At the heart of the
museum is a black box
exhibition space
containing an array of
Saint Laurent pieces
from various eras
(right). Displayed on
screens are sketches
and fabric samples,
including those from
the highly controversial
1971 'Liberation'
collection, inspired by
1940s wartime fashion
(below right)
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and :Marrakesh represent the geographic
and atmosph eric polarit ies of Saint
Laurent's life. The Paris museum occupies
Saint Laurent's old atelier in the 1 6th
arrondissement, "\V here t he ghostly whiff' of
t he master still linger s in his i nner san ctum,
just as he left it in 2002.
The J\1:arrakesh satellite is a brand new
building, where t he fir st thing you see is
a lar ge, gold YSL logo in t he entr an ce
courtyard. From t h e street, now renamed
Rue Yves Saint Laurent, it might be just
anoth er upscale bout ique. The site lies
next to t he luxuriant J ardin ~lajorelle and
Villa Oasis, which Ber ge and Saint Laurent
acquired in 1980. Brought up in t he Algerian
city of Oran during the Fren ch colonial er a,
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Saint Laurent was pr ofoundly enamoured of
t he North African milieu, buying his fir st
Marrakesh bolthole in 1966. He ended up
designing most of his collections t here and
came to loathe Paris an d the demands
of t he cat walk shows.
In t he pant h eon of museology, fashion
museums occupy a particularly rarefied
niche. Yet judging from the popularity of
recent V&A shows on luminaries such as
Alexander McQueen and Christian Dior
(Saint Laurent's fir st employer ), t her e is a
vor acious public appetite for high fashion
as spectacle, given added spice by t he often
equally spectacular lives of its fashionistas.
Architecture cannot, and pr obably sh ould
not, compete; t h e content s will always be
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mor e arresting t han t h e container. In
Marrakesh, t his holds especially true.
H er e, a n ecessarily hermetic composit ion
of terrazzo and terracotta, punctuated by
court yards in t he M:oroccan vernacular,
forms a neutral backdrop to the main event :
t h e life and legend ofYves Saint Laurent.
Externally, t he museum has t he
characteristic opacit y and impermeability
of t he medina, with its blind b ox volumes
of exhibit ion spaces, auditorium, bookshop
and subterranean con servation suites.
E verything is tur ned in on itself, away from
t h e searing desert heat and light, except for
a cafe which addresses a courtyard temper ed
by water and p lanting. Walls of pinkish
terr azzo formed from an aggregate of local