka dot halter, the author attempts to equate Saint Laurent’s use of sheer fabric with modern art. Please.
The fact that such cringe-inducing attempts at art historicism don’t really detract from the book as a whole really speaks to the quality of its other elements. From a visual perspective, it is one of the loveliest fashion books to come out this year and would be a beloved volume for anyone who loves to look at gorgeous pictures.