Mondrian’s Dress: Yves Saint Lauren, Piet Mondrian, and Pop Art

Mondrian’s Dress: Yves Saint Lauren, Piet Mondrian, and Pop Art Nancy J. Troy and Marguerite Tartsinis. MIT Press, 2023. 192 pp., 41 b&w and 91 col. illus., cloth, $49.95. ISBN: 9780262048354

The myriad interconnections and exchanges that have taken place between the fields of art and fashion throughout Western modernity have intrigued, perplexed, and at times appear to have caused upset to the handful of art historians and critics who have deemed the subject worthy of attention. Arguably, since the 1990s an ongoing flurry of purposeful activities, events, products and collaborations that have emerged between various institutions, brands, social actors, and creatives from the global worlds of art and fashion is demonstrable of a tangible and evermore prescient relationship based upon mutual interests and benefits. Yet, beyond these more recent and contemporary contexts of late 20th and early 21st centuries a more extensive history of the relationship between art and fashion in terms of its multifarious dimensions, intrigues, and iterations is lacking if not taken for granted. It is refreshing to see the authors Nancy J. Troy and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis apply meticulous scrutiny to this subject in the shape of their recent publication Mondrian’s Dress: Yves Saint Laurent, Piet Mondrian and Pop Art.

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Reading Mondrian’s Dress I was left to question how a greater dialogue with ‘fashion’ and more direct engagement with fashion theory and the body of scholarship that now falls under the disciplinary umbrella of ‘fashion studies’ could have brought other perspectives into play.

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For instance, an understanding of ‘style-fashion-dress', as it stems from the arenas of fashion and cultural studies could develop further insights into the very appeal of Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dress and its many iterations. Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dress as ‘brand icon’ also exists, finds meaning and value between the ‘extraordinary’ and ‘ordinary’ via the historical remnants of ‘everyday’ fashion and culture.5 The fashion image, the couture model, the licenced ready-to-wear, homemade or ‘knock-off’ copies the ways in which this dress, as material object, image and idea, became something desirable and worthy of attention beyond the confines of the catwalk show, the glossy pages of a magazine or the sanctified walls of the art museum to those who saw, wore and wanted this garment is deserving of further attention. This does not negate the achievement of Mondrian’s Dress, a book that is a highly accomplished end product filled with a plentiful tapestry of dialogues and narrative threads. This study is also an emergent starting point for new avenues of historical enquiry. Implicit in the very realisation of Mondrian’s Dress is the invitation for further dialogues between histories of art, fashion and design, to take place. This makes it an invaluable contribution to a wider academic audience and readership with both disciplinary and interdisciplinary interests.

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